How To Make Money From Your Passion | Seth Godin - Ep. 445

welcome to the show today a free-flowing conversation with the amazing seth godin he continues to be one of the most requested guests on the podcast for years he's been on several times before as you'll recall this is an especially pertinent conversation for creators artists and those who want to make a living from their creative work here we go with seth godin [Music] so it makes you nervous when your work resonates that's that sounds unusual you know usually people get really excited or is that what you mean by nervous i think if people aren't walking out of the theater at least a few then you're probably not as ahead of the curve as you'd like to be if you're going to spend this partial part of your life writing or making a book or launching something and so the challenge is how do you dance between that's obvious and wow i never thought of it that way before and now i see things differently versus that makes absolutely no sense i'm running away if you go too far ahead that's what happens and i've written books and blog posts like that but like when i wrote permission marketing people said i was delusional and they said that uh email marketing wasn't a thing and it would never happen and yeah that was horrible to hear but i was right you know and in the case of the practice i think i might be able to thread the needle here between that's really useful and i never thought about that before and that's sort of what i'm hearing but a few people who would say i'm delusional would be helpful yeah okay well uh i read it and i don't think you're delusional sorry to be unhelpful i think it was spot on sorry to disappoint you with with email marketing you know yeah you were right people are email marketing even even now i still see big companies kind of struggle to do it you know you get your nike newsletter or whatever if you've ever bought a pair of shoes and they have your email but i always wonder i go how come all these places that come out with new stuff they put a little like eight and a half by eleven flyer on the door that you don't even see when you walk in because there's 58 stickers on there and they go have you heard about our new whatever and i go no tell me more about it they're like well there's a sign here and there's a sign up there and i'm like this is you know game stop there's signs everywhere and they're all light lighting up why don't you just send it to me tell me yeah well i didn't say people were doing email marketing properly i just said that it's a 20 billion a year industry right zero billion when i started so it it's a form of dante's inferno for me every day to open my inbox and watch how poorly people are doing 20 years after i told them how to do it right so you said before when you put out the book a lot of people said you were wrong you're delusional it's never going to be a thing and then you turned out to be bright yes that's gratifying but how much control should that sort of approval have over our work probably none but that's easier said than done right okay so let's talk about criticism because that's a great place to dive in all criticism is not the same and we should tattoo that on our foreheads probably backwards so when you look in the mirror you can see yeah you can read it yourself um what does that mean it means that if someone gives you a one-star review all they're saying is this wasn't for me not that i'm an erudite insightful critic of the human condition and i've read this carefully i understand what you were trying to do and it deserves one star they're saying this isn't for me and if a vegetarian gives a steakhouse one star that doesn't tell you anything other than it's a steakhouse right so over time i have gotten better but i'm still terrible at ignoring criticism that isn't helpful to make the work better for the people the work is supposed to be right but then there's this other kind of criticism that's priceless this is from someone who gets the joke someone who's on the journey someone who respects you someone who's enrolled and they see that you missed a beat they see that something wasn't quite right and so it was interesting i don't know if you saw hamilton on the disney channel no i haven't yet totally yet totally worth it um particularly if you turn on the subtitles so you don't miss a word um but he's that fast or something the number of words per minute is very high oh great okay if you listen to lin-manuel miranda talk about his inspiration every single sentence reflects back to three things that came before in the world it's so rich but you have a problem a challenge which is movies look like movies and plays when you see them in the theater look like plays so one of the things about a play is that you get to decide what on the stage you're going to be looking at and in a movie you don't so what should hamilton be when you put it on the disney channel should it be a lockdown camera recording one person's point of view or should it be a movie and he sort of did half and half oh so everyone hated it who wanted one and got the other i don't think most people understood because it's such a powerful thing it works but i don't think most people understood why it made them feel just a little off but if you've studied mcluhan and you've been looking at this kind of stuff for a long time you could have been helpful in that editing room to say you know maybe we need fewer cuts maybe we need more cuts because we're trying to what is this thing right and so if i'm making a book or a new form of media or a workshop i i relish that sort of feedback because it's priceless and what i was saying when we got started is what you want to do with a book that's going to be around for a while is touch a button for people that helps them understand that they need this but also turn on lights to places where there weren't any lights and often people when that happens will respond by saying you're delusional and there are certain elements of this where they're doing that when i talk about writer's block isn't real