Seth Godin - The Practice Of Shipping Creative Work | Modern Wisdom Podcast 241

imposter syndrome is the feeling of being a fraud of being unprepared why did they pick me who am i to show up and do this more and more people would come up to me and say how do i get rid of this and they're surprised at my answer which is not only can't you get rid of it you shouldn't want to because it's the sign that you're healthy it's a sign you're doing good work because if you're trying to invent the future of course you're an imposter because you haven't seen the future yet it's not here you are acting as if you're putting something into the world that you cannot be as qualified to be as someone who's a street sweeper because the street sweepers swept that street yesterday they know they can do it there's no imposter going on at all but if you're imagining that people are going to be moved or changed or influenced by what you're about to do but you've never done it you're an imposter so when it shows up the answer is thank you thanks for letting me know i'm onto something here i am doing this work and feeling it the same way you run a marathon you better get tired because if you don't get tired you're not trying hard enough what is the practice well the only two kinds of successful people in the world um what they have in common is that they've solved interesting problems that they've shown up and made something better that they did something original something important maybe they did it by waiting for the muse to touch them by getting picked by somehow getting permission but more likely in my experience of talking to lots of people from every line of work is that they have a practice that they show up on the regular that they have a way to see for a word to produce this work even when they don't feel like it especially when they don't and so i wrote a book about this process of shipping creative work and it counters so many of the myths that people have about what does it mean to even be creative what does it mean to do this work you're proud of what are the biggest misconceptions or the things that most people get wrong about creativity well they think that you need to be in the mood that it happens when you find flow that uh all criticism is the same that writer's block is real that the muse can be summoned a whole bunch of things that put it outside of you that turn it into some sort of gift or talent no one talks that way about plumbing no one talks that way about most of the things in our life why do we talk that way about this important thing and it's because we're afraid yeah i recently had your friend steven pressfield on the show and i see a lot of parallels between the practice and the war of art and turning pro is that were you influenced by him when writing this book i don't think it's fair to call them parallels i think it's fair to say i'm stealing from him um i was trying to be so diplomatic seth steve steve is a dear friend um and he and i differ about a couple things he actually uh is more spiritual about where does this stuff come from but what i tried to do was share my personal experience you know i discovered the war of art 10 years ago when i was writing linchpin i can't believe no one told me about it beforehand and what i believe is that we are not involved in an epic battle against resistance i believe we are dancing with feelings that exist to protect us and you can't win the battle but you can learn to dance with them it's a really lovely way to frame it i i have to say of the stuff that stephen puts forward the more esoteric kind of um metaphysical stuff that's there is for me as someone who's quite salt of the earth is a little bit more challenging but by hook or by crook i think the outcome is correct and i definitely see the the similarities i love the way that there's certain aphorisms and maxims in the practice that are really they sort of spearhead a big big chunk of work and they they kind of drive it home so let's define our terms before we can do anything we have to define our terms how do you define creativity what is it to you so creativity is not painting or writing an opera it's simply solving an interesting problem in a generous way that might not work in a way that only a human can do it so there are elephants who can paint oil paintings but they're not they're not being creative and there's that famous uh selfie that a macaque uh monkey took in indonesia it's not a selfie it's not a selfie because the monkey didn't know to be nervous when it pointed the camera at itself and so you've got to have this human element for it to meet my definition of creative yeah you say that creativity is an action not a feeling and that you put a lot of emphasis on to people showing up and doing the work you use as a good example yourself that you don't blog because you have to blog you blog because it's tomorrow and each day another piece of art another article comes out one question i have there is how do you not kill your love for a topic or a creative output by brute forcing your work rate well i am in favor of hobbies totally in favor of hobbies but don't try to sell them to people do your hobby because you love it do your work because it's your work now it is possible to learn to love your work you can learn to love being a plumber you can learn to love being someone who paves roads in a steamroller right that i don't think that we should try to find our passion i think we should be passionate about what we do because it's way easier to end up happy if you can make that decision so at the beginning writing a blog post every day felt like a lot and if someone had said now you need to do it 7 000 times in a row i probably would have pushed back but like everything that humans deal with we get used to it if your job had been 15 years ago to sit in front of a tiny screen and spend two to three hours