"Why SPENDING MORE Time & Energy WON'T Make You SUCCESSFUL!" | Seth Godin & Lewis Howes

almost nobody is talented talent is completely overrated talent is a betrayal it is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill don't call someone skillful talented because they're not they're skillful i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness please welcome welcome everyone to the school of greatness i'm so excited we've got my friend seth godin in the house i'm so grateful you're here thank you for coming on it's been way too long it's good to see you way too long we connected i think i don't know 2010 2011 i came into your office when you were running um another company at that time and you kind of were doing this experiment with a group of entrepreneurs and people coming in to help launch a book publishing company you had and did some did some teaching about webinars with you back then and it's been amazing to just stay connected and hopefully we do many more of these in the future but uh we were talking right beforehand about how now is kind of a crazy time where it's easy to put out short content on social media but it seems like people are more more afraid of putting out deep meaningful work why do you think it's harder for people emotionally to sit down hunker down and create a piece of art whether that's a book that's a painting that's a project that has some deep meaning to it and put it out there why is it harder now more than ever yeah i don't think we should underrate excuses excuses are good for peace of mind and so the excuse 20 years ago was a magazine won't feature my writing i can't get a gallery to have my art they won't put my show on cable tv so because they won't pick me i'm off the hook and we called your bluff because now you can start a project and put it on kickstarter and you can make whatever art you call art and you can lead if you want to lead and you can connect if you want to connect or you can go on social media and say ditto and troll and just do what everyone else is doing right now well that's safer because then you're off the hook and my whole mantra for 30 years has been i'd like to be on the hook please what does that mean to be on the hook well the expression might come from fish but i think it probably comes from a generous tradition in turkey whereas if you have a couple extra bucks in your pocket when you go to a bakery you could buy two loaves of bread instead of one and you put the second loaf on a hook on the wall and if someone who's hungry comes in they can have a loaf of bread it's a form of sharing and it's a form of responsibility because i can do it i will do it i'm on the hook and so what it means to be on the hook is to make a promise is to show up and say i have a podcast and it's going to be here next week too or to show up and say i think i can figure out how to make this system better i'm going to try no guarantees but put me on the hook because i'd like to try yeah and right now it feels like people are concerned with so many other things beyond finding their passion they want to find their passion but they're so overwhelmed and stressed with just the the the noise or the stress or the unrest of the political situation pandemic everything that's happening it's hard for them to focus on finding their passion and it may not even be a priority to them right now your book the practice is showing us how to find our passion and i wanted to ask you what is the difference between passion and purpose and how do we find both of them and how do they work together so what would happen if you didn't have to find it what would happen if you could simply summon it and i think that that changes everything for people if you believe that there is one thing that you were ordained to do to be not just a helicopter pilot but a pilot of jet helicopters or not you know pick your ever specific thing well then you're always going to be dissatisfied as you bounce from one thing to another arms folded saying nope that's not it that's not it what if instead we could simply say i am choosing to be passionate about what i do and my purpose is whatever i am doing i'm going to be here for it i'm present for it i'm merely going to do it so you know i decided a long time ago that my passion and my purpose was a certain kind of teaching to a certain kind of audience in a certain kind of way but i could have just as easily ended up being a game designer i mean like i was only a one week decision away from that or a producer of broadway plays aaron sorkin asked me to produce a few good men i mean like i could have been a totally different thing and i would have been passionate about that too so i don't believe that some angel blessed me when i was four years old and put me on this path i think we get to make a choice and yes the world is upside down and all the trauma it's so painful and if you want to go revisit it and it's helping you please go revisit it but if it's not helping you just to simmer in it anymore go make things better and decide to be passionate about making things better yeah how can we find fulfillment and deep meaning in our work or in our life even if we're not fully passionate about it is it i'm hearing you say you just got to make a decision that whatever you're doing you're going to be passionate about it and then you are passionate so here's here's the first question then how much are you attached to the outcome if you went to school like i did like most people did 12 16 years you may have heard the expression will this be on the test if you are asking that question it means you're part of an educational system and the system says the following trade us your heart and soul for a couple minutes your attention and in exchange we'll give you an a that's the deal and most people if the a isn't available aren't going to bother learning whatever it is that they're supposed to quote learn in the educational system so we're completely trained on the outcome if there is no outcome not worth the effort so a bunch of years ago my friends allen and bill started a magazine called fast company and they had this thing they called in advance it was like a retreat but in reverse and they got 75 of us to go to jackson hole