it's a myth when i talk about reassurance being futile these are things that are unsettling to people and that's why i put them in because we need to consider them if we're going to do this this work all of us do this work of being creative you mentioned that writer's block isn't real i think there's probably a lot of people who are procrastinating writing whatever it is they were gonna write by listening to this podcast or watching this video depending on where you're consuming it and they're going tell me more about how writer's block isn't real i've been awake for three days i've had six quarts of coffee and i'm i'm staring at a blank page with a blinking cursor yeah well first of all when i say writing i don't just mean typing i mean making a podcast or starting a consulting business or whatever it is you do so i've been busy laser forging these things on my glowforge they're maple blocks i call them writer's blocks and every one of them has on it almost every one of them has on it it says right here writer's block is a myth because no such thing there's no such thing as writer's block and it's real at the same time we feel it but plumbers don't get plumber's block and crossing guards don't get crossing guard blocks so why do writers get this special thing and i think the mistake people make is they called it the wrong thing you don't have any problem writing what you have is fear of bad writing your fear of bad writing is making you feel blocked and if you just showed me all your bad writing i think we could agree you don't have writer's block we just got over the hump you showed me your bad writing and if you do enough bad writing if you make enough bad podcasts if you whatever it is if you develop a practice sooner or later some good ones are going to slip through and that is the only secret so isaac asimov published 400 books we worked together on a project years ago and he told me that the secret of publishing that's when it was hard to publish a book 400 books the secret is he got up every morning at 6 30 and he typed and he typed until noon every day and what happens is if you're committing to five hours of typing a day your subconscious says well if i'm gonna type i might as well type something good whereas if you don't have that commitment if you don't have that practice then you wait for perfect and then you stall and then you negotiate and then you bargain and the next thing you know you're drinking a lot of coffee in two years have gone by yeah yeah i i think i'm still working on making bad podcasts but it's it's true i i suppose with any project you do some shows and you go or some books and you go man this just came right out this chapter just came right out and other times you go that was brutal that was like one of those workouts where you go halfway through the thing in the bathroom and you're just catching your breath or you're like you know puking in the sink or whatever and then you come back out and you go maybe i just shouldn't come to this gym anymore maybe i shouldn't do this anymore and then you take a nap or you come back to it or you have another one the next day and you go no no uh this this is this is better this one feels better but you never get to this feels better if you never do the one that makes you puke in the sink right exactly and i think there are several short versions of this one of them is we shouldn't do the work because we feel like it we feel like it because we're doing the work so is the is the trick or the tactic the practical application just let's say it is with writing just get up and start writing even if we don't know what the hell we're doing just start writing even the most ridiculously mundane version of what we intended especially if you don't know what you're doing because writing when you know what you're doing isn't particularly worthwhile because we already know that stuff that it's an exploration so this the subtitle of the book is ship creative work and those three words all matter and the first word ship means that if it doesn't ship it doesn't count that our job is to show up and make things better to improve things to change things for a group of people but if you're just waiting for perfect you're not shipping and it's called work because it's not our hobby it's the thing we signed up to do even when we didn't feel like it and so i'm arguing that if you have a decent job and if you have a job you like it's probably because you're not doing exactly what you did yesterday you're probably not a compliant cog in a brutal system you probably have some agency some ownership some ability to lead that's the work to be creative and you can claim you're blocked but really you're just afraid and the way through it is through it you mentioned in the book which by the way i got that super rough cut which i like there's some there's some tea sips in there and stuff i think you should leave those in that's what i think i think it makes it even more real is like you're really sitting there talking to me because you go oh wait hold on right and then all right let me start that sentence over right it's so much more realistic i that would be an interesting experiment right just the unedited audio of a book released on audible with a cough or a sneeze maybe edited out just for volume i will let them know yeah yeah i'm sure they'll be i'm sure they're keen to try that with your latest work uh you did mention in the in the book industrial this industrial system that we have has brainwashed us into believing that the outcome matters and that this is a bad bargain can you speak to that a little bit because i think a lot of people are outcome dependent i know i certainly started that way i find myself falling back to that all the time it's hard maybe it's the united states thing western thing but it's really hard not to have an outcome in mind when you start a project that's going to take you years or weeks or days the outcome matters but reminding ourselves that the outcome matters in everything we do is toxic but saying i'm only doing this because of the outcome is