Seth Godin: Thinking Backwards

you there are verses of it so here's the thing the topic today is backwards I didn't make up to top it but that's the topic how come the alphabets in that orders it cuz of that song right you all thank you see it's early you know it could be ZYX WVU TS rqp o MN l know that seems wrong and a lot of people can't even do that i started teaching my kids how to do that when they were three months old and most of what i want to do today is take your questions because that's the best part for me selfishly but i there's a few things I want to put on the table about backwards and about the way people who have the mad skills you guys have are approaching your work I don't need to talk to you about how to see I don't need to talk to you about the importance of beauty I don't need to talk to I can't teach you anything about the tactics and mechanics of the work that you do right but I can talk a little bit about the leverage that's available to you and how you might see the world differently as you want to bring that work to the world the first thing that we've got backwards is this many people believe that great designers get great clients it's not true it's the other way around so the chip kid great guy friend of mine and a super talented book cover designer would not be known to anyone if he wasn't working at the place where he's working maira kalman who has spoken here and has really changed way people think about illustration would be unknown and would never have been able to do the work she did if she didn't have the clients she had and shepard fairey his client is him and he's gone to jail 30 times to jail with kids 30 times for the privilege of having himself as a client so the question I would ask you is how much of your day is spent and this is true even if you have a day job because bosses are also clients how much of your day is spent working to get better clients versus pleasing the clients you've already got and is pleasing the clients you've already got the best way to get better clients is a better client somebody who merely pays you more or are you selling your soul and selling out your career by taking someone today who's going to put you in the wrong box versus choosing your own path to find the client who is capable of giving you the platform that you deserve which leads to the second thing that's upside-down which is that patience is for the impatient that in fact when you're getting started and your in-laws are making faces at you and you're not sure if you're going to be able to pay the rent and you don't know why you're living in Brooklyn to begin with and you're going to have to move back to Florida it's easy to say you know what I need to go faster to pick up these scraps and pick up these scraps and sometimes what that does is it gives you the foot up to get to the next level but sometimes what that does is it just makes your scrap collector and that one of the things that we see when we look at the work of people who have put really big ideas into the world who have built online platforms right is that they got there by being patiently impatient or impatiently patient whichever way you want to juxtapose it that if you look around at the blog's you read or the people you respect online or the organization's you want to work with the myth of the overnight success is just that a myth that you know the much-vaunted Twitter was a failure a complete failure for two years nobody used it and if they took the mindset of well if it doesn't work in two weeks we got to go do something else you never would have heard of it okay and then the biggest one is this principle of leading up that one of the things that I hear the most after I give a talk or someone reads one of my books is that's great but my boss won't let me I'd love to do something like that but my boss won't let me well of course she won't because what you're saying terrors I want to do something really cool and really neat and if it works I'll get the credit but if it doesn't you'll get the blame because you said it was okay who would take that deal and that in fact what we see is that the people who have jobs or who have clients who are making a dent in the universe are doing it by leading the people who are ostensibly in charge to make better decisions leading those people to have better taste leading those people to have the guts to do the work that they're capable of doing and so no you are not in charge but in fact nobody is in charge if you want to look at it that way right that even the president United States can blame the people who won't vote for his bills in the Senate or the house no one is ostensibly in charge but it's so easy for us to say my boss won't let me when what we're really saying is no one gave me an effective place to hide that we all grew up in an industrial world an industrial economy a place where we were trained from the time we were three to do what we were told that they invented public school the industrialist of the world because they needed more workers and what they needed from workers are people who are willing to sit still for 10 hours use a number-two pencil and follow instructions that's what we were indoctrinated to do that's how you got an A in third grade and that's how you got into a famous college right and so it's deep within us to want to do that and to let the boss tell us what to do but we just changed all the rules and that's not the option anymore so I have bullet points here the first one is do it on purpose figure out on purpose every day when you go to do your work how am i leading up how am i doing the work and laying the tracks to get my clients to be better clients to find better clients to get my boss to be a