off season to just hang out for three days and then they took notes so they would know what stories to write for the next year and as one of the uh perks they got us all up at five o'clock in the morning and they took us fly fishing for a fly fishing lesson which i'd never done and on my way in the van with nine other people i say to the organizer do you have any flies that don't have hooks on them and he looked at me like i was a nut and i was like well here's the deal we're throwing the fish back anyway and i have no desire to spear a fish and throw it back in i'd rather just not catch the fish at all so he found me one and i got to tell you within an hour or two i was casting better and more happily than almost anyone else because i wasn't trying to catch a fish i was simply trying to cast and they were busy measuring their performance based on whether a primeval creature whose brain is smaller than a walnut was biting a hook and i was saying what's it like to be here on this beautiful day with my friends learning to cast and there is where passion is because if you say i can't be passionate unless there's a prize you've just given up your life to the outside world who gets to decide if you have a prize or not why not ignore the score keeping of social media ignore all the stuff that the outside world is doing that you can't control and simply say i have a practice in my practices i do this work and i do it the best i can i learn from what works and what doesn't but i don't judge myself and my day based on what it worked whether it worked because all i have control over is the practice so how do we separate the judgment of not achieving the result we set out to do or the expectation that we have or other people have how do we remove the judgment but also make adjustments as we go to improve the practice and the art so that we can hopefully get a result and survive and live and thrive exactly be socially accepted and all the things that most human beings want yeah it's a perfect question so if you're going to try to to please the masses you can't do that you have to please the smallest viable audience now smallest might be a big number but the smallest viable audience so you know this is my 20th book most of them have been bestsellers 99 of the people in america have never read a word i have written 99 it's not for them you got to figure out who it's not for and so you find your smallest viable audience you know i want the 18 yoga moms in this zip code to trust me if they don't get the joke you just learn something really important you better adjust because now you know who it's for but if in the whole world someone says well that's sort of dumb and you feel bad about yourself no it wasn't for them but we're afraid to say who it's for because if we say who it's for we're on the hook because if we say i'm building this for people who you know are powder skiers and the powder skiers don't show up you don't have any weasel room and so that's why being specific helps you find your voice so should we i love this so we figure out what our specific audience is who it's for who it's not for and eliminate that okay we figure that out and then we create the work for them but what if they don't like it what if it's not useful or helpful or a value to that audience then do we judge ourselves and beat ourselves up and analyze it or do we just say okay i'm not going to judge myself based on the result i'm just going to continue to improve and get better every day i will assert that most people including me aren't as good as we think we are and that the work probably can be improved but i will also say that beating yourself up as far as i can tell serves no function right so if you get locked out of your house you call locksmith locksmith shows up with 18 keys that the lock company made that are the 18 masters and they put the first key in and if it doesn't open it they go to the second key at no point does the locksmith say i'm a bad locksmith the locksmith just works their way through the 18 keys until something opens the door and so our opportunity you know my first year as a book packager i sold my first book the first day for five thousand dollars chip conley and i split the money so we made two thousand five hundred dollars each warner books i said this is great if i could sell 20 books a year i can make a living and then i got 800 rejection letters in a row i didn't sell one book for a year 800 times someone in the book industry cared enough to buy a stamp send me a letter telling me they hated my idea no 800 times wow and what i was able to do i'm not sure where i found it was to say that project had a problem not i had a problem but that project had a problem what did i learn because as long as each project is getting closer right because about 400 in i started getting maybes instead of no's so i knew i was on my way to getting the joke but it wasn't that i was a bad person it was that my typing that my writing that my idea didn't work and distinguishing between those two is really important how do we separate ourselves from like man i put all this effort and all this love and this time and energy into this thing and it got rejected a million times but i'm not going to take it personally because it's not me i'm going to separate myself from the thing how do we how do we separate ourselves from our babies which a lot of people say this is my baby this is my work this is my life mission here and then how do we separate my thing from owning it to say something i created yeah so three parts to this the first is authenticity is a crock no one wants you to be authentic and you're not being authentic everyone's wearing a mask all the time everyone's being judged on the slightest bit of information nobody knows what it's like to be you so number two people don't want authenticity they want consistency they want you to make a promise and keep it they want you to be the best version of yourself people don't want to tune into this podcast and hear for an hour that you're having a bad day and that you're grumpy they want the very best version of louis that's why they're here right and so whatever's getting rejected isn't truly you because no one can know you and then the third part