Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain

ten years ago there were Kowski brothers moved to California to make a movie it turns out that coming up with ideas for movie isn't particularly difficult turns out that dreaming up costumes in a whole other world in a story is something a lot of people can do but what's interesting about what their workout skis did is they made a movie right the matrix happened because they finished I don't have a lot of time candle goes to about there and what I want to do before the candle burns out is sell you on a pretty simple idea that's not that hard to understand but it's pretty difficult to embrace never talked about this before I'm public so I'll do my best but I hope you'll bear with me so I want to start by giving you a couple examples of what I'm trying to get at here it's not that hard to dream up some clever ways to start a talk get people's attention the balloon lucky for me there's no hole in it this works there we go not that hard to add some air what's hard is taking a water balloon and throwing it into the audience hoping it won't pop and embarrass you in front of all these people who came to hear you talk the last part that's the hard part the water part the syringe part that part wasn't so hard so I want to tell you a couple stories about the real-life implications of this some of you may know that there actually was a guy named Duncan Hines Duncan Hines in 1899 was working for Wells Fargo and his assignment was to take a horse and buggy across Colorado to some far outpost well he pulled the horse over he saw a house he went into the house for some food the house was deserted it was snowing he lost the horse he lost the buggy he was stranded in the middle of Colorado for three days he wandered around looking for the horse and buggy for three days he didn't have anything to eat finally discovered he got in a giant circle on his way back to civilization found the horse found the buggy got to civilization pulled into the town and went to the only place there was to eat and ordered five orders of ham and eggs and our argument with the chef they compromised on three he ate them all turns out that in the 1890s the 1900s 1910s finding a restaurant in which to eat where you wouldn't get ptomaine poisoning was extremely difficult because the only people who would go to a restaurant lived in town traveling salesmen had a hard time of it Duncan Hines ended up getting a job as a traveling salesman selling printing in Chicago thought ham and egg experience never went away and he spent ten or fifteen years as he went around the Midwest keeping copious notes on where to eat and where not to eat not a particularly vivid idea then one year for Christmas he and his wife mailed his notebook little mimeograph copies of his notebook to their Christmas list and so many people asked for it again the next year that it occurred to Duncan Hines that maybe there were other people thanks Danny Ford who were travelling around who needed a place to go and eat without getting sick and Duncan Hines led a quest a quest to create the restaurant industry in this country a quest to boot to increase health standards a quest to teach people how to eat and every year year after year basically by himself aided by an ever rotating group of secretaries he produced the original Zagat's was called Duncan Hines guide to good eating and then he added a cookbook and then he added a hotel list and what's fascinating is when he died he only had $25,000 in the bank Duncan Hines didn't do this for the money Duncan Hines did it because he did things when he started something he finished it the interesting footnote on the story is about nineteen fifty something a guy named Roy Park decided it would be really interesting to take the Duncan Hines name and add it to a line of foods another interesting idea lots of people had had the idea before and no one had even gotten to first base with Duncan Hines he wasn't interested Duncan wanted to control what he did he wanted to make the things that he made and as we thought no one got in front of Duncan Hines with this Roy Parks spent months figuring out how to make the initial approach until finally they hit it off and then they started working together and it ended up becoming a company so big that when Roy Park died ten years ago he was number 175 on the Forbes list and he had five hundred million dollars in cash in the bank the interesting thing about the two stories it seems to me but what they have in common is they are about finishing not about starting the idea of a notebook filled with restaurants which seat isn't particularly difficult to understand so the guys and 37signals write in almost everything they talk about say that there are two secrets to shipping actually one to shipping something on-time and on-budget and the secret is when you run out of money or you run out of time you ship then you're on time and on budget and if your mindset is that I ship that's not just a convenient shortcut it's in fact an obligation and you build your work around that obligation that you instead of becoming someone who's a wandering generality and someone who had lots of great ideas and if only if only if only you're someone who always ends up shipping I've had many many many products the vast majority of the things I've written or created organization I built fail but the reason that I've managed a modicum of success is because I just keep shipping and if you're proud of what you ship and you ship on-time and on-budget you get to do it again and then you get to do it again so if we read Steve mikanos great book on software product management we just cover this idea of thrashing