better boss and if my boss is on a to become a better boss to leave and go find a better boss on purpose that's your job number two tell stories that resonate with those in charge you cannot prove anything to get the people you work for to do something but you can tell them a story that gets under their skin that resonates that they remember number three demand responsibility but don't worry at all about Authority that in the old system in the top-down industrial pyramid you're not allowed to tell anyone what to do unless you have the authority from the person above you but in the bottom-up world we live in now people who take responsibility are often given responsibility it's okay it's my fault I'll take the responsibility for this but if you are willing to let other people pretend to have authority that's fine because we don't need no stinking badges anymore that what we have is the ability to let our work speak for itself the fourth one reflect credit button blit embrace blame this goes back to what I just said so if there's something wrong you own that but if someone is particularly a boss or a client wants to take credit that's fabulous and the reason it's fabulous is they will come back to you for more of that because they have a choice about who to work with and they're eager to work with people who make them look good so how do you deal with this environment where the boss won't let you the answer is do small things things that won't get you fired without asking and if they work go to your boss your client and let them take full credit for what you did and if they don't work go to your boss and your client telling what you learned and take responsibility because what happens when you start down that cycle is you get to do it again and once you've done it four times or six times or eight times and the boss and the client is taking credit for times or six times or eight times for a small thing you did in the world they're going to come back to and say let's do that small thing again and maybe we can do it even bigger together and I'll take the credit and you'll say fine because you're getting to do the work and it's the work that you're after not the credit and that look around this room how is it that you all came together this morning not yesterday not tomorrow because Tina and her crew convened and that all of you have convening power that we're not in the industrial economy anymore we're in the connection economy and connection creates value as as it's been written before and I his name just flew out of my head and I apologize to him Matt Ridley as Matt Ridley has written there isn't a person on earth who knows how to make a computer mouse not one person you need a metallurgist at a plastics person and similar to supply chain and somebody else who knows how to do the finance and everything else if we couldn't come together in a team we couldn't make a mouse we couldn't make almost anything we count gun in our world who is doing the convening who is sitting there saying I'm going to organize a group 5 people 50 people 500 people to come together to connect with each other to create value no one is stopping you from doing that except the little voice in your head that says it's not your turn and you're not supposed to then what we've got now is all these tools and what we're using them for is to play Angry Birds which is ridiculous their connection machines right and connection machines work best when we are connecting with people and then the last one the last resort is if they don't get it go somewhere that does you don't get tomorrow over again you don't get next week over again one shot so if you're working with people who are truly stuck who are truly stuck in a way that they cannot get out of it you need to go find someone who gets it one of the lions and giants of our industry GM O'Connell is here and GM invented the first digital ad agency right nobody would be here if people like him hadn't done stuff like that in the 90s and the secret and you can ask me this is he only had the right clients at the beginning that if he was busy calling on exon exon exon exon didn't get the joke then they're dead to him go call on somebody else because if you want to make change make it for people who deserve it but don't give up too soon because maybe it's your fault that they don't get the joke so Michaels reg wrote a great short piece last year and what it said was the real question you need to ask is how do you want your customers to change what change are you're trying to make in the people you work with and the big insight here and got to talk about Apple because I've been gone 15 minutes and haven't talked about Apple the big insight is this the change Apple wants to make is it wants to turn its customers into people with good taste and if you look at Apple through that lens a whole bunch of things make sense because if people start having better taste about the way their devices work and about the way they look and about what they make they're more likely to buy more stuff that Apple makes because people with good taste want to touch stuff like that so that was the change they were trying to make in the world so when you think about what change you're trying to make in your clients in their customers in your boss and you realize that your work can make that change happen you're more likely to do it on purpose so then back to what your job is I think the art you make the beauty you make the design you do is a hobby what you get paid to do is go to meetings and ship stuff on time what you get paid to do is the hard work of doing it on demand so if you're busy complaining because they won't let you do that thing you want to do well the stuff you want to do