i made these on my laser cutter they're maple blocks uh they're called writer's blocks and one of the sides says all criticism is not the same and acknowledging to yourself that there's different kinds of criticism some to be ignored some to be listened to is really important so a bunch of years ago i was on the upper west side of manhattan and i was walking past this little pocket playground and i hear inside the playground this five-year-old taunting someone like making fun of them in the playground way that boys do and then i realize he's taunting me he's calling me names he's making fun of my glasses and my hair cut and i gotta tell you if i was seven years old that would have crushed me right i remember when i was seven that would have crushed me but now i'm like you're six go screw yourself go away you can't lay a hand on me right all criticism is not the same and so when my editor at penguin says you know you should change the title of the book because the title used to be trust yourself and she was right because her criticism is priceless her criticism i'd pay anything for her because she knows what she's talking about so we got to be really clear did we pick the wrong part of the market did we show up for the part of the market on the wrong day or is the person we're talking too good at giving criticism and we're learning something here because learning something is different than taking it personally it's very hard to do both at the same time you mentioned timing for a second did we pick the wrong day how important is it to time shipping your work with whatever's happening in the season is it uh tone death to put something out right now is it the right time should i hold this a year or two uh how do we know when it's the right time to share our creative work yeah that's great so let me try to talk about two things here the first one is this nobody wants to get hustled and too many people on the internet have decided that the hustle lifestyle is the appropriate way forward to come up with tips and tricks to steal people's attention to do the you know the email three step to go from i've never heard of you two here's my money all of that no one wants you to do that so how do we bring our ideas to the world without feeling like we're hustling people how do we get out of that mindset that appropriately holds us back because we don't want to be selfish and say me me me well my suggestion is that people look at it as an opportunity to be generous if what you have to offer is something that we would miss if you didn't do it it's generous if you were standing by the side of the pool and a kid was drowning you would rescue them even if you don't have a water safety instructor card even if there's a better lifeguard two blocks away because it's generous to do so so is it the wrong time to show up with a message of i can help make things better well it depends if you show up at a funeral trying to sell you know some sort of life insurance free policy that's probably not a good idea because you're hustling people right on the other hand if you're able to give somebody something that opens a door for them that helps them see the world differently that helps them move forward and they say thank you then how dare you hold it back and then the other half of it about timing is for some people it's never the right time and what we are seeking is not everyone what we're seeking is enrollment who of all the people you can reach is eager to go on this journey right like the cool thing about podcasts the cool thing about work from generous leaders like you you don't show up in the middle of the night insisting someone listen people subscribe and so since they're subscribing you can take your time you can spend an hour you don't have to say and we'll be right back because they're in it voluntarily so we earn trust not by stealing people's attention but by dancing with it how do we learn to trust ourselves when we're i believe most humans are insecure especially now with social media there's more and more insecurity the more time you spend on there the more you question and compare yourself to someone else um in every category my relationship's not as good as these people my my following and my business is not as good as this person my health i don't look as good every area work insecure as a society in general i would say how do creatives learn to completely get rid of insecurity or is that the wrong question is it good to have someone security but how do we overcome self-doubt from holding us back and believe in ourselves more let's talk about social media for a second because if you're not paying then you're not the customer you're the product and because you're the product they are working overtime to make you feel bad they are basically saying you should feel bad about yourself until you click this button to see what people are saying about you behind your back and then about two minutes later they'll say oh now you should feel bad until you press this button and so it's this endless cycle at the same time all you're seeing on certain platforms are greatest hits albums it's like being a rock group and all you're surrounded by is billy joel's greatest hits elton john's greatest hits the doobie brothers well of course you're stuck because that's their life's work on one album right um so the first thing i'm proposing is that you turn it off and you turn it off for long periods of time that you can be an informed citizen and you can be connected to your friends in less than 20 minutes a day and anything you're doing beyond that you're not doing it because it's additive you're doing it because you're hooked you're addicted it's not additive it's addictive right exactly and the addiction is it keeps you from the noise in your head it keeps you from yourself and so the reason the book was called trust yourself is when you are talking to yourself who is talking and who is listening to you it's only one of you but we act like there's two and so the one who's talking is the twitter facebook one that's saying you're inadequate you're never going to amount to anything you're not perfect you need to wait it's not the right time my friend steve pressfield calls this resistance it's profound