Seth Godin: The Person Who Fails the Most Wins

behind the brand takes an inside look at the people that are making things happen from upcoming entrepreneurs to the big guys we show you how they go about their business meet the innovators with a know-how and vision to succeed get behind the brand hi I'm Brian Elliot here with special guest Seth Godin hi Brian thanks for coming again good to see you it's my pleasure so we're back in sunny Orange County and really great to have you I wanted to know after you've written this new book how did you get this job how these all happen you know it's funny I think that there's a long tradition of people having jobs I think that tradition is over I think the model of walking up the corporate ladder is busted and this notion that you have a job doesn't really make a lot of sense I mean if you work on the candy a simple assembly line putting truffles in the box truffles in the box that's a job yeah but if you have almost any white-collar job almost any job where you get access to the Internet almost any job where there isn't a list of what you do all day you don't really have a job you have an opportunity and I viewed my life for 25 years as just one more opportunity to poke the box to try something out to do a project I think we live in project world and there's lots of ways people can get a job like mine it just means sticking with it for a long time before it starts to work but you didn't always do this you sort of started on the corporate side and evolved into other things right you tried a lot of things you're talking your books about some of your successes and some of your failures and that's sort of part of the process right sure I mean the number I've failed way more times than I've succeeded what are some of your failures well I invented the first videotaped aquarium and videotaped fireplace so you can put a VHS tape in and if you're really lonely and a loser you can watch the fish go back that was before they had the one that would play on your computer exactly always ahead of your time let me just say that oh he's ahead of my time and and so whatever was I went to American Airlines magazine and I said let me want a full-page ad and if it sells I'll pay you for every one it sells and if it does I'm infinity and I ran the ad and I had set in my mind a list of 30 orders if I got 30 orders I'd make the tape yep and I got 24 orders during the Towson every one a nice gift send them the money back right and a week later I got eight more orders and then I had to send those back in it and you know it's a failure and I launched books that failed I did a book called email addresses of the rich and famous and Roger Ebert got really mad and I made videotapes that didn't work at books it didn't work my lesson was if I fail more than you do I win because built-in to that lesson is this notion that you get to keep playing if you get to keep playing that means you get to keep failing and sooner or later you're going to make it succeed the people who lose are either the ones who don't fail at all and get stuck or the ones who fail so big they don't get to play again right you talk about in the new book poke the box I will get to that in a minute about this calculation of you know the risk being more expensive than the opportunity right right so you know if if you're talking to a pacemaker assembly man or an airline pilot they don't try stuff they don't say I wonder what happens if I do this and we're really glad that they don't do that because the cost of failing is greater than the cost of discovering what works and what doesn't but almost no one I know builds pacemakers and I don't know any airline pilots most of us now live in a world where the kind of failure I'm talking about isn't fatal at all then if you post a blog post and it doesn't resonate with people post another one tomorrow yeah if you tweet something and no one retweets it tweet again in an hour that if you're just obsessed with always doing what everyone else is doing because you're afraid of someone saying you failed then you're in really big trouble right a lot of people watching this are small business owners they're entrepreneurs or they're working for the man and they've got something in the back of their mind that they want to try what's your message to them about jumping out there taking a risk well I think we got to first decide about definitions here a freelancer is someone who gets paid for working right that a graphic designer might be a freelancer that means more you worked and where you get paid an entrepreneur gets paid while they sleep they build a business bigger than themselves and she gets paid even when she's not there and she uses someone else's money to get big when freelancers act like entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs act like freelancers chaos ensues not a good idea and if you have a job with a boss you need to think about whether your boss is asking you to do a set of tasks if your boss is they're going to try to find someone cheaper than you to do them which is not good or is your boss asking you to solve interesting problems and if that's the case now you have your work cut out for you so what I would say to people in all three categories is take appropriate risks and by appropriate risks I mean risks that keep you in the game even if you fail figuring out how you can be in an industry or how you can be in a space or how you can try things out you know here's a simple example that has nothing to with starting a new business let's say you always have a look and appearance in a stick when you're at cocktail parties well go buy a ticket to some charity gala where you don't know anyone we're a completely different outfit try a completely different shtick and see what