Seth Godin | The BEST Business Hustle Strategy You've Never Considered

there's a lot of talk about hustle and a lot of people are out there crushing it yeah doing great work and good for them and yet I can't help but feel a little bit of this you know you know the acronym FOMO right fear missing out and also the tendency or temptation for comparison's you know we live in this Instagram world where we're you know looking at the highlights of the reels of other people's lives and they're doing they seem to be doing it better faster stronger can you talk about the hustle can you talk about sure so these ammonia two topics yeah quick audience poll who here likes to be hustled no one raised their hand human beings do not like to be hustled because what it means the semantics matter what it means to be hustled is that someone's getting something from you that you'd rather they weren't getting yeah that's the opposite of this idea from cat hook of a generous hustle a generous hustle is when you show up with generosity to do something for the other person with no end in sight for you almost all of us like a generous hustle almost all of us want someone to coach us encourage us open the door for us take us to where we need to go so I'm a huge fan of the persistent generous hustle I have a real problem with people who are following some dummies playbook they send you an email saying what's your favorite color and then you write back and then the next thing they say we be my mentor and then right like there's this method which probably came from the the pickup community years ago and the idea that we could manipulate somebody else to help us get what we want it doesn't have a place it didn't have a place before it doesn't have a place going forward cuz it doesn't scale it doesn't build trust it's not who we want to become so my encouragement to people is work even harder than you thought you could work but work on metrics that matter and the metric that I think matters the most is trust who wouldn't miss you if you were gone who's expecting something from you that you can deliver who trusts you and we get that way by being generous so to pivot into your second question the essential thing to understand about social media as well as cable TV you are not the customer you are the product there was a product because if they can get you in a certain mental state you will use it more and if that mental state involves shame and an adequacy you will be more likely to not only use it more but to engage with the things that are being sold to you so the metrics that are exposed the makeup virtual and real that is shown to make everyone else's life look better is designed to make you feel shame than inadequate and it is up to you if you want to play that game or not but the people who play that game don't win that game they just get to play the game and be sad all the time and we know this we know that the more you use certain kinds of social networks in certain ways the sadder you get and all you got to do is look at 50 years of Hollywood to see the corrosive effects of that because between the Academy Awards and the makeup artists and then who has a bigger house in Beverly Hills and everything else none of those people are happier than they were yesterday yeah right and so if you're gonna be in this world except that you're the product not the customer and use it for your own benefit and the benefit of people you care about not because some algorithm decided you would make them a profit how do we avoid comparisons then you know with our co-workers or our friends or well so status goes all the way back as far as we can measure my dog is long with almost every other dog except for Truman across the street Baxter hates Truman and it it we love the family across the street they got two little kids and Baxter attacked Truman way this is something new I don't so you have a dog I do ever done what kind of dog is it he's a mutt from Puerto Rico okay so you have one dog one at a time okay well we have to we have to tie we just rescued two new puppies that's great it's equal parts joy and pain right now is that what they're called joy pretty much we've this our third sort of third pound dog in 20 years and back there's a great dog but Baxter hates Truman and the reason that Baxter hates Truman is because they're almost exactly the same size so there's not enough you know no liminal sheriffs and no one knows who the office so the dog is confused well the dog has to settle scores right and like watch any John Wayne movie here we are in you know Newport watch any John Wayne movie he doesn't Don Wayne doesn't hassle people he's clearly better than and clearly worse than it's only when there's that status problem that it occurs I think the line is this town isn't big enough for the both of us yeah exactly so that's back there and Truman's problem too so it goes all the way down to pound dogs to humans so it's not gonna go away just like our fear is not gonna go as the question is what are you gonna do with it if the person got the promotion that they didn't deserve or has a car bigger than yours or gets paid to do work that would embarrass you you see it you will you cannot help but see it then what are you gonna do with it what story will you tell yourself about it to decide so there's a bunch of things I stopped keeping track of a few years ago I don't read any of my reviews it's not easy to do but I don't none of them because I'm never gonna write that book again so how is their review gonna help me because I'm never gonna write that book again right and then the