is your hobby the stuff we're paying you for is the difficult emotional labor of looking people in the eye and telling them the truth and telling them in the truth in a way that makes them change change in a way that creates more beauty change in a way that creates more difference it's more important you do work that's important than you do work that's pretty and we're too hung up in this industrial polished world and saying isn't that pretty I got rid of that little burr that little distraction but it's not important right that the wabi-sabi of the item can a it's okay what's important is did it make a change happen did it make someone cry did it save a life did it connect to people in a way that they wouldn't have been connected and so now that I've stirred up enough dust we get to the heart of it which is this everyone in this room owns a media company fifteen years ago no one in this room owned a media company and now all of you do and that means you don't need the New Yorker to say yes and you don't need CBS to say yes and you don't even need the Huffington Post to say yes that everybody owns a media company if you want to if you want to put on an event and have 500 people come you can if you want to write something online and have a million people read it you can if you want to be in the connection business you can and this is really bad news for people who are insisting on being picked because you're not going to get picked Dick Clark has passed away he's not going to call and put you on American Bandstand it's over and it's being replaced by the awesome scary responsibility of picking yourself of saying I am my own client and this is the best work I could get the person who does the work for me to do here it is I made this what do you think and you'll put that in front of people and some people will say I don't get it and you may have to say with guts then it's not for you and go over here and say here I made this because your job isn't to make something for everyone there is no longer anything for everyone anything the most popular soft drink in America is other the most popular beer in America is none of the above go down the list of every single thing where we used to have domination we don't anymore that other is what's going on that we're getting more and more into silos that there's all these weird things outside the normal distribution and so if you're saying what I need to do to be successful and what I need to do be happy is by be picked by a mass market marketer who has excellent we'll do what I say and we'll bring my product which is going to be the one I love and everyone is going to embrace it and say I did a good job and there will be no criticism you will fail and be unhappy but if you say you know what there's just a few people a few people that I can imagine who I could put something in front of that would change them enough and connect them enough that they would talk about it then the word would spread and know everyone's not going to love you work but you don't need everyone think about who your heroes are in the world you work in none of those heroes are known by the typical man on the street none of them that the people who are doing work that matters aren't doing work that's popular they're just doing work that changes some people so before we go to questions I first want to read you a quote from Leonard Bernstein he said I'm no longer sure what the question is but I do know the answer and the answer is yes and what that means in your situation in our situation in the world we work in right now is if you are looking for people to say no to you so you have an excuse you are spending your time doing the wrong thing and that it has never been easier and I think in the future it's going to be harder than it is today I think this is the Golden Age of yes it has never been easier for you to figure out who your audience is who you're going to change and what work you're going to do that's going to matter in 1927 there was a conference of physicists in Seoul they which is a city in Europe and in the photo of it Albert Einstein is there Marie Curie is there there's seventeen winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics and the thing that's extraordinary is most of those people won the Nobel Prize after 1927 that the person who organized the conference didn't just go down the list of Nobel Prize winners what he did was he created a platform and an expectation and when you went to that conference you looked around he said wow I need to raise my bar then you looked around he said there is potential here because some of these people aren't even as smart as me and if I push myself even higher there's a lot of open territory ahead this is a Solvay conference right here right now right that if you look around this isn't about what's in your DNA this isn't about who's genetically predisposed to do great work that's a myth what it's about is who's expecting to do it and who's going to do it with intention and who's going to do it in a way that we remember and that causes the connection my friend chalene has this great quote and I'll share it with you as I wrap up before our questions which is this I have no doubt that the people in this room are going to succeed the question is are you going to matter I hope you will thank you thank you

Channel: CreativeMornings HQ

Views: 263,357

Rating: 4.8913269 out of 5

Keywords: CreativeMornings, Seth Godin, New York, CreativeMornings/NYC, author, lecture, talk, backwards, art, failure, work, responsibility, clients, design, writer, book, thinking, creativity, get the work you want, love what you do, job, protips, advice

Id: o76qx7ZzFs4

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2013