doom-scrolling your way through the state of the world for money people would have had a nervous breakdown they would have killed themselves now people do it voluntarily and so the thing is you can seek to do the work for good reasons and then you can fall in love with the work you don't have to worry about killing your joy if you choose to find joy i really like that i think that's a lovely distinction one of the examples that i loved one of my most favorite examples is about you teaching people to juggle can you explain what learning to juggle has to do with our process and a desire for an outcome so i've uh taught thousands of people how to juggle i'm not a great juggler but i know how to teach it and because they're not related being a good juggler and being a juggling teacher when i ask people if they want to learn how to juggle they say oh sure and they grab three balls and they start throwing them and inevitably what happens is people have seen jugglers before and what they pay attention to when they see a juggler is the catching juggling is mostly about catching that we root for the person if we're on their side to not drop a ball and if they do we go oh and so as soon as you start learning how to juggle within two or three throws not you because you're an extraordinary athlete but in general you lunge for a ball it's out of place you lunge to catch it because catching is what you're supposed to do well once you've lunged to one side now you're way out of position for the next one and then the balls are going to drop and you're going to fail and you're going to say i hate juggling and you're done and that's why almost nobody knows how to juggle so what i do is i say this is going to take about an hour and it will not take less than that so here we go we're going to spend 20 minutes throwing one ball and not trying to catch it throw throw throw throw it drops on the ground we pick it up and then we're going to do it with the other ball throw throw drop drop so half an hour into it we've done throw throw drop drop over and over and over again which means that you are now really good at throwing and if you're good at throwing the catching takes care of itself and we live in a culture that rewards people who lunge that rewards the emergency save but that's a mistake what we need to do is reward the throwing and not worry about catching get the throwing under control if you learn the practice you'll be amazed at how easy it is to catch i love that it's one of my two favorite quotes first one our work is about throwing the catching take takes care of itself the second one process saves us from the poverty of our intentions from elizabeth king like that unfulfilled life you know they say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person who you could have been and that process saves us from the poverty of our intentions wow that is i love that um the the hack trap take us through the the trap of becoming a hack the race to the bottom tell us about that well i want to do elizabeth king for just one more minute because i wouldn't have been able to do the book without having uh stumbled upon her and her work watched the documentary and now proud to call her my friend um what does it mean the poverty of our intentions well let's go back to this whole idea of a workout if you negotiate with yourself at mile one of a run you will never run nine miles that is the worst time to decide how far you're gonna run you should have the discussion at the best part of your day tomorrow i'm gonna run nine miles now you've made the decision when your intentions show up later and you are negotiating for it to be less that's not the moment when you're going to make art and so what the practice says what the process is about is i'm not going to decide that i'm not going to have a blog post tomorrow i made that decision 20 years ago there's going to be a blog post tomorrow so now that decision is made it doesn't matter what my intentions are there's going to be a blog post tomorrow and that feels fairly draconian but what it does for me is it lightens my cognitive load enormously i don't have to have a meeting with myself about this i also don't have to have a meeting about being a vegetarian or watching television i made these decisions a really long time ago and so then i can go back to work right that's that ties in really nicely with a few things i've been thinking about recently i'm a big advocate of sobriety for productivity use i think it gives you more time more money and more calories to spend on things that you care about but my background is a club promoter so i've run nightclubs for 14 years um so there's a little bit of a juxtaposition there but i made a commitment to myself and anyone who asks and anyone who's listening to this go back and just search modern wisdom sobriety it'll pop up wherever you're listening um what i tell everyone who wants to go sober who says i want some of those gains is pick an amount of time you're going to do it for don't have an open-ended window 28 days three months six months one year whatever it might be i'm 26 months into this particular stint of it for myself um for precisely that reason it doesn't give you the opportunity it lightens the cognitive load whether you believe in ego depletion and the the um sort of desecration of willpower throughout the day there's some interesting stories about ceos in silicon valley always wearing the same clothes because it means they don't have to make that decision they can save that decision-making for the decisions that matter yeah yeah that's great uh just an aside we have a friend who wrote an important book about the history of drunk driving because if you think about it it has to have a history because first you had to have driving right and uh we did a book party for him and we decided we couldn't have a bar because it was a book about drunk driving