Seth Godin Interview - How to Dance with Fear

welcome to the bravery project today I'm talking to Seth Godin and I'm really really excited about this Seth is an author a marketer an entrepreneur but most of all Seth is a teacher and I had the pleasure of being taught by him recently at ruckus makers which is a seminar that he put on in Hastings on Hudson a few weeks ago and Seth thank you for being here I really appreciate your time well thank you Greg and having you at the seminar really made a difference your contribution did not go unnoticed people really benefited from knowing you I'm glad so one of the things that I want to start off with was you're very careful when you speak and write about this but the difference between mentors and heroes and I just want to tell you up front that you're a big hero for me kind of virtually and I guess now alive when I saw you at ruckus makers you're the first book that I read by you was poke the box and at the time I'm sure there's hundreds of stories like this at the time I was in a great job great people doing marketing but I was kind of sitting there and saying you know how long is it going to take for me to make an impact in this specific situation being young and kind of that getting that idea of if I fail more than you I win which you mentioned in the book I love that and at the same time and so that's what what me to go off and start creating what I'm creating and get to talk to you now which is pretty cool I think the idea of failure we understand it philosophically right and when I talk to clients and when I read your work we get it philosophically okay I fail more it gives me more data coming in get more of a chance to eventually not fail and succeed but it's still not that fun to think about it like it's still not like okay I still have to fail though but I don't really want to fail love you when you're urging people and and teaching people and writing is there a way to make failure more palatable or more easy to actually go out and say this might not work but I'm gonna do it anyway yeah let's talk first about how deep this runs imagine that you're on the subway or the bus and someone was yeah let's say I'm mild for mental illness is just glaring at you the whole time glaring with just shooting daggers from their eyes it's almost impossible to feel good about yourself when you get off the train that you will go through all the depth of your subconscious looking for what you did to this person because that's how we're wired right we're wired just as you can see a dog is wired not to look someone in the eye who's got more power than they do we're trying very hard to please the people around us we're trying very hard not to be seen as a fraud and as a failure I get that it's true we cannot make it go away my argument is this we don't do physical labor for a living anymore physical labor digging ditches carrying large sheets of metal risking our lives to put out fires most of us don't do that most of us do emotional labor and the question is what is difficult about emotional labor it's not the free coffee and doughnuts it's not they get anywhere whatever clothes we want to work in surfing Amazon all day looking for Christmas presents these are not difficult tasks the difficult task is confronting the fear of failure that's what we are paid to do that's what we are rewarded for so when it shows up and it's hard when the tension shows up when the fear shows up we don't get to say how do I make this easy just like the marathon runner doesn't get to say how do I make myself untie 'red what we say is oh now it's time for me to do my work I love that one thing that you talk about is the marathon runner knows that there's gonna be pain and the process and the last few miles is where do you put the pain so Seth when you're writing you know you're writing on this blog every single day you're doing talks creating all this stuff in the world where do you put your fear um you know I think that over the years I have built a little bucket that it can go in and my bucket isn't as big as some people give it credit for there are plenty of things now I have the leverage to do that I don't do and I don't do them because I feel like it would make the bucket overflow and it would keep me from doing the work I want to do you know writing a blog post every day that gets read by a lot of people is a privilege but I'm not sure that I could sustain that if I had to do it live with comments and anonymous people criticizing me and putting it on periscope or meerkat or something all of those things would add up in my head to a whole narrative that would overflow the bucket so what I have done what most creative people I know have done is not insulated themselves from the fear but over time gradually built a bigger bucket you kind of what you whittle away at the things that the spaces where fear can come in - it sounds like by pairing down I asked I asked our little Facebook group of the ruckus makers if they had any questions to ask you and one of one of the questions I got was how do you deal with what kind of specific the specific strategies or tactics to deal with fear and overwhelm well the key word is deal with you know I think the better word is dance with that dealing with imply you know you deal with termites by exterminating them you don't deal with fear you dance with fear here it comes again what am I going to do with it that makes a benefit happen that helps people so that could be things like you know when I went to business school with chip Conley all those years ago chip started a group of five of us that met every Tuesday in the anthropology department which down the street from the Stanford Business School so we knew Tuesday from 6:00 to 9:00 we were going to be in a room where the only thing that would ever happen in that room is a positive brave exciting brainstorming session about business models and probably thirty times