toxic so there's this hackney old expression what would you do if you knew you could not fail which i think is bogus because you should just wish for invisibility and three more wishes um but what about this what would you do if you knew you would fail what would be worth doing even if you knew the outcome wasn't going to arise then we are free to do the work and the irony is that the single best way to get the outcome you seek is to not obsess about the outcome so one of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded certainly one of the three best-selling jazz albums of all time is kinda blue from miles davis and how long did it take from the first uh note till they were done and the answer is three days three days that's all it took from the beginning to the end if you're in the studio and a high pressure situation there's a lot riding on it well then you know what you're spending all your time doing reverse engineering for radio airplay wondering about this edit or that edit adding a little bit more reverb over here you're becoming a perfectionist why because perfectionism isn't about being perfect perfectionism isn't even about being good it's about hiding you're so obsessed about the outcome you forgot about the practice you forgot to simply do the work to merely do it without a lot of commentary and obsession about what's on the other side and that will come through and so yeah every once in a while there's a steely dan that takes a year to make a record but what we know is as you enjoyed in listening to my slurping tea that what we really want is someone who's going to show up as a human and say here i made this and that's the magic of magic that magic is not calculated magic is simply the result of a seeking to serve but not getting obsessed and controlling your reaction to what i made i feel like you can see these people especially online creators that are really visible falling into this trap because you find people it's really clear they're struggling to make something relevant so they're kind of rehashing someone else's stuff and they don't take this is maybe a flag that i'm inventing here but it seems like those people take criticism really poorly because since the outcome matters so much like if you write in to me and you say hey you know with seth godin you really missed an opportunity over here i go you know what i wonder if this person's right they said they've been listening for eight years i should listen to this person um you know they're not cussing me out or something on a twitter they're they're actually they took the time to write in but i see a lot of online creators especially like these influencers on social media they uh often do not take criticism well at all and they have like a meltdown very visibly and part of that i think is because everything for them has to be so curated because that's the thing that they're selling is that their life is perfect and that their work is perfect it seems like a really dangerous sort of whirlpool to get trapped in because you can't really well i guess you can swim out but it seems like it's really challenging because your life revolves around that outcome yeah the online thing has many layers to it part of it is about this mistaken belief in authenticity as if authenticity is what anybody wants from you no one wants authenticity from you they want consistency they want you to be the best version of yourself right and even if you're in a bad mood today they don't want to hear that they want the best version now maybe if your brand is that you're someone who is in bad moods a lot then you should be in a bad mood even when you're in a good mood because that's what we expect from you authenticity is an excuse we use for when we do something that people don't get the joke don't like oh i was just being authentic yeah we don't care we want a better version of you and so if someone is living that authentic thing and someone criticizes them it feels really personal and um adam driver the actor from star wars i quote him in the book and he's going on and on about how it's hard to be an actor because when you're up there doing the thing it's it's it's you well no it's not you're an actor when you're up there doing your thing you're acting and if people don't like it it's not that they don't like you they don't know you they just don't like your acting and so we have this ability to be able to say i made this this isn't me i made this for you and if it's not something that you like well then either i made it for the wrong person or i could have made it better next time but i'm not a bad person because i made something here let's work together on the same side of the table to figure out how to make it better and then the last part is this whole need online because there's all these false metrics like likes from people who don't like you and friends from people who aren't your friends uh to want to be the next blank right how can i be the next jordan well there already is a jordan that slot's taken the only next we need is the next u and yet there's this pressure to fit in and do it the way you're supposed to so i can't tell you how many times people send me notes this is faded over time but your blog isn't a real blog because you don't have comments your blog isn't a real blog because you don't have listicles and numbered things and your blog is interview because that's what you were supposed to do but all those people who had those kinds of blogs they're gone now and i figured out the thing i wanted to do the thing that was going to be my practice and i'm still doing it and if it's not for you please don't come and if it is for you here it is i think it's interesting that people decided to gatekeep whether or not your blog was a real blog like talk about an irrelevant technicality to like wrong hill to die on for literally anyone to make that argument i i also think it's funny that adam driver who plays a character in star wars where he has a like a guy with supernatural magical powers where he's an evil jedi or whatever it's called uh sith lord or