and i got to tell you as someone who has never consumed alcohol just by choice it was a terrible party people people just did not know what to do and we had one friend who showed up and she had uh severely sprained her ankle and her husband's a doctor and she had a note from her doctor that she was allowed to drink for medical reasons but everybody else like so as a club promoter i'm just telling you you might want to not make this a widespread thing but i totally agree with you about it my parties are going to suck let's start getting everyone to be to be sober oh man yeah i can i can imagine that look right hack trap take us through the the trap of becoming a hack so um you're not from around here are you in london or near london right now newcastle winterfell of uh okay okay okay so there's coal there but there's no hack uh there is a borough of london called hackney and it used to be on the outskirts when london was smaller and they raised horses there but they didn't raise racehorses or show horses or jumpers they raised ordinary cheap horses if you needed if you need a horse here's a horse well what kind of person buys a horse it's just a horse a reliable cheap horse that you want the answer is a cab driver and that's why london cab drivers are called hacks because they got their horses from hackney and that word then evolved to mean whatever it's it's what you asked for we're done even stephen we don't know each other anything there's no excellence involved here i don't think there's anything wrong with being a hack unless you also want to be an artist at the same time so what it means to be a hack is give people exactly what they want if you look at television television is filled by tv shows made by hacks right there's a network that says i want to show like this play to the lowest common denominator here's the budget it gets done it doesn't matter that most of the fast food is made by hack that there was a day when fish and chips in england was special and now it's just a hack food made for people who are just trying to get some calories but there's a different kind of work and it is the work of leadership of saying to the people who think they want something that's pretty good to say actually consider what would happen if something extraordinary was on offer it's not for everyone and it might cost more in time and money but for some people this this matters and that work is not the work of a hack it's the work either of a amateur who's doing it for love or a professional who's engaging in a contract with someone saying yeah you're hiring me because i'm a professional i'm going to change the game for you we're going to take it to a new level but don't ask me to do hack work because hack works easy for me to get but i don't want to do that i want to do work that will challenge me to solve interesting problems and so in the book i try to outline for people you can need do either but don't be confused don't be a hack and pretend you're an artist and don't be an artist and act like a hack i read last night the toxoplasma of rage by scott alexander have you read this i haven't i know about toxoplasma and i know about scott alexander but i missed the connection so go ahead tell me it's an unbelievable blog post widely cited as the most important blog post on slate star codex um so anyone who is interested that's a big that's a very big shout out i know he's a prolific him and elliott yudkowski and two people that probably would compete with you for volume of blog posts written over the last couple of decades uh and basically he talks about precisely this that the stories which are the ones which are most newsworthy are the ones that cause the most vitriol and um debate from either side which inevitably reduces their effectiveness so peter as an animal change organization garners more support from the press because it does stuff that is outrageous but by its very nature it polarizes people as opposed to and he gives some examples i can't remember of more conservative sedate chilled animal change organizations who don't get the easy wins in terms of exposure but do get higher conversions of those people that they reach and i think like ready last night like just stumbled upon it decided to read it last night yeah appears completely in line with what we're talking about here yeah i know scott's extraordinary and uh i highlight one of his posts in the book uh we've met just once but he fell out of my blog reader because of the whole fight he had with the new york times so i got to put him back in because otherwise i would have read that already so toxoplasma we need to talk about that even though it's off topic toxoplasma is a real thing it is a disease organism that afflicts rats and what it does is it makes rats attracted to the smell of cat urine because this microorganism that lives in the brain of a rat cannot procreate unless it gets eaten by a cat so it takes over the rat causes it to die so that it can reproduce and i've been working on something about the media so now i gotta go read this because it's totally related which is we believe that we see the world as it is but we live in culture and culture changes what we see and culture is driven by media and media is driven by a business model what's happened in the last 20 years is the business model of media has dramatically shifted and it has decided that it profits the most when we are on edge insecure and feeling insufficient so even though as we see from steve pinker's great book the world is safer and healthier than it has ever been before even counting covid no one thinks that's true and the reason people don't think that's true is because the media doesn't want us to think it's true because it sells papers in quotation marks so yeah it's interesting to to make the analogy to toxoplasma it's just so fun to talk about toxoplasma but he is correct that the way we