here's what happens in almost every software project and the reason I think you should read the book even if you don't make software is it happens in any project where there's more than a couple people involved what happens is someone comes up with a neat idea of something to make and they start working on it and they start working on it and then they get a little bit of funding and they little get a little bit of support and then some other programmers get added but about a month or a couple months or Microsoft's case a year before it ships other people start to get involved other people start wanting to look at the user interface other people start weighing in and about two months before it ships thrashing occurs people start ripping things out and putting things in and the closer you get to deadlines the more thrashing occurs the more cycles get expended the more work gets put into it until eventually you ship not on time and not on budget and Steve's idea which is actually adopted by Microsoft and other smart programming shops some places better than others is really simple you must strache at the beginning because thrashing at the beginning is cheap thrashing on your website when it's still in Photoshop is cheap thrashing on it when it's already been put into flash is expensive that what you need to do is realize that what you do for a living is not be creative everyone is creative what you do for a living is ship and as someone who knows how to ship you have a discipline and part of your discipline is that you insist on thrashing early that you say to everyone in the organization we're having a thrashing meeting for this thing that's shipping in a year and if you don't come now you have to sign a piece of paper promising that you will not talk to us again and when I worked at a software company I don't know if I have any examples that went in the early 80s my boss was the king of thrashing David was great but he loved to show up the day before we were going to ship with just one little suggestion and that led to one little bug which led to all around a playtesting which led to shipping dates going away and so I created the form and I 24 years old walked into the president's office and made him sign it six months before the product was going to ship I have seen this back I will not talk to you again you didn't have to sign it he could come talk to me now or he could sign it but no one was going to work on the project and only did it either one that is the discipline of what a creative artist does so the question that inquiring minds will ask is why does it work this way why do human beings sabotage their work so often and so I got to give you a little bit of a biology lesson and then I'm going to talk about why that is so this is a chicken a chicken has a lizard's brain chickens and dinosaurs are all related the lizard brain is the brain that you see if you look at it a sonogram of a fetus right a little early fetus has a tail it has a little tiny thing on the top of its brainstem that as you watch the fetus developed through sonogram you can see the path of evolution it shows you day by day how human beings evolved and it turns out that all lizards and chickens have is a lizard brain I'm a McDonough this is as they say and the idea of the lizard brain is this it is hungry it is scared it is selfish and it is horny that's its job and that's all it does the reason they call wild animals wild is because they have lizard brains and all they care about in any given moment when you see a squirrel in Central Park or when you see something scampering across the street is how am I going to survive how am I going to have kids get me out of here it turns out that we have one too and if you look in the Wikipedia there it is is a little picture of it and there's the other brain on top and that as evolution came along that little one went there and then we grew this new one on top the limbic system and the neocortex that's what dogs had first and then Apes and people like us that part is all about how do I share how do I be loyal how do I connect and the part on top of that is how do I come up with a really cool way to do something how do I break tradition how do I challenge the status quo and we love living up here but every single time we get close to shipping every single time the manuscript is ready to send to the publisher the lizard brain speaks up the lizard brain by the way was in charge of you in high school and the lizard brain says they're going to laugh at me the lizard brain says I'm going to get in trouble what TV is coming to watch me put graffiti on street signs I'm going to get arrested the lizard brain is screaming at the top of its lungs and so what happens is we don't do it we sabotage it we hold back we have another meeting of course we're going to come to the meeting before ship date because that's the moment when our lizard brain is saying oh the critics are going to get to see this we might have to change it so what I'm trying to start unfolding for you here is the fact that you don't need to be more creative all of you are actually too creative that what you need is a quieter lizard brain and there are some interesting ways to think about this so we're going to go back to my friendly plunger here most people at work are doing this back and forth back and forth following instructions doing what they're supposed to do that for most people is a great job because the lizard brain is quiet all day long all day long you know you sit there you fix one MetroCard machine then you fix the next MetroCard machine then you fix the next MetroCard machine and at the end of the day you get a paycheck and you don't get in trouble and