whatever it is is like that's me up there no it's literally a science fiction character that is debatably not human or whatever and has magical telekinetic powers or whatever the hell it is like how could you take that personally that's really tough you really have to like get in front of it and try so hard to take that personally yeah it sounds like more like deep insecurity than than actually well don't we all have that though i mean yeah of course i'm not trying to i know does and i definitely do it just seems like to mistake that with people shouldn't criticize your work just seems like what am i like i don't know what am i missing on that one and that and so that leads the other side of the block which is that reassurance these blocks are different that's great they're all different reassurance is futile people hate this because reassurance feels really good that when someone says oh it's going to be okay the thing is if you got the call if ellen degeneres was on the phone she said i love listening to your thing keep going it's great you'd be riding high for i don't know at least three hours and then you'd need it again because it doesn't last and the reason it doesn't last is because everything isn't going to be okay every plan does not come out every outcome is not realized and someone who reassures you and says it will be they're predicting a future that's not going to happen so we just strip away our need for reassurance and start with well it might not work but i'm going to try my best it might not work but i'm going to show up with generosity to try to contribute then whatever happens is what happens but i can't control that all i can control is what's right here in front of me obviously making art and making money doing that art is better than making art and not making any money and having to work at a place that you don't find fulfilling we all know that it's possible to do both because you and i are both doing it it's fulfilling much of the time and won't say all the time i'm sure there are bad days for anybody but how do you balance this equation in your mind a lot of these the so-called gurus online right they say things like follow your passion just do what you love the money will come later both you and i know that that is not necessarily true right i mean we all want the fish as you say in the book with fly fishing everybody just wants the fish yeah all right so let's start with the easy one follow your passion it's so much more reliable to decide to be passionate about what you do than to insist that you do what you're passionate about and many of us have jobs that did not exist 20 years ago but people were passionate then so did something like how did this happen well it happened because people like you and i found new things to do and decided to be passionate about it so that's the first piece of it but the bigger issue that you're bringing up is only recently like really really really recently because you get paid to do something that feels like a hobby that digging latrines or you know cleaning the inside of somebody's mouth as a dentist these are not no one does those things as a hobby but plenty of people have a podcast as a hobby plenty of people have a blog as a hobby all of a sudden hobbies are monetizable and the first thing i want to say to people is think twice before you try to monetize your hobby because it will stop being your hobby and it will start being your work the best way to ruin a hobby is to try to monetize it i'll tell you that yeah so there's a lot to be said if you've got a decent job that's safe and secure where you're paid fairly i wouldn't quit it so fast because you should just keep doing your hobby which is you got you know 40 hours a week off the clock go do your hobby the minute you try to sell the work of your hobby like my hobby is making canoe paddles out of cherry wood if i sold a paddle it would be all downhill from there because then i said well i wonder if i could sell two paddles and then what does the market want you you get all hung up on this instead of the craft so leaving that aside can you make money from your art well there are several things you can do one thing you can do which is another thing that has woken people up from my book and from the workshop is you could be a hack and i think there's nothing wrong with being a hack so let's be really clear what a hack is a hack is somebody who knows what the market wants and gives it to them that's it so james patterson best-selling author in america is a hack because book after book after book he is not writing eye-opening literature he is giving the market what it wants and if you buy an alex cross novel you're going to get an alex cross novel good for him i got no shade to cast on the best-selling author in america but he's also not asking people to look at him as a tortured soul who's right on the cutting edge and who's doing things that might not work because he's made it really clear this is what you want here it is and that's important work that makes our economy function the first alex cross novel that was art because that might not have worked because that was leaving a job at a fancy ad agency and leaning into the great unknown that feels different and you can sign up for one or the other but you shouldn't get confused about which one is which because when so let's think about you know what's your favorite rock group of the 70s or 80s someone like the doobie brothers oh god well can we say like van halen that's top of mind right now right rest in peace yeah when van halen was touring recently they were playing covers of van van halen songs because they weren't van halen anymore they were a cover band who used to be van halen because in that moment they were hacks the crowd knew what they wanted to hear the band knew they were there to give the crowd what they wanted that's a fair deal right that's different than being on a cutting edge and saying i'm exploring a frontier here a frontier that has a lot of pieces in it that are unknown to make a living at that requires a whole bunch of other