the five of us met for three hours and the minute you walk into the room all you felt like was a creative powerhouse because that's all that ever happened in that room no criticism no failure no truth of the market just that's what we do here so we can create these rituals these places these moments where we do it on a regular basis and we can make ourselves more afraid of not doing it than we are of fear what are your what are your daily kind of rituals I want to be careful because I know that every creative does their own thing their own way so I'm not asking for a template but you've also talked about how when we kind of can pull out some of the choices and make things more automatic it makes it a little more seamless so I'm curious if you have any rituals that to help you yeah well you know in my notebook your turn I have a rant about Stephen King's pencil because people are always asking Stephen King what kind of pencil he uses and it doesn't matter one bit and I love hearing the sound of my own voice and I could go on for hours about my rituals I'm not going to tell you any of them because they don't matter so I like to go so I'd like to play with you a little bit are you okay with that so we can do yeah so finish this sentence bravery is overrated all right tell me a little bit about that um we can say he's so brave or she's so brave one of the reasons we say that is because we can point out how special it is to be brave and therefore let ourselves off the hook bravery is for Heroes bravery is for people with special DNA bravery you know Steve wasn't Steve Jobs brave to launch the iPhone no actually any of us could choose to be in a place where we do things that other people think are brave and if we over ate bravery and put it up there with artistic genius we've insulated ourselves and let ourselves off the hook now bravery is for everybody hmm so can it can give us a way to hide it's kind of being a label er yeah so you tell a story about when you start it off in book publishing and your first day you know you submit the book it's great yeah it's a $5,000 deal it's accepted and then you go through something like 900 I've heard 850 or 900 rejection letters after that what were you thinking when you sent out the 900 and first proposal haha so this is actually the one that chip and I did together the very first one so chip got 2,500 and I get to one 500 in those days a laser printer was too expensive to buy so I would have to walk down the street and pay a dollar to print out a page of a proposal so I would try to make proposals shorter because I didn't have enough dollars to print out long proposals and I would I think that what happened around the 900 800 submission was I started to learn what people were resonating with and it's that learning that separates the annoying jerk from the person who's on their way that I wasn't sending the same bad proposal out again and again and again I knew my proposals were getting better and I knew why they were getting better and I knew if I could just keep getting them to get better it was gonna work because I was sending the proposals to people who for a living read proposals and I was sending them to an industry that for a living bought the kind of thing I was selling and those are two key elements to what we have to do if we're trying to bootstrap our way forward too many people hide by trying to sell the unsellable to people who don't buy what they're selling anyway and he said well yeah but I made 400 calls today well no you spammed 400 people who didn't want to hear from but even though I had 30 people who had rejected me 30 times those 30 people almost all of them wanted to hear my next idea almost all of them had interacted with me enough that they knew that one day I was going to have something they wanted to buy and it's that listening that we see so rarely on the Internet you know if you tweet the same stupid way 400 times in a row don't think that the four hundred first one's going to work because no one here is waiting for you to do that but if you can figure out where the threads are and follow them and earn the privilege and I've never seen it as anything but a privilege the privilege of pitching people who want to be pitched then you can keep going hmm I'm getting this kind of image as you're talking I love the thread analogy almost of when you're doing something that might not work you're kind of in a dark room looking for the door and you can kind of keep banging your head against the wall or you can reach out and kind of try to figure out and each time you get more information about where the doorway might be and I guess that's why it's so important to at least accept that failures part of the process because when you reach out the first time you're probably not going to grab the doorknob right away the first time yeah and to take the analogy one little step further you know uh it's really about sonar sonar as you get close to the various things gives you a hint about what's ahead and that sonar doesn't mean you can see the door but it means you are getting proprioceptive feedback that lets you understand where you are in the room okay so that's interesting for people listening and and I'm curious to how do you develop that sonar I think you develop that sooner by learning how to sell okay I learned how to sell by selling ice cream sandwiches when I was 15 at the high school cafeteria and then I started a ski club when I was 15 and a half 16 and then I used to sell the lessons that I needed to teach up at summer camp in Canada and then I started selling posters when I got to college where the first day of school I'd lay out all these posters on the school Commons and you can see which posters people wanted to buy we could look people in the eye you could understand oh when I put this sort of thing in front of someone this is the sort of thing they do and I learned the hard way what it was to