change the culture is not by getting a trending headline in social media we change the culture by establishing that people like us do things like this and persistently and consistently chipping away at the edges i got to give you you ready to rant about that oh absolutely toxoplasma gondii has appeared in two newsletters as well and i only started it halfway through this year so we're all we this is the toxoplasma fanboy podcast right now me and seth here party of two um i gotta give you another another thing uh that i've recently come across from stuart russell's human compatible which is about the control problem for artificial general intelligence very similar to super intelligence by nick bostrom or the precipice by toby ord if you're into existential risk and one of the things that he brings up there is that the optimization algorithms on social media feeds like youtube and twitter and facebook not only are they trying to uh produce content that you are most likely to click on it wants you to click on the things there the easiest way for the social media algorithm to do that is to make your preferences more predictable and people who are out at the extremes and are polarized are much easier to predict what they're going to click on someone who's centrist and has a nuanced view will tip one way then on the next thing they'll tip the other way and again with that like i know we can tumble down the uh malicious techno sort of critic world that we're in at the moment as hard as we want but the point is that there are a number of different forces at play here both conscious and unconscious both automated and creative that are all kind of racing to the bottom and i think that i think that what you talk about there i know it's not necessarily the single important outcome but all of this highlights that if you go towards something which is a creativity which is virtuous and you speaking your sort of highest form of art forward that's a competitive advantage because it's a game that very few people are playing correct it's a game that most people don't even think they should or are allowed to be playing and you know kevin kelly's book what technology wants is a must read it will change the way you see so many of these issues kevin's the founding editor of wired magazine he is a sage this is his best book and basically he argues that technology is a species and it is evolving and forcing us to change as it does and if we figure out what technology wants we start to understand things and i was assigned to an executive who had worked both at facebook and twitter and watching how facile he was at justifying all of the bad decisions that they make because nobody there in my experience is particularly evil but everyone there is doing in the short run what they feel like they're supposed to do as opposed to taking a step back and saying yeah that might work but what would i be proud of and that is inherent in art art when you're not being a hack has to be something you can point to and saying i made that and the number of people who work at facebook were saying yeah i invented it so it would end up like that not very many people are saying it because they don't want to own it they're hacks i think the guy who co-created the infinite scroll says that it was the single worst invention he's ever made in his life his single biggest regret of his life oh my god it was terrifying uh okay so how do we deal with criticism you talk about criticism in the book as someone whose platform is growing now this is something that personally for me is a a really important thing i'm starting to garner sufficient traffic that criticism comes thick and fast how can i deal with it yeah so old dad joke guy goes to the doctor and uh said the doctor says uh you got trouble your heart's going to give out in a few weeks he says i want a second opinion and the doctor says okay you're ugly too and the thing is i would value the doctor's opinion on the first thing but on the second none of his business none of his business because you're in a relationship with someone who doesn't think you're ugly the fact that the doctor thinks you're ugly is irrelevant so the key here is that all criticism is not the same just because someone found two earbuds and listened to your podcast doesn't mean you care about their opinion it may very well be that they should listen to somebody else's podcast you're not trying to be joe rogan so if they want to listen to joe rogan they should go over there if they start saying you need to do these things to be more like joe rogan so i'll like you you need to say joe rogan's over there and that was a huge lesson for me to figure out who are we seeking to serve where is the smallest viable audience and how do i ignore everyone else so 15 years ago i took comments off my blog and there was an outcry this is not a real blog there's no comments don't you care blah blah i realized if i left the comments on i was going to write every blog post a little bit longer explaining myself a little bit more trying to get rid of any place for someone to criticize me and eventually i'd have no blog so i had a choice blog with no comments or no blog and i got rid of the comments and 10 years ago i stopped reading the reviews on amazon haven't read one ever since and my writing has gotten better not worse because a one star review doesn't tell me i did a bad job it tells me the wrong person read my book i love that i also think that it ties in a lot with enacting whatever you feel is true to yourself in creativity because if it's something that is genuinely unmolested from what you want to do to its creation you don't second guess it i think criticism probably strikes at people who are playing this metagame or perhaps being a hack or 20 hack 50 hack whatever particularly harshly yes now there's something that goes with this that's super important which is