it's deep it gets you to change your clothes 20 times before you go on a blind date it you know we all the problems come from resistance but who is that voice talking to it's talking to a voice that wants to be trusted it's talking to a voice that once said something creative once did something that was funny once made something better all of us have done it at least once and then along the way resistance in that voice persuaded us not to trust that self and if we turn off social media and stop checking our email for an hour two hours a day the only person left to talk to is the self and if we can adopt a practice and give the self room it will surprise us it won't always be right it won't always be successful but it will always be better than your hustling hacking way of just playing with the system this is something i respect about you i don't think you've ever been on social media yourself really i mean a lot of your pages are managed by your team at least for as long as i can remember it's probably been years maybe you dabble every now and then you do a couple tweets i'm not sure if you still do that but and i think it allows you to write 20 books and launch businesses and be there for your team and be there for your family and continue to show up for yourself without being insecure always just get a am i going to compare myself to whoever else is putting out a book this year it allows you to focus and i remember i did a a couple years ago i went to hawaii for five days and i left my phone and computer in la and i got on a plane with no phone no computer and it was terrifying because i had to go old school 1997 and ask for directions at a gas station to figure out where my hotel was but i tell you what after two days i was laying in the ocean looking up and i wasn't thinking about going to check my phone on the beach or getting back into the room to check something it was the most freeing liberating thing that i've ever done and i highly recommend people figure out a system that works for them maybe you're not able to do that for days or years like seth has done but something where you can time block periods of the time during the day where you don't check social media i think that's a huge yeah yeah no i and i am i have as much insecurity as the next person it's just different kind of insecurity what type of security do you have right now uh i spend most of my time wrestling with the sin of omission what didn't i do who didn't i respect who didn't i give a chance to what didn't i publish that would have made things better where did i hold back because it was a little bit more comfortable because those errors have compounded and built and built and built they're so much bigger than the error of naming a book all marketers are liars which is a really name bad name for a book right but you know i didn't write the long tail well it would have been better to write the long tail than to give that book a better title you know what i mean and so yeah when twitter came along i was there really early i saw what was possible and i said what will i have to give up to be good at twitter because whatever i give up i'll be less good at that and the same thing's true with facebook and instagram and linkedin i don't use any of them and it's not necessary to use them to be a well-functioning adult now maybe if i had a dating life i'd feel differently about it but it's hard for me to see who has actually built a legitimate practice of doing creative work who can point to social media as the primary reason they're able to do it yeah it's possible to be a kardashian and it's possible to be a youtube star but then you're looking in the rear of your mirror all day right you're not spending time saying how do i become a better version of me you're spending time saying what's the trend i got to get in front of it so what do you do to help overcome self-doubt or insecurity for yourself so i have a blog i've written 7 500 posts in a row and tomorrow morning which will be a friday there will be another post but it won't be there because it's the best post ever nor will it be there because i decided to post it tomorrow it will be there because it's friday and i haven't reconsidered that decision in 20 years so i don't have to have a meeting with myself about whether or not it's time to write a blog post there will be a blog post you chop the wood you carry the water by getting rid of the debate then you i mean think about how many things you do that were impossible 100 years ago that when movies first opened they had spec i don't know if you know this they had special attendance at the movies because they were afraid people would have a heart attack or fate because seeing a train coming on the movie screen was so traumatic and the first few years the cars were available people broke their arms on a regular basis turning the starter of the car and early in the days of uh washing machines and dishwashers washing machines they only had one plug in people's houses and so you had to unplug the light and plug in the washing machine and the washing machine wasn't balanced so it would move dozens of people died every year because the the cord would wrap around their neck and kill them so there's all this stuff we just do as a matter of course right driving across town used to be death-defying but we get used to it we build a pattern into it and so what i've tried to do is make it so that writing a blog post for a million people doesn't make me nervous because i do it every day and so therefore i can then focus on yeah but i have this chance tomorrow to say something that might help someone let me just focus on that because i've trained myself that it's not that risky when do you feel the biggest or the most amount of fear then i would say if i've committed to a significant project that's bigger than a blog post and i am going to pitch it to people who i trust i'm worried about one or two things either they'll all like it right away in which case i did something sort of trivial and then i have to start over or and you have to launch that thing and put all this energy and time into it yeah or they com they say i've completely missed it and now i've got a real problem because i have trained myself