talk to someone who wanted to buy but didn't want to buy what I had and I learned how to judge accurately the difference between someone who says they're not interested in someone who truly isn't interested and selling face to face is underrated and super valuable if you can do it in a way where you are welcome you know I'm a coach and in a way you know the coaches a lot of coaches get into the game because they want to serve people and help and be great coaches and a lot of it is selling obviously because you have to get a client in front of you and selling I think one of the things you're saying is selling can be great market research you know working with people in that way because then you can scale it and do the marketing thing but a lot of the people who succeed as entrepreneurs early on that I see are great at sales to start off and they just gotta get that one right and an acupuncturist can also be great at sales even though the acupuncturist doesn't have to stand outside waving her needles around saying may I poke you the fact is you go back to the acupuncturist the second time not because she put the needles in the right place you go back the second time because she sold the service to you in a way that makes you want it again so I like to flip back to bravery briefly because it seems like there's there's kind of two views there's the bravery is overrated and I'm hearing that and then there's the bravery is something that all of us can have - it also kind of seems important if it's if we define bravery as dancing with fear in some way so do you think bravery can be cultivated oh you bet where else is he going to come from so so how do you cultivate bravery what are some strategies that you've seen or that you've used well ok let's understand that at an industrial life-or-death scale we know that the Navy SEALs figure out how to turn people who are average into people who are brave beyond measure so given time and money we can force people into this we can brainwash them into being break so let's leave out guns and and crazy things like that and say yeah but how do I become brave and I think it's pretty straightforward you become generous first okay tell me more if you can figure out how to become relentlessly generous in a way that changes people around you for the better in a way that benefits them without benefiting you in any visible way and you get hooked on that then the next thing you're going to want to do is be even more generous and the only way to be even more generous is to do something that might not work you become more generous by putting yourself out there in a way that might not work so we can agree that mother Teresa was one of the bravest people we of our generation right but she never made a penny bravery doesn't mean closing the sale bravery means how far can you go on behalf of someone else and too often people who are in some small way broken aren't willing to be generous until after they are quote successful until after they are quote well-off but the way you become successful and sometimes even well-off is by being relentlessly generous what scares you um you know it varies over time in this stage of my life the thing that scares me the most about my work is not doing it justice you know I've got half an hour with you will this be in the best podcast I ever did I'm certainly trying for that and if I fail at that I will be disappointed in myself for not having the guts to put more of myself into it more people read my blog then in a long time will I waste it tomorrow I got a chance to talk to people about in this case April Fool's will I waste this 2015 April Fool's can I do it justice I'm afraid of letting that opportunity go by sounds like the fear changes because that's that pressure that you feel now it's probably different than when you just get started off you kind of have other fears it's kind of a will this even work in general yeah and then in between is the huge Brene brown fear of being found out to be a fraud because the fact is if you are not bending steel or digging ditches you are fraud right that what right does Greg have to be talking to people about bravery he's not brave all the time what right does Seth Godin have to talk about anything because the number of failures is right there and it's huge I failed more than most people you know we don't of us have a right to do any of this stuff it's all just a bunch of hoo-hah that we do with each other in a way that's as generous as we can but if you know some inquiring reporter wants to write an expose to prove that we're fraud they will succeed because at some level we are all vulnerable and we're all human and the way you can be called out on that is by someone saying you're not as blank as you think you are because the only way to leap the only way to make a difference is to be better at whatever then we think we are why did you write this book what to do when it's your turn why did you write it um I think paper is important I think words and pictures matter and I think that culture is changed more than ever from the bottom up that when Clark Gable took off a shirt in a movie and wasn't wearing a t-shirt t-shirt sales plummeted that's top-down culture change culture change now is that Greg tells 50 people about this book or Susan gives three of her friends a copy and I've been studying the world of publishing for my whole professional life and bookstores are broken and I missed them and publishing is floundering and I love those people we need to figure out a way to keep changing the culture so it struck me that this was a moment in time when I could speak up without using a blog post in a way that would have more leverage to change the people I care about looking at it even more broadly because I love that why do you do what you do in general um you know work is a practice now for many of us if you've got a roof over your head and are making a decent living you