happens yeah there's no risk in that right right what's the worst it'll happen you're not going to end up in the newspaper right and you're going to discover oh when I look people in the eye they're nicer to me and I was afraid to do that in my hometown but I discovered it here and now I can go try it over there it's like public speaking no one ever died giving a speech but so many people are afraid of it what's the downside right right and yet the people who tend to do it often discover things about themselves you've already touched on so many little mini topics I like to dive deeper into so going back to your new book poke the box explain to us what poke the box means and and then I want to talk to you about the cover okay well it's a permission slip what the book is is hopefully someone will give it to you and if they do they are saying - it's okay with me for you to fail it's okay with me for you to figure out what works and the expression poke the box is one that programmers use and it's that's how you learn a program you try something and you see what the computer does you try something you see what the computer programmers don't get bummed out when their code doesn't run they just make a change they do it again it's all about exploring and trying anything exactly this might work and similar to maybe a chef might try a different recipe and write different ingredients the scene so why book I mean the books only 85 pages long and the purpose of the book is books have impact they have more impact than YouTube videos they have more impact than you know a 5 minute podcast yeah that what a book does is it hit you over the head again and again and then you can leave it on the shelf or leave it on the desk and it reminds you that it's ok to do these things and can pass it on and you can pass that so our book comes in a five pack it comes in a 52 pack because I'm hoping some people will read ago everyone in my company used to read this thing by 52 of them clever boxes leave it on the reception fit in your back pocket it's small enough there you go tell me about the cover so I don't think I can remember book that didn't have any words on the front it's just a bingo we invent it's an icon right so it not only is my next book I've invented a whole publishing company I try to take my own advice and my advice here is pop the box I'm poking not by going back to my old publisher and taking a bunch of money which would be easy but to say what if I reinvented publishing altogether and so our back end is powered by Amazon with the first publishing company able to do that and gives us all sorts of cool advantages but one of them is that anytime you see a book for sale online there's the cover and right next to it is what it is so why do I need to say what it is when right next to it it's going to say what it is right even better if it's on your desk and someone walks in and they see a book with no reading on the cover what are they going to do yeah I'm curious right yeah and so you have a whole conversation that I didn't pay for just because I gave you a beautiful cover with no words on it I I'm seeing the master plan this is really a metaphor about curiosity right yeah because there's the theme that runs throughout the book tell us about how important it is to be curious and maybe talking about some of the things that are missing that you see you know business owners and people that are trying to get discovered and become indispensable well there's a company called penguin magic and I love their business model and I we don't time for me to get into it but their website is filled with videos of people doing their tricks but they're not doing them in a tuxedo with a white rabbit they go into the streets of Las Vegas find semi drunken tourists and do tricks on them right there on the street right usually at night and the tricks are pretty amazing and inevitably the people start screaming oh my god it's Satan love Allah and then they go how to do that and they all want to know how you did it and the way penguin makes a living is people buy the trick to find out how it's done right got you too often in our world someone does something something extraordinary and we don't say how'd you do that we don't wonder how does it work how did how did that business get from here to there how did that thing what's the technology behind that it's like magic but we don't care and if you got curious you're not going to learn and in the old day that was fine because the world was the same but now the world is so different you have to learn so how do we get there I mean is it we're desensitized is there too much out there that were just spoiled you know we have all this technology basically at our fingertips we have to walk very far to get it most of its free why why aren't we curious anymore well we you know we've been brainwashed that when they electrified America they only had one outlet in the house and it was a thing with a light bulb in it they hadn't invented any appliances so when they invented the dishwasher in the washing machine washing the clothes washer was first and you had to unscrew the lights in your house so it's dark and you got to screw in the thing to bring the electricity and it was inevitable that you would figure out how it worked because if you didn't it was going to electrocute you sure and once we got over that hump by the 1940s businesses worked electricity work cars worked the system worked and then school got to work brainwashing us to just accept it all right don't ask questions no user serviceable parts inside right you shouldn't own a screwdriver anymore don't open this sure and so that thing compounded by you know big banks and big corporations and big government agencies they don't ask just listen yeah conforming