things to happen first you have to understand genre you have to understand what your work rhymes with you can't copy it exactly it's not generic but it has to be in a category and second this is huge you have to seek the smallest viable audience not the biggest possible one but the smallest one that can sustain you right so talking heads or lou reed playing at cbgb's there's only like 120 people in the audience but those 120 people are the right people there for the right reason and then maybe they'll tell their friends and maybe it will grow but if you start by saying if we don't play madison square garden we're a failure then you're going to have to try to reverse engineer anything everything is not going to get there and so one of the curses that could hit your band if you're getting started is that you could be an opening act postcovid for a big group the opening act life is terrible because the people in the room aren't there for you they're waiting for you to go away so that they can listen to who they want to listen to so you're getting all this feedback from the wrong people and if you can seek the smallest viable audience and delight them that puts you on the hook that lets you refine your craft and then maybe you can get paid for your work what about people who feel completely drained in whatever they're doing it doesn't matter if they are cleaning teeth or if they maybe they're doing creative work they just still still feel totally burned out or drained or just completely lacking enthusiasm how can we cultivate passion around our work or discover an occupation through which we can cultivate passion or enthusiasm or is that the wrong question no it's a great no one's asked me that recently that's a great question so i'm going to divide it into two pieces first of all what is stress stress is wanting to do two things at the same time stay and go be quiet and be seen whatever two things there are and so people are stressed at work because they don't want to be at work but they want to get paid that causes stress if all day long you are stressed it's really easy to lose any enthusiasm you have for anything and then the second piece of it is what amplifies that the reason you want to go is because you're afraid of something you're afraid of being insufficient you're afraid of doing a bad job you feel like an imposter so when we add all of that up modern western industrial work is filled with stress it's enervating and it kills passion because we want to do two things we understand we want to go want to get rewarded and we want to leave and we're filled with fear and we feel like an imposter so it's no wonder that there's so much dissatisfaction and on we in the way we approach our work which is why people who can't find a better path go home and self-medicate with netflix or alcohol or whatever it is and people who can go home and find a hobby or literature or something else that elevates them it feels to me like the opportunity is figure out how to turn your work into something that's more of a choice less stressful and fills you with energy and joy and we know that there are people who work in a steel mill who are happy doing it and we know that there are people who turn in their books in on time without being punished by internal you know debate about writer's block and everything else what is the difference and i think the difference is we begin with a choice which is possibility we are here and we can do something with our day not but but and and that's from raw xander the idea of saying i'm on vacation and it's raining means not that my vacation is ruined but that i can catch up on my reading or i can take a cooking class all these things i've been hoping to do whereas if i say i'm on vacation but it's raining i'm trapped and so shifting our mindset toward possibility who can i touch even if it's just the person in the next cubicle how can i bring humanity to today as opposed to just sitting in the tension in the stress it opens the door for a better life how do we weigh success and stay out of certain success traps so for example i do my show gets a lot of downloads i'm very proud of that uh of course i always want more downloads and if i'm not growing in size as a show i i admit i feel like i'm doing something wrong and i know a lot of creators have this problem if their new paintings aren't worth more or selling more than their last ones they feel like they're not moving in the right direction if you're an actor you work at a community playhouse there's some people that are just not satisfied are not as satisfied as they would be if they had a larger audience they want to see that crowd every year move back a couple more dozen rows how do we avoid getting sucked into that or is that inevitable when it comes to people who are driven or i don't know am i what am i what am i doing wrong that i want that or is that normal you nailed it not only do you want it but you got brainwashed into wanting it because right people who keep score win when you get obsessed with it right tim cook does not need any more money but no the stock price helps all of the investors so the investors want tim cook to be obsessed with the stock price and facebook wants you to be obsessed with how many friends you have and uh the people who advertise on your podcast and et cetera et cetera want you to figure out how to get more the problem with more is that it is an infinite hole that can never be filled now if you get sustenance and joy out of engaging with an infinite hole that can never be filled i got no problems right and we find this with world-class athletes that's what they do world-class athletes fade away the minute the whole isn't infinite anymore right worst thing that ever happened to michael jordan was he had nobody left to beat and so we had to switch to another sport that was a bigger hole right and most of the people i know don't fit into that category most of the people i know find peace of mind when they're not staring at an infinite hole but we have trouble turning away and so the practice involves among