still have a hundred hours a week when you're not asleep or at work and the question is what will we do with that time and for me the practice I'm not practicing medicine and sometimes you know I get to be in front of people the practice of helping the culture change in a way that I'm proud of is I think an interesting way to spend my days it would make I hope my mom proud and it's a privilege and I don't want to walk away from them and just sit on a beach and I don't think I'd be any good at playing the stock market so this seems to me like a useful use of my time I love it in your book in your book the dip one of the main ideas is that being number one you disproportionately get more rewards and more respect and and and and you have more power to be generous than number two or number three and so it's about being the best in your world and how are you define world um a lot of the people in my audience and me all the time we have trouble kind of defining what do we want that world to be and uncovering what that little world is and that's sort of the game in a way what advice would you give to someone who is a year in or two years in and is still kind of thrashing around and defining what is that world that I want to change or do you do that right up front or do you never really find out you know I talked about this the other day the smallest possible world that can sustain you is the world you can choose so my job when I started being a book packager was among the world of 30 people how could I be seen as the best at making complicated books like almanacs just 30 people that's the whole world or when I started writing for Fast Company the entire world were the hundred thousand subscribers of Fast Company that's all all I wanted was those hundred thousand people to open the magazine to my page first and then to Xerox what I wrote and give it to people who weren't in my world because that would expand it right then when I started blogging which was right during the Fast Company days the number of people who were reading content on the Internet and we're seeking change at work and were part of the tribe that you and I are not part of how many people was that a hundred thousand two hundred thousand it wasn't a billion and so being the best blogger for those people wasn't too daunting because there were only 12 other people who were trying to be the best bloggers for those people so then when Twitter shows up Twitter is daunting because it looks like you need to tweet to 100 million potential people well I didn't go on Twitter because I said to myself to do the work that would make me the best at using Twitter I will have to stop doing something else what do I want to give up that I'm already good at so that I won't be mediocre at this and almost everyone who tweets on Twitter is mediocre by definition right by definition one standard deviation is 93 percent ninety-three percent of the people on Twitter are mediocre using Twitter because they're putting in a little but if you're willing the way Chris Brogan did a bunch of years ago to answer every single Act message to do this to do this to do it you could be the best in the world in this community at that Laura fit and pistachio became the best in the world at her little niche and transformed that into a company which she sold which turned into a great job blah blah blah so again Minimum Viable audience as my friends at Copyblogger say Minimum Viable audience so is that little world that you're trying to change is that the same as a niche or do you see them as different you know the word niche first came out in the popular business culture from trout and Reese's book positioning finding Nisha and philic fine and a slot in the prospects brain where you can be right next to someone else's and fill as an existing spot they have a lot in common my take is this if you say to people find a small niche they feel like they're compromising and trading down what I wanted to say in a very with a very similar strategy is the whole world that cares is your niche it's not everyone is just the world that cares treat different people differently find the weird find the edges those people are your niche niche is not defined by you it's defined by them and I think that's a huge distinction this group do they see each other when they look in the mirror do they say we all have this problem because if they see it and then you show up with that language they will see you as the person who can help them the same with tribes the tribe already kind of exists and you just uncovered it awesome Thank You Seth I'm going to respect your time and let you go I have one more question for you it's from another ruckus maker okay um it's kind of a fun one so what's the most creative or thoughtful expression of gratitude that you've ever received from a client friend or colleague um I without doubt it is when someone reports to me how they took what they learned and did something with it that benefited people in ways I never could have expected that they have saved lives built institutions taught people built schools raised money started organizations hired people in ways that I didn't say go do that then this will happen they took some tools I gave them added some insight on their part and build something that transformed their part of the culture that is what I wake up hoping will happen every single day that is the legacy I am seeking not who teach I teach but the people I taught who did they teach you've definitely done that for me so thank you Seth um I encourage everyone to go out and check out that stuff at Seth Godin comm pick up his book and guess some for some friends um Seth will talk soon thanks Greg we'll see you later bye

Channel: Greg Faxon

Views: 70,257

Rating: 4.8876405 out of 5

Keywords: Seth Godin, Bravery, Interview, Greg Faxon

Id: wBRnzPuwepA

Length: 27min 34sec (1654 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2015