to fall in love with whatever i'm committing to like we started with be passionate about what you do and so now i got to decide am i willing to be passionate about what i do in the face of all the skepticism so if if you think back to 1989 1990 uh i was living here in new york and i started one of the first internet companies and every single person i know all of my relatives said that i was completely delusional for years this went on and it was a hard slog because it's not like you started something in 1991 before the world wide web and the next thing you know you won it was it took 7 and a half years for it to work and i was surrounded by people who didn't get the joke and that's a scary feeling because you've made a promise to people about their livelihood you've made a promise to your future self about this work you're doing and sometimes you have to persist and other times you have to say you know i was wrong and either one of them is really challenging yeah i have this theory that uh we're afraid of three main things we're afraid of failure we're afraid of success which is why you just shared both of those and kind of the third one is just the fear of judging judgment people judging you that know you or that don't know you just the constant judgment that people have close or not close to you and those three fears kind of us and some of us lean more into one of them than others or all of them for me it was never fear failure because as an athlete i learned early on you got to make mistakes to learn to you know improve the shot to catch the football to whatever it is you got to you got to fail to learn and grow so i welcome the mistakes i wasn't afraid of success because i wanted to succeed i had these goals you know we would have team goals i was like let's win but i was deathly afraid of people's opinions and the the judgment of people that knew me or didn't know me and that's what made me feel insecure was caring so much about everyone's opinion and it made me very unhappy for so long but would you say that you care about people's opinion or that are close to you or more people opinion that are not close to you i love the name of the show school greatness and i think that greatness is a really cool idea because we can't have such a scarcity mindset that we think that only one person is great greatness does not mean you beat everybody else right greatness to me means that you went right to the edge of what you were capable of doing in this moment and so i think it is possible to be great and come in 400th at the new york marathon because compared to what you would have done if you hadn't shown up the way you showed up never what happened and so for me a version of greatness for me is reading something a year later and not remembering how i possibly wrote it that listening to an audio book i recorded 10 years ago because i need to hear it hearing from a past version of me about what might be possible and um one of the things that is a problem for me in social media is i just don't deal well with anonymous criticism you don't you don't you don't like it no i it completely undermines me because i want to make things right and i can't because that person's already gone right and you know zig ziglar used to talk about that person who cuts you off in traffic and you're honking and angry at them they don't even know you exist they got loud music on they're gone where's god but you're sitting there living with the toxicity of that right but then the other thing that i love about the name is the word school because you don't mean school in the education sense of and then i'll give you an a you mean school in the learning sense of if you are enrolled in this journey and you're doing it for the right reason here you might learn something but you don't have to be poked and prodded you will self enroll you will go forward and so the you know the online workshops that i've been building for the last five years delta mba that's all about that the reason it works so well is because the only people who take it really want to and that's why books are so cool because the only person who buys it is no one accidentally buys a book right and so you get to start by saying this is where i'm going do you want to come and it feels to me like that's one of the critical elements of greatness is being open to only going there with people who want to go with you yeah i love the word enrollment that you use i use that word a lot because i'm such a big believer that life is a as a game of enrollment we're enrolling people in our vision or we're unenrolling them with every moment and it doesn't matter if you've been enrolling for 30 years you could unenroll someone in a moment or lose trust in a moment with your relationship or whatever it may be and then need to re-enroll for a long time to get that back are you a believer that creative people are born with a creative gift or talent more than let's say less creative people or can any type of creativity be learned over the years yeah so thank you so much for setting me up for this okay number number one almost nobody is talented talent is completely overrated i would argue that you were born with certain physical talents that enabled you to excel in sports that i could never have acquired no matter how how hard i tried even that said though larry bird was not born with the kind of talent that michael jordan was larry bird just grounded out and shot more practice shots than anybody else that's a skill and hustled yeah yeah but the good kind of hustle yeah exactly and so it feels to me like talent is a betrayal it is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill don't call someone skillful talented because they're not they're skillful so we can agree that um playing the piano is a skill in the sense that if you work at it you get better at it but i would like to believe that being enthusiastic is a skill and then so is being creative it's a skill you can get better at it you can choose to put in the work in whatever form it takes we're not talking about graphic art here unless you want it to be graphic art to gain the skill and if that's true that's really good news because it means you're not stuck where you are it means you can go