just because it's what you wanted to do doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work those are two separate things right so if you want to compose a symphony that's played entirely on raw pieces of fish please do but do not expect the commission from the london symphony orchestra they're different things and so part of what we do as a creator is we we've got to figure out who do we seek to change what change do we seek to make and then we have to make it for those people those people are the ones who are seeking to change not necessarily ourselves if it's a hobby that's different but if it's professional work you're not allowed to hate your customer you're not allowed to hate your fan because you're there for them just as much as you need them to be there for you do you advocate a formalized process before people they explore before you exploit sit down work out your core values trying to think about what the project means to you and avatars of perfect audience members and stuff like that is there a way that people can kind of synthesize this into something more real yeah we talk about this uh i talk about this and this is marketing and we cover it in the marketing workshop so i believe that intentional action sometimes called design thinking saves a lot of time and energy who's it for what's it for what do i seek to accomplish these three questions how will i know if it's working you don't have to answer those questions but then you're stumbling around in the blind in the dark trying to knock a pinata out this is different this is saying i'm here on purpose with an intent with a reason that's hard because it puts you on the hook and people don't want to be on the hook because if you announce it and it doesn't happen then you got to say i failed i could do better it didn't work whereas if you don't announce it there's a lot more wiggle room and so bob dylan who makes up stuff even in his own autobiography tells the story of what happened after he went electric at newport and what he did was uh he had a very specific idea about the music he wanted to make who he wanted to make it for and what change it would make and he had a problem which is his fans didn't want him to do that so in that moment you decide do i want to be a hack or do i want to make art and so he said to his promoter here's the deal we're going to go to all these cities three years in a row every year we're going to go to the same towns and the promoter said that doesn't make any sense you got to give the town time to cool out he said no here's why i want to do it the first year we're going to show up in st louis or denver wherever and we're going to get booed and the second year those people mostly won't come back and the third year the people who like me will bring their friends and it took three years to clean out the audience but by doing that he could get back to making the music he wanted to make for people who wanted to hear it but first he had to be specific in mind not i'm going to change the mind of people who want the old stuff but to say i'm going to bring in a whole circle of people who want the new stuff i did a lot of research before i started my newsletter this year and one of the little maxims that i came across there which i really loved was never fear the unsubscribe yeah and i think that that's precisely the same you actually want as many unsubscribes as possible you want to prune that audience down and this leads us nicely into something i get a lot of messages about imposter syndrome which is a hell of a drug um how can we get past imposter syndrome and that's the perfect way to ask the question so for the 12 people who have not experienced it i will explain that imposter syndrome is the feeling of being a fraud of being unprepared why did they pick me who am i to show up and do this and as soon as it started getting talked about more and more people would come up to me now that they could talk about it and say how do i get rid of this and they're surprised at my answer which is not only can't you get rid of it you shouldn't want to because it's the sign that you're healthy it's a sign you're doing good work because if you're trying to invent the future of course you're an imposter because you haven't seen the future yet it's not here you are acting as if you're putting something into the world that you cannot be as qualified to be as someone who's a street sweeper because the street sweepers sweep swept that street yesterday they know they can do it there's no imposter going on at all but if you're imagining that people are going to be moved or changed or influenced by what you're about to do but you've never done it you're an imposter so when it shows up the answer is thank you thanks for letting me know i'm onto something thanks for letting me know i'm not mentally ill here i am doing this work and feeling it the same way if you run a marathon you better get tired because if you don't get tired you're not trying hard enough i think that ties back to what we were saying before about this kind of i guess the compromising of how far you're pushing the boundaries the competence your domain of competence right that a lot of people perhaps might feel that imposter syndrome which gives them a sense of a lack of confidence and then compromise by copying what someone else does so their imposter syndrome gets down regulated because they know maybe i haven't made this work but if i do precisely the same thing as joe rogan or scott alexander or whatever whatever like my hero within this industry i don't need to worry because i i just followed the formula yep i'm off the hook and that's why people ask me for tactics all the time and why i don't give them tactics because we don't need the next scott alexander we already have one two would be good though it might keep it might keep the uh the human race going a little bit more um what