other things deciding what your inputs are and what you're going to keep track of and what you're going to keep score of so i'm not on twitter i'm not on facebook i'm not on linkedin i did those things for a reason and the reason is if i was there i'd be day trading all day long who have i pleased today what are my numbers like i have a podcast i don't know how many people listen to my podcast i organized my life so i would not know how many people because i am good at making numbers go up and that would turn me into a hack because again nothing wrong with being a hack but if you want to make your numbers go up you know what to do and the story of joni mitchell really sits with me joni mitchell joni mitchell so joni mitchell for people who are younger than me uh was the most important singer-songwriter of her generation in the early 70s everything she touched turned to a hit she you know every college dorm everyone had every joni mitchell record and joni realized a she had enough money b she could do this for the next 40 years for 40 years she could keep playing songs in the joni mitchell genre they're not that hard right and she didn't want to do that she didn't want to play covers of herself she liked the feeling of art instead so she released a record called don juan's reckless daughter intentionally designed to make most of her fans walk away and they stuck with her and she had to do it two more times before they gave up on her but those records let joni mitchell go back to being the person she wanted to be and not keep score they certainly annoyed her record label but joni's problem is not her record labels problem and vice versa she's not them and they're not her she gets to do what she wants and so she said if you want to listen to the music i want to make this is the music i want to make and if that means i can't sell out madison square garden that's okay and i would argue that she ended up living a happier life than a musician who kept chasing that big platinum sale that they had the first time and on the internet we're all versions of joni mitchell we've all got fans and followers who want us to play starry starry night one more time do it again and you don't have to choose that if you don't want to there's a price for it but you only have to pay the price once and then you can go back to doing the work you want to do for the people you want to do it for have you ever heard of i don't expect that you would her name is michelle pham she was a makeup tutorial person on youtube that does ring a bell okay i wondered if you might know who she was it's kind of weird that you and i both know who that is i guess but it's the industry yeah so for people who don't know she was i guess a vietnamese gal who was probably like i don't know 19 or something like that or younger doing makeup tutorials on youtube a decade ago or whenever youtube first started and nobody i mean i remember like this is how you make your nose look thinner or something with like shading things and stuff i didn't pay that much attention to as a 19 year old or 25 year old guy and she gave up her youtube channel one day she just made a video that said hey guys i'm going away for a little while or something along those lines and she never came back and and she was making like seven million dollars a year or whatever it was you know and she other youtubers who were professionals were probably lucky to break 80k she was making millions of dollars doing makeup stuff and i heard an interview with her on some podcast recently can't even remember what it was i'll find it and throw it in the show notes and they basically said hey where did you go why and she said i just realized i was doing the same thing i stopped enjoying what i was doing i was talking about makeup over and over and over again and it like her original excuse was i wanted to go start a family and got married but then she was like that's not really it yeah you know you can get a you can have a family and get married and still do makeup tutorials in your room um i just didn't want to anymore because she and she tried to articulate this and i think it's what you're saying it just started to feel bad because every time she did a video that wasn't how do you make your nose look thinner she got criticism and then every time she did people said oh is this all you got by the way you're old and fat now and she was like i'm over this crap and she left at the peak the top of the game um lisa lampadelli very similar she was at the top of the comedy game and she said this is i'm miserable and i hate this and she went and lost 100 pounds and everyone said what's your problem oh you're too good to be fat now or whatever and she was like these are toxic horrible people i'm done and she just retired that was it it's hard to do but i think you kind of hit that you have to realize when you're at that fork in the road do i become a hack and do what everyone wants me to do and maybe be miserable do i go this way and do whatever it is that i want artistically or do i maybe even just step back and go you know what i'm just going to be a parent and that's that's what's going to make me happy i'll take take my 70 million dollars and leave it's that's exactly right i am not arguing that you have to retire what i'm saying is that it turns out that the smallest viable audience isn't that big so i don't know if you know my friend amanda palmer but amanda used to be half of the dresden dolls which was a sort of punk band in boston they got finally a record deal and after two records the label calls them in and they say guys your your last record stiffed you sold 20 000 units you're off the label you're fired that's a lot of records well not for a big label it's not okay 20 000 you're off the you're off the label and so she went indie on her own and then she made the most successful music kickstarter in history she raised 1.2 million dollars in 30 days and people like that's incredible amanda palmer what a rock star and she told me she counted up how many people backed it you want to guess the number seven thousand