other thing is I don't pay attention to how my peers are doing that they also have more books than me fine congratulations their YouTube videos more than mine it's fantastic because it means someone learned something and if I don't want to have that race with you I can enjoy my day more so many thoughts I'll try and harness them you mentioned you will write that book again but if you were to update one of your collections what would be the book that you would update you know for 2018 heading into 2020 and and what do you think's missing from it well I'm thinking hard cuz I've never caused myself to think about this I've had you know the publisher says it's the tenth anniversary of this could you please write an updated edition and my take has been well then I would have to write an update every week because it keeps changing so why don't I just encase it in amber and say in this moment this is what I thought about the world and I'm not we've heard you know Kurt Vonnegut could write circles around me but he didn't rewrite his books either it's like that's what happened I feel really badly about the way I marketed all marketers or liars because I think it's a profound piece of work that people didn't get because the cover was terrible and the title was bad my fault completely but you changed and updated the title right yeah but it wasn't enough and first impressions last a really long time yeah I wrote a book called survival is not enough that took more time than any other book but lynchpin I wrote 200 pages that I had to delete toward the end Charles Darwin wrote the foreword which wasn't easy because he's dead and I've seen congratulations yeah no copyright claim though so I was fine I think there's a lot of lesson in that book but it was 2001 in the world was a really different place then so I haven't read it in a long time it would be interesting to explore that but it was more academic than I think most people want to read ok so then let's go back to the dog dilemma okay and let's extrapolate that or maybe make a metaphor out of it if I'm that person what's your dog's name again Baxter and Baxter doesn't get along with Truman Truman I found out that Baxter was named after the dog from an anchorman which embarrasses me so just you wanted personal detail here we go Baxter has one pause that's a different color than the other one and it's his right paw I think he's a little self-conscious about it so I want I wanted his name to be lefty so everyone would look at his left paw not notices his right paw is a different color but lefty did so I decided it would be Lenin right because then I could get it like a whole geopolitical thing going on le ni n and but the problem is some people would think I was naming him after John Lennon so then I went with Trotsky cuz Trotsky was perfect I got overruled his name's Baxter so what I'm Baxter yeah and I work with a Truman alright there's not enough right what do I do how you know how do i I mean I've got this job I love working for that company true story ready lawyers cared a lot about status in general because law is all this you know we're gonna have a fight in court one of us is gonna win two associates one's a friend of mine same start date five years into it it's time for them to stop sharing an office so there's two new offices one office is a foot bigger than the other one who gets the office that's the foot bigger how do you figure it out right well if you're gonna do Rochambeau or something then it's a game of luck and there's gonna be hard feelings so my friend said to the other associate you take it take the bigger office because I'm not keeping track of that and it changed so much about their dynamic about what work was focused on if it's important to the other person to be the Alpha and you can do your work do your work because it's the only way to adjudicate this status argument now people will say well if I do that then I'll always lose everything I'd be a doormat but that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is you get to decide what your work is and if it's important to you to win a turf war a turf war that's visual on the status thing then go fight that fight but all the time and energy you're putting into that fight is time and energy you're not putting it to your craft and I think it makes way more sense to say I made this and to be proud of that and not worry about some metric that you didn't pick good stuff what's the worst piece of advice you've ever gotten there's a company called Learning Annex have you ever heard of them do they have them about here that wasn't on my radar okay so the idea was you to me but in real life in 1990 something okay so you would go they rent a school and have 20 classrooms and at night you could take a course from this person or this person or this person and this was early in the days of desktop publishing and they came to me and said will you teach the desktop publishing class and I viewed it as well there's an audience I could teach this you made $49 a night or something and then they would send someone to watch what you're doing steal it and then have lots of people teach the class you invented and the advice I got from the person who brought me in was if you really want to make it at this it needs to be way more generic it needs to be predictable there needs to be an outline there needs to be a syllabus this is how teaching works and start with the topic sentence take people through the tactics create a test do that whole thing and I've gotten that advice throughout my career about my speaking when I invented the idea of