does be paranoid about mediocrity me so perfectionism and mediocrity are both the same thing and what they are are places to hide perfectionism means i will never be finished because how could it be perfect and perfectionism feels like a worthwhile endeavor because we say what do you want me to just ship junk and so we hide behind perfectionism mediocrity the flip side of that is well what the hell i just put it out there can't hold me responsible i didn't really work very hard at it again i'm off the hook so medioc mediocre is another word for average and most organizations make average stuff most creators make average stuff for average people that's what makes it average most and if your average stuff doesn't happen no one will miss it because there's plenty of average stuff to take its place but if you can figure out how to do something that's beyond mediocre not perfect but simply changing the situation solving the interesting problem that we would miss if it weren't here but there's all this pressure on you to make it average and the easier way to deal with that pressure is to say let's call it mediocre instead i'm going to guess that again this all of these threads tie together if you are pushing the work rate of the work that you do there also has to be a point at which you accept it is good enough if you need to release a blog post every day and you work on it until tomorrow it's tomorrow like you have to press the publish button at some point correct so you just use the two-word phrase that i really like which is good enough so let's be really honest about what good enough means we defined good enough in advance to mean it's good enough anything better than good enough either we've made a mistake in our definition or we've wasted time and money right so when they made the lexus to compete with mercedes good enough meant it has to be higher quality than any mercedes ever built but it didn't have to be perfect it didn't have to be a car that would go 2 million miles on a gallon of gas right it just had to be better than the best mercedes that was their definition of good enough and then you ship it and so if you're having trouble defining good enough go work on that but once you define what good enough is that's spec and the definition of quality is meeting spec so instead of good enough we just call it quality but they're the same thing meet spec that liberates you to increase this work rate as well as we said before which makes you able to learn more because work that doesn't ship doesn't count and one of the reasons it doesn't count is it can't fail if it can't fail you don't learn anything there's a twitter account run by my good friend jack butcher from visualize value called advice inverted and the top pinned post at the moment is intentions matter more than actions there you go i love that that there's a lot of layers there that's great he's a smart smart smart fella uh talking of actions one of the things upon reading james clear's atomic abits last year um was this kind of identity-based change that i've really realized um and you say that we become what we do um which is an interesting uh how do you say symbiotic relationship between we have a inclination we feed it it gives us something back it becomes this kind of self-sustaining process and before you know it you've become the work the work is you you know i mean it kind of this it starts well done it's not just the work i mean a lot of people are waiting to become an honest person and then they'll go tell the truth well but if you want to be an honest person start by telling the truth if you want to be a runner you don't need a permit you just need to run 30 days in a row then you're a runner if you want to be a writer just write 30 days in a row then you're a writer do the work and then you can get the mantle then you become the thing that the work represents is there something is there a single thread that you see amongst creative people uh a unifying characteristic which is most prominent in them it tends to um have two poles and they might be related i just haven't found it yet one of them is the ego strength of the i and i made this i and i alone solved this problem i showed up you know this is the symphony conductor who cannot be replaced uh the other one is the restlessness of seeing defects in the world that interesting problems beg to be solved no credit necessary i just need this problem to be solved uh i can do both not usually at the same time but i've felt both inclination so you know if i'm at a uh back in the old days when i was in a restaurant i'm sitting at a restaurant and the door keeps slamming because the spring was disconnected and there's you know 30 people in the restaurant and everyone's annoyed by this so i just got up and put the spring back on because i just couldn't sit there knowing that all it needed was the spring to be hooked up and i didn't wait for the manager to tell me it was okay the manager wanted the spring to be off they could take the spring off later that instinct is something we see in creative people all the time it often happens when we're seeing organizations do creative work on the other hand there's definitely thanks to the media the impresario you know nikola tesla henry ford thing of i and i alone invented the future and a lot of times we benefit from that and sometimes megalomaniacs pay a big price or we all pay a big price for pigelo maniacs yeah when we look at those people from the outside i think everyone loves the idea of being elon musk but no one really knows what it's like inside of his head when he goes to bed at night this is a big a big insight from naval ravikant and tim ferriss about i cannot take part of someone's life i have to take the whole like do you want to pay the price the whole sale not piecemeal ship it in bulk one unit do not assemble at home elon musk internal monologue price