twenty same number twenty thousand same number twenty thousand so that means that you didn't need the label at all the number that gets you kicked off a label is also the number that makes you the most successful kickstarter in history so when you think about who are you seeking to serve and how are you choosing to serve them one model is i'm going to touch 10 million people a little and maybe they'll pay me a nickel or the other thing is i could be someone that a thousand people would really miss if i were gone and as kevin kelly has pointed out a thousand true fans let you do your work and we need to make the world better the world is really upside down right now how are we gonna do that i'm not sure we're gonna do it by chasing a metric that uh some social media person thinks is important i think we're going to do it by finding a group of people connecting them leading them and making things better for them because that pays it forward and it cycles up and it also lets us be human again and not be cogs in this weird media machine it also sounds like the label doesn't do anything if you sell the exact same amount of records on kickstarter or at least it does the same as you would have done if you marketed it yourself on a website that doesn't put your record in every store or whatever labels do now uh yeah i mean what nothing what the label wants is pharrell right that when pharrell shows up with a song he doesn't reach 20 000 people the label with streaming and everything else reaching 10 million people or 40 million people that's how they are organized they're organized for a smallest viable audience of millions and millions of people so youtube says we got a long tail here we got you know more than half our videos have only been seen five times we don't care which videos get seen a billion times as long as it's some of them and so youtube's problem is different than your problem youtube is busy saying put up whatever you want we'll profit from the winners but you don't have a million videos you just got eight or eighty so who are they for and you know i saw a video a couple days ago a woodworking guy who was teaching in detail how to use a certain kind of router to do a certain kind of dado to put together a certain kind of bench and he's making an excellent living doing that for a very specific group of people and if you don't get the joke it's not for you there's always youtube and what makes money on youtube will never cease to amaze i mean i'll go who listens to the i'll get a pitch and i'll go nobody listens to this dumb this is the dumbest thing i've ever seen and i'll i'll google the result and it's like oh they have eight million subscribers oh that last video got nine million views well it must be a couple years wow it came out last month huh okay i don't know what i'm talking about right i no one does yeah uh look it all of course makes sense for us to do good work let me tell you where a lot of people get discouraged where i sometimes get discouraged there are podcasts out there that talk about what the host had for breakfast uh it's a recap of 90 day fiance or some reality tv show on bravo and that show is twice the size of this one or more right and you're never going to have better ratings than like jersey shore or the the show where people punch each other in the fa the jerry springer effect kind of thing um this to me can sometimes be discouraging what am i missing here like how do we stay motivated you're not missing anything these people are hacks and they're giving the audience exactly what it wants right it is way easier to sell cotton candy and cigarettes than it is to sell tofu and tempe it just is right you have to decide are you going to say it's not my fault it's what the audience wants pander to them race to the bottom because someone's going to do it or you can decide i made this and what irks me is not that the masses want what the masses want what irks me is that people who are pandering to the masses insist that they're not pandering to the masses of course we are and you should own it because that's what you're doing on purpose and where i draw the line is when you manipulate people or sell them cigarettes to addict them until they die that's not okay for anybody to do that that that level of being a hand a pack a hack of pandering to people is immoral but if it turns out that people really want to listen to a certain kind of music that you don't like but you can make that music i'm not going to complain about it go ahead what i feel like is a trap lately and i've heard some people talking about this i don't want to name check anybody but a lot of these popular online influencers and creators they'll say something or they'll be i guess complaining but maybe that's strong of a word i get it sometimes it's like their owed gratitude and it's this gross feeling that let's say let's say i get it sometimes when i'm tired i'm annoyed about something else uh or a show fan says something annoying in an email that gets under my skin it's rare but when it happens my wife always says you're you know you're being ridiculous right and the answer is yes i i do know that i'm being ridiculous it it's this is a trap that we have to have seen before right this is something you've heard about when we're owed gratitude that's really what it is it's almost like this temporary sense of entitlement where i'm like how dare you have anything but kind things to say about my hard work so um before covert i gave a thousand speeches over 30 years and it's a big deal for me to get on an airplane give a part of my life fly somewhere and there are certain places that are easier than others convention centers are a disaster they're not organized for anything it's particularly giving a speech foreign audiences are trouble because they're wearing those headphones and everything is seven seconds delayed so if you say something funny people don't really laugh and you hear the so i'm in a convention center in mexico city with the simultaneous translation i've come all this way to do my best work i am making a mistake