you don't get laid off and that's your job we've been taught to do that for real long time boy creative people do is they try to change the status quo it's a little bit like taking this in blocking the air now one of the things that happens when you pull on it is it's not that hard to pull it's sort of fun to pulling your leg oh you're pulling your leg oh you're pulling your leg up and that's what a mature creative people do all day long they come up with an idea they write it down in their molar skinny they come up with an idea and they post it on their blog right and this part we spend a lot of time doing this going back and forth but you notice what happens what happens is the plunger still where it was when I started talking about it every once in a while we commit to something and we start pulling but you know what happens it gets harder and harder and harder as the vacuum gets stronger and stronger and stronger so we give it our best but we let go that Steven Pressfield calls the resistance the resistance gets worse and worse and worse the closer we get to shipping and the reason is because of the lizard brain the lizard brain says I need to speak up now because they're going to make fun of you and there are a few people right one of my favorites Jill Greenberg who she gets this far you know what you know she pulls harder until she breaks the status quo and then everything is different and everyone says wow you're a genius right the genius part is getting the lizard brain to shut up long enough to overcome the resistance and the way that I've thought about it is this some people view what they're doing as pulling on that plunger trying and trying and trying and what happens when you approach life like that is you get this feeling in the pit of your stomach or in the back your head and the list of valid excuses is long and getting longer all the time right I'm an alcoholic I can't be expected to do that I'm not an alcoholic yet but I like to drink I like to drink and my friends haven't seen me in a really long time I have a family to support I can't afford to do that that guy's blog is already too big my blog will never catch up with it I can't possibly do this because there's something wrong with the committee system my boss won't let me the list is really really long and everything under lists is great you know why because we organized to be great at having that list we like having that list especially the lizard brain the other way to think about it though second balloon is these things now I was never good at this and the reason I was never good at this is it turns out if you've ever tried it that the first couple breaths are really hard getting started is the opposite of the plunger getting started with this is really hard but if you do the physics after the first two breaths the percentage change in latex that you're making gets smaller and smaller and smaller with each breath and that the model is if you can get the first two breaths over with you're going to get the balloon filled up because it's downhill from there so the way I look at the resistance even before I knew what it was called is pretty straightforward if I'm going to do the first two breaths I'm going to finish it so I'm really obsessively careful about what I decide to do the first two breaths about because I know that if I start it then it's all downhill I'm gone I'm going to ship so I thrash at the beginning at the beginning there's lots and lots and lots of argument and discussion with the lizard brain lots and lots and lots of thinking and scenario planning that says wait a minute if I do these first two breaths if I start thinking about a cover or a thesis or whatever I'm going to finish it so I better decide now the end result is you get a lot of spare time on your hands because you're not resisting you're not delaying you're not saying I need to see this next episode of Mad Men cause there might be something useful in it for the next thing I'm going to write you don't have that conversation because you're already over the first two breaths and it's all downhill from there so I have two things to say in closing the first one is maybe a small opportunity which is my current obsession is people who are doing sort of brave status-quo changing war work and shipping it so if you have an example that email to me if you feel like it set that seth godin comm i'd appreciate it the second thing much more important is this some of you came here today to pay homage to the resistance because if you're at a conference sharpening the saw you can't possibly be expected to do productive work you can't possibly be expected to ship the next big thing you're at a conference but some of you came here today because of the voice in your limbic system or your neocortex is saying you know you're a lot better than the people who are just frustrated and maybe because you notice it's not a creativity conference it's a shipping conference maybe there's a different way of thinking about where you are right now my guess talking to Scott and the other folks who are running this thing is that some of the best and brightest and highest potential people in New York are here today and I want to argue that you don't have the opportunity to do this you have the obligation to do it because we need the work you're doing we need your genius we need your insight and I'm praying and hoping you go do it thank you very much you

Channel: 99U

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Keywords: Making Ideas Happen, 99U, 99U conference, 99 percent conference, 99% conference, entrepreneurship, Behance, design

Id: qtZfTpV4KPE

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2015