because that's well said that's the price that you would have to pay um i have one one question that i really want to ask you which i'm going to finish on but before that um which company is doing some of your favorite marketing right now is there anything you've seen in 2020 that you've been particularly impressed or happy with my answer is any company that someone can name that they feel like they have a relationship with that they feel like is doing something that works for them is on my list it's not necessarily the one i would pick but the fact that someone feels that way is proof that they're on to something so you know there were brands 20 30 40 years ago that had that relationship with people and now they're just turning it up and then there are other brands that didn't used to mean very much but now they do and that's the symptom that somebody there found the smallest viable audience and decided to do creative work i have found that anytime i write about a company the owner gets into enormous amounts of trouble for bad behavior or something and so i don't do that anymore that's a that's a fair point yeah i understand do you think it's possible for companies to scale up to the sort of hyper structure like the sphere in the in the upper ethanol of the of the atmosphere and retain that level of creativity well okay so there's different kinds of companies in different kinds of scale without a doubt uh there have been entire decades in which places like hollywood using a studio model produced endless amounts of extraordinary creativity that um you know 1939 in the movie business was just stunning it was a lot of people working but they were parallel it wasn't a hierarchy then there's you know apple at its prime which is pre-tim cook and there you had a really rigid hierarchy with a lot of leverage and so they didn't come out with that many different products but the products they came out with you know paved the earth they just changed everything and it's interesting to see that as soon as tim came in his goal was to make the stock price go up and so his sole innovation at apple has been making them the most valuable company in the world as opposed to changing our culture in ways that you could point to and say wow that was creative is there a corner going to come at some point in future where we move away from these socialized metrics of success and embrace internal measures of success yeah i mean i don't know if i'm still going to be around when ai has uh not just replaced all the assembly line workers and the travel agents but people like you and me in terms of doing the work that people pay for but as we create more and more value we have to decide is it going to get into the hands of fewer or fewer people or are we going to treat so many of the things we pay for now as rights the way we think of roads or clean water or library cards because we can afford it and if that happens the question is where will our status roles come from where will our social hierarchies come from because they're not going to be who made more money and sorry it's going to be i think the key is then to say is the purpose of our culture to enable capitalism or is the purpose of capitalism to enable culture and i would like to believe it's the latter and to get there i think we end up with a world a lot more like the amateur blogosphere podcast sphere and a lot less like how do i sell more whatever on the street corner by hustling out the other guy yeah i hope so so my final question what insight about life do you wish more people knew i think that uh we have more leverage than we thought and you don't have to change everything but you can change something and if enough people make a change for the better and stop acting like victims even though many of us are victims who got the short end of the stick we can make things better and that's not the right answer to every question we need organized government we need coordinated action to undo indoctrination and injustice and so many other things but that doesn't mean we should wait till that happens we got to start right this minute and make things better i love it sir thank you so much for coming on the practice shipping creative work will be linked in the show notes below of course if people want to check out anything else where should they go i started an organization i don't run anymore called the kimbo where we run workshops including the alt mba it's at akimbo.com and my blog every day as long as i have anything to do with it is it seth blog amazing everything's linked in the show notes below i've absolutely adored this thankfully now that you're on my list you are releasing was it 19 books 18 books deep that you are now something like that this 20 20th bestseller today's the day congratulations man thank you congratulations uh that means basically i have probably two episodes a year less that i need to schedule in because i can just continue to hassle your guys seth's brought a new book out thank you yeah i'll take him 6 p.m on tuesday catch you later on um everyone that's been listening any questions comments you know what to do leave them in the comments below but for now seth thank you so much thanks chris keep making a ruckus this was fun you

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 45,059

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, Joe rogan, True Geordie, chris williamson, Seth godin, marketing, imposter syndrome, hack, fraud, creativity, steven pressfield, how to be creative, how to write, seths blog, purple cow, tribe, tom bilyeu, altMBA, alternative mba, the practise, ship creative work, speech, ted talk, tedx, process, how to deal with creativity, perfectionism, procrastination, war of art, turning pro, creativity hacks, how to blog, how to be a writer

Id: _DfEMaZinFc

Length: 44min 1sec (2641 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020