right so now we enter this revolutionary age that we're in right now where so many things are being rebuilt and every once in a while a 20 year old comes along and builds a website that makes him a billion dollars and the rest of us will just say that oh we never thought of that yeah because we're just waiting for someone to tell us what to do talk to me about the resistance in lynchpin fantastic book very personal you had said we talked about this last time very personal for me too and it was a very timely message I think still very relevant today and probably five years from now but talk to us about the resistance about fear and how that plays and how we can use it to our advantage yeah well how did we end up accepting this dictatorship of the system how does it work in other countries how does it become the status quo turns out we are evolutionarily organized to do that there's a part of our brain right here called the just above the brainstem it's the part of the brain that's been around for millions of years the same brain of chicken has same brain a lizard has psychologist called the lizard brain and if certain things happen turbulence your boss is caller ID on your cell phone right certain siren in your rear-view mirror it instantly activates and it doesn't matter if you're in the middle of something great when it happened all other systems shut down and so what we do in school is in order to get a kid through 12 years of it the teachers discovered that shortest shortcut is just activate that every time you activate that the kid will become compliant so we set up the system and then we hire people and we say you know do this or you're fired right and in our head we say fired no job I'll never get another job I'll run out of unemployment I'll become homeless I'll die so the boss says something and we immediately associate that with dying and so this brainwashing system was in place for a really long time and it's you can come to power and become a dictator with it you can also become a boss or a teacher or a parent using that system which is all great unless a revolution comes and when the revolution comes the people who can figure out how to shut down their amygdala long enough are able to succeed and so that's why Silicon Valley works because everyone is sitting around reassuring themselves that they should be calm where everyone else in the world is freaking out - oh let's build up new here oh yeah and and the the problem is that we've been punished so much for trying new things right that we've been conditioned not to do it right right and then we start punishing ourselves and that's what I'm talk--i right now you're actually not being punished that much to try new things right right now it's easier to start a business today than any time in history the only person who's stopping you from starting a business is you right right access to technology access to capital access to information access to markets never ever been like this before right when I started early companies in mind where I needed 70 people to build a company and raise millions it out now you can start you know the Domino project I started with zero Squidoo we started with zero I mean it's not hard anymore except the voice in your head the resistance is Steve Pressfield calls it I love that you say there's thousands of books maybe millions of books to us about what to do and we can go to you know graduate school and learn what to do but what's missing is how to do it or actually to go talk about just that peace initiative well first thing is to say about initiative is no one gives you initiative you have to take it which is really cool most people don't think about it that way but it's true I taught at the NYU School of Business graduate school I had the most popular course in the school and there were 60 people in class no grades I mean sorry no tests no homework 100 percent class participation yeah and one of the classes I come in and I said everyone bring a cell phone and I call people up one at a time and I gave them a phone number of someone and I said call this person and sell them a subscription at Time magazine while everyone in the class watches you now tell me exactly what the downside is here they'll hang up on you yeah that's he but if you don't call I'm gonna give you an F right one third of the class wouldn't make the call really because it the act of having to talk extemporaneously to a stranger in front of the class was so overwhelming to people would never ever been asked to take initiative that they just shut down I mean the way you get to the second year at the Stern School of Business is you get aids from the time you're in third grade anyway you get A's is you just say what are the instructions what does this do or do you need me to follow exact conformity yeah how does this idea I'm just curious cuz I spent some time working in Japan there's a country that is all about conformity for a good reason right geography demands it right they all have to live close quarters and it's busy and so that's part of its ingrained in their culture does this work in other places you see let's compare Singapore in Japan Japan's our real trouble right Japan's in trouble because the conformity thing isn't working it didn't work at Sony and it doesn't work internally for a lot of companies because if all you're gonna do is what you did before and there isn't a you know a Deming or somebody else with a new map right it's really tough Singapore is just as crowded as Japan but Singapore the government there says you know we're not give you a lot of other freedoms but we're going to give you the freedom and we're going to insist that you guys go poke you go figure out how to fail at this business in this business in this business and that's