slides with no words on them really well meaning people said you can't do that your slides need a bullet points on them and every step along the way I knew at my core that if I listened to that advice I was doomed because everyone is better at fitting in than me and I saw if I'm gonna play that game I'm gonna lose that game I'd rather play a game there might be a much smaller game where I have a chance to make the impact there one yeah that's good advice and it's difficult right to break the mold or the status quo or yeah because then I got fired well or or if you say I'm gonna do it differently you get the blame and the punishment yeah right I mean can you talk about there's probably raise your hand if you're a freelancer raise rate there's way more freelancers than that so let's start by defining the difference between entrepreneurs and freelancers yeah and then give me your opinion on whether or not we should work for free sometimes because it okay you know we get asked to do things on spec sure you know if we do agency work or if we you know show me first prove the model work for free or for an intern you know the freelancer entrepreneur dichotomy came to me literally out of the blue and I think it's one of my big contributions to the world understanding this difference and once people hear it it makes their lives so much better freelancers we get paid when we work we have to show up in person that's what we get paid for entrepreneurs get paid when they sleep entrepreneurs build something bigger than themselves entrepreneurs often use other people's money but always are working to build something that they could sell if they wanted to it's not that you got to be really clear which one you are in any given moment because you'll get confused here's why you'll get confused if you're a freelancer and you think you're an entrepreneur you try to grow what you're gonna do is hire someone to be you someone cheaper than you therefore not as good as you so you can keep the Vig and what you end up doing in a jam is hiring the best available person who works for free which is you and so you end up working for yourself all the time frazzled saying you're building something big when actually what you're doing is a workaholic freelancer that's a bad idea that what freelancers ought to do if they want to grow is raise their price get better clients a freelancer with better clients is happier more productive and more profitable than a freelancer with bad clients but that's the world if you're freelancer the seeking out of better clients how do we get better clients you talked a lot about picking your clients yes how do you do that so the entrepreneur thing is if you're an entrepreneur your only job is to hire someone to do your job every time you invent a job hire someone else to do it if you can keep doing that that's how you become Larry Ellison that's how you become someone who builds an entity Larry Ellison doesn't code in Oracle he doesn't make sales calls at Oracle he doesn't clean the building what does Larry Ellison do he just keeps inventing things for people to do and the hiring with them to do it right and so if you're an entrepreneur and you're not doing that well I hope you're enjoying your day because you're allowed to build a job because that's what you've done is built a job but entrepreneurial work is that creation of the next cycle okay so if you're a freelancer how do you get better clients the way you get better clients is by telling a true story that resonates with what better clients want to buy so Frank Lloyd Wright famously designed Fallingwater in 15 minutes on the back of a paper bag one of the most iconic homes in the United States and he turned to the client and he said if you wish I will build this for you he didn't say let's have a focus group and meeting and sanding off the edges and make it a fun place to live he said if you wish I'll build this for you Frank Lloyd Wright had great clients why were his clients great clients because he was the Frank Lloyd Wright and they felt like it was worth all the suffering and expense to have a famous architect as that's what they wanted to buy a house from a famous architect some of them wanted his actual art but most of them wanted to be able to say and Frank Lloyd Wright designed it so that's one way you get a client like that another way you get a client like that is let's say you're an ad agency there are lots of good clients who need to be able to tell their boss we hired a firm that won a lot of awards or we hired a firm that used to work for our competitor but we got them to work for us instead there are art directors who want to hire a photographer who's extremely difficult to work with because if they're a diva they must be great and so I haven't know photographers who are divas on purpose because being a diva get some better clients I mean took we go down the list what story is this person telling themselves about this transaction we are about to have right and back to the engineering mindset if you think your job is to do your job then what you're going to do is keep lowering your price and keep working harder and what you're gonna get our clients who don't want to pay a lot and when a freelancer who's gonna work really hard but those aren't good clients there's just a lot of them and that's a race to the bike it's a race to the bottom and you might win

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 26,734

Rating: 4.9380283 out of 5

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

Id: 5QSzaGLiCYk

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019