in this moment i think they owe me something i think this audience owes me something and in the third row there's a woman on her cell phone but she's not listening to the conversation she's having the conversation she's talking as loud as i am talking to you in the third row while i'm giving my presentation and there's 4 000 people there and i i start giving my presentation to her and i start at i mean my presentation is different every time i give it but i'm like talking about how we get hooked on our devices and i'm talking about trying to do two things i'm like talking directly to her and it's having no impact whatsoever and after about 30 seconds i catch myself and i say wait a second there are 2 900 people here who are here for me and this woman's here for her how dare i steal from those people when i can give those people a gift nobody here owes me anything no one because if i believe they owe me something i have signed up for outcome i've signed up for the toxic cycle of betting on the outcome i'm never going to be able to give this speech on this day in mexico city ever again so what can i do about that and i picked someone 10 rows behind her and i gave the presentation to them instead and the punch line might be they gave me a standing ovation i don't remember because i wasn't paying attention to whether or not they would express gratitude i knew that i had gratitude for those people who were giving me a chance to do my work and that lesson really has sat with me because as soon as you understand that nobody owes you anything and that you don't have this right to be heard to be seen to be appreciated it makes it so much easier to let go of all of that which frees up all of your brain to do the work you said you wanted to do in the first place because you didn't tell me you wanted to get applauded you told me you wanted to do work that made a difference so go make a difference i think that's a great place to wrap it seth i read the book oh you know what i got to get this one line from you because this was my favorite line in the whole book if a reason doesn't stop everyone from doing something it's not a reason it's an excuse that's like the my favorite line maybe the catchphrase of the whole episode i want to repeat it because everyone's like looking for their rewind button on their podcast app right now because they were jogging if a reason doesn't stop everyone from doing something it's not a reason it's an excuse that is such brilliant insight can you speak to that a little bit i don't know how much more there even is to say about it but i thought it was genius well so let's talk about the laws of physics because the laws of physics seem to apply to everybody no one can get 30 feet in the air you don't get to say i can't jump 30 feet in the air because i'm a bad person or i don't feel like it no newton says you can't jump 30 feet in the air so it's a reason but if some people can put out a podcast with the regular pace you do and the generosity you bring to it we know it can be done and we also know that all you need to do to make a podcast is have a computer and you do so now all you got it left is an excuse because there are no reasons i love that and i think that's that should go right at the top of the show notes and for those of you who are wondering if what you have is a reason or an excuse ask yourself if uh if the laws of physics dictate that it's possible or or not and i think that's pretty much that's all we need right just a little coin to flip mentally that says has anyone ever done this before ever uh and even then it might not be a reason because people break that five minute mile or whatever it is it's happened before right well said seth godin the book is called the practice we'll link to it in the show notes thank you very much for sitting down with us uh from your well is it technical i mean you sold your business or is that not public no no talk about that it's um so akimbo which is the institution that i started five years ago to do online learning is now a b corp and that means it's legally obligated to work in the public interest and to serve uh all of its constituents and it is run and owned um by two of the senior people there alex and marie couldn't be more proud they know how to build an institution better than me so i'm still doing workshops but it's their company and they run it um i am coming to you from what used to be our office we call it a studio i'm the only person here i've been the only person here since march and uh i live about a mile away nice you still got a room full of rubber duckies i have there i'm trying to trim the number of rubber duckies because there's always new stuff that i'm building like this to take the place of rubber duckies but yes right still a lot of rubber duckies here if you're not watching on youtube he held up the writer's block that he's lasering uh everybody's being productive during covet it's some in more ways than others thank you for your or your block that you sent me as well and thank you for your time really appreciate it the practice will be linked in the show notes thanks seth thanks jordan be well i hope you all enjoyed this you can find a lot more in the jordan harbinger show podcast feed that's where i put the majority of the episodes including a lot of stuff that doesn't make it to youtube you can find the jordan harbinger show in apple podcasts spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts click here for an interview with the amazing malcolm gladwell click here for an interview with the legendary oliver stone and click right here to subscribe to the channel

Channel: THE JORDAN HARBINGER SHOW

Views: 70,628

Rating: 4.9495993 out of 5

Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, follow your passion, seth godin, make money, seth godin marketing, seth godin podcast, seth godin interview, entrepreneurship, the practice, creativity, seth godin the practice, the practice seth godin, seth, starving artist

Id: u7YZ84HTEDI

Length: 50min 18sec (3018 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020