what they built the country for right so I think that yeah all around the world what what they figured out in China is they're saying we don't want to be the low-cost producer of other people's junk that's not where we're going to end up so they keep trying to move up and so they're inventing stuff whether it's solar power and new ways to make cars etc that isn't about waiting for someone in the united states to fax them the plants right and so we're losing that because we're lulling ourselves into believing that we're the only people in the world who know how to take initiative when in fact we're learning that we all we know how to do is watch the Super Bowl that works especially instead of Singapore when the higher-ups are giving you permission so I guess my question is if you're at the bottom of the totem pole then we have folks at the top of the totem pole who may be you know the roadblocks who should we go after first to convince I mean is it really just about us is it the you know be the change you want to see in the world whether you're the top of my boss won't let me think is a problem and I start with this if you're saying that if you go to your boss and say may I do blah blah blah that your boss says not well of course she says no she says no because what you're really saying is if I do this and it fails it'll be your fault right and if it succeeds I get the credit okay no boss will do that yeah so that's a crutch and it could be the HR department to saying you know you've got to write with pens that only have blue ink or whatever they might but that's the second part if you truly work in an organization that will not let you take even a little initiative you oughta try to get fired because first of all I don't think you really work in an organization like that right but if you do why are you wasting today and tomorrow in the next month and the next six months doing that oh maybe it's and I've talked to a lot of people about this maybe it's just in our minds it is that's what it is yeah that's exactly what we feel stuck so for you know for example when I worked at my only real job that's been a core software you know it was a real company back in the day when there were real companies with real jobs but I did things like on Christmas Day when most of the people who were buying educational computer games were opening their educational computer games I came in and answered the phones instead of having no one answered the phone right because it was fun three hours of like helping kids on Christmas morning talking to them blah blah blah well was someone going to fire me for doing that was that in me company can you imagine getting fired for doing that so two weeks later when you're at a meeting and someone's talking about rewriting the manuals you think well when I was answering the phones and I talked to 200 people everyone in the room sits there quietly because you're now the expert why are you the expert because you figured out what to say when you answer the phone you're the only person in the room at your level who's ever talked to a customer and you've talked to 200 of them what does that cost yeah right and so the point is that we all have so many more degrees of freedom than we give ourselves credit for even if you're a waitress at Denny's you can figure out how to be the waitress they will miss if you're gone yeah and if you know the napkins are out of place or you know you think we should have shining your spoons you could take care of that yeah it is about picking yourself right and you know every once in a while you hear the case of you know some waitress who got a ten thousand dollar tip because some guy come in so often yeah and you know finally he said thank you right now she's not doing it for the ten thousand dollar tip she's doing it because discovering how to smile differently or talk differently to make the patron have an engagement with you that's your real job your job is not to bring the eggs from one place in the restaurant to the other they can do that themselves at a buffet they're coming because you are a human being and what human beings do is art is new stuff is connection and this humanity is what has been boiled out of us and what we're seeing is it's coming back in right eye there's this phrase that's been around my head all day today which is you know Tom Peters wrote a magazine story years ago called the brand called you that was brilliant and it totally changed what people thought of branding but my new thing is I'm not a brand you are not a brand you're a person and there's a big difference between being you know gal right and being Michael Dell right and I think that we're now entering this world where it's okay to be a person again excellent set as always thank you so much for being here with us appreciate you coming here and great talking with you always well I just want to say I think the community needs to recognize the fact that you're out there poking every day that you're not sitting there following a map it's all about how you can connect with people how you can bring them up and and I think that there's not enough of that in the world so I think you for doing my pleasure thank you so much you

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 155,539

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Keywords: seth godin, Seth Godin Behind the Brand, Seth Godin blog, poke the box seth godin, Seth Godin Alt MBA, Seth Godin books, sethgodin, positive, dominoproject, pokethebox, motivation, inspiration, success, optimism, TED, TED talk, seth godin challenges you to fail, thisissethblog, Seth Godin Linchpin, Linchpin, Seth, author seth godin, Seth's blog, Bryan Elliott, positively

Id: JecJzrIfdHg

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2011