to where you want to go and it's really good news because skills can be acquired and that fills me with optimism about so many things in our world you know we can point to the human condition and say people are just doomed to hate each other and to undercut each other but i can point to a culture where that's not happening so how did that happen well it's because it's a skill what are the three biggest skills you think all human beings should acquire whether it be creativity or some type of attribute that to just make them better human beings happier more quote unquote successful richer lives yeah with relationships health everything what are those three skills whether you're 20 or 60 what three skills should we acquire to live a better life i love this okay how about this number one is uh the skill of possibility of seeing that things could be better number two the skill of empathy practical empathy of understanding people don't know what you know don't want what you want don't see what you see that they have a noise in your their head that's different than the noise in your head and that's okay and then the third one is uh the skill of learning how to learn of being open to saying i see possibility i see people who need to be served who aren't who i am and i if i put enough into this can figure out how to make a contribution those i think are three skills yeah it's really just understanding emotional intelligence and people and stepping into other people's shoes and having compassion why did you choose those three skills over copywriting or well i got i have personal finances are some there are some next level tactical ones like decision making is a skill and almost every western human is terrible at it why why are we terrible at it because some costs are something that uh are probably hardwired into us what a sunk cost means is the harder you worked to have something the harder it is for you to give it up and we see this mistake happen all the time the example i'll give is um precovid you've got two tickets to the movies and uh they were really hard to get and you told your girlfriend that you were gonna go to the movies together and on your way you bump into a friend who says i got two front row seats to see hamilton do you want to go that means your tickets are worthless and a lot of people go well no no there's no well it doesn't matter how much those tickets cost you they're sunk you already made that decision you can't unmake it and so we stick with the job longer than we should or we stick to a way of thinking about the world longer than we should because it cost a lot we went to law school so now i have to be a lawyer no you don't the law school degree is a gift from your former self you don't have to take it you can say no thank you and go do something that gives you joy instead so sunk cost is a is a giant skill based area and then what goes right next to that is the skill of saying that was a good idea but i have a better one now oh and that takes exp explain that so i launched this idea and it started going and i built momentum for a few years but now this is actually a better idea for the time or for my life or whatever and so i want to let go of that thing and move into this well it's not that's that's definitely true that's some cost but then beyond it okay i'm the boss and i built this organization and this is how we do our expense reports but now we're going to do expense reports this way because it's better but usually what happens is someone says that problem solved i don't have to revisit it so if i think about the car industry the car industry said it took us 90 years to develop the internal combustion engine that was a lot of cycles a big sunk cost and someone shows up and says why don't we make electric cars and you know because internal combustion isn't broken because i can show you that if we look at an early electric car compared to a state-of-the-art lexus the state-of-the-art lexus is better not a problem whereas what would have transferred billions and billions of dollars of assets away from elon musk is if they had said nope you're right we're just going to copy all the things you're doing that are working and make it even better because we have an improvement ratchet in place a dealer network in place we're trusted we could go to the races but senior executives making seven figures said nope nothing could be better than this um yeah i tell you what i got a tesla a few years ago and it's hard for me to think i'd ever want to go back for a day-to-day car that's not electric personally it just but let's think about tesla for a minute because tesla made a whole bunch of decisions a few years ago that they refused to reconsider right that the inside of the car should have no cup holders of a certain kind that the inside of the car should have these things on the dashboard but not these things that the service needs so they're as guilty of the same thing they took a leap they hired a thousand people and now they're stuck on their sunk costs right that's true that's right and they'll be stuck until they innovate or continue to open up why why do we need reassurance why does it seem like a lot of people need this reassurance just every day we need some type of reassurance and why should we avoid reassurance so that's the second side reassurance is too tough reassurance feels really good right so we get off we get off this call the phone's ringing and kai comes to you and says hey louis great job it's oprah and oprah was listening she just wants you to know what a great job you did right so you're you're flying for like two hours maybe three and then you need to hear it from somebody else because what it means to get reassurance is that someone is telling you that the future is going to be okay and it feels good because we would like the future to be okay but deep down we know that that person doesn't know that the future is going to be okay so as soon as reassurance shows up it reminds us that we are confronting an uncertain world and we want more of it we want to be held safely and it doesn't scale you can't get enough of it so what's the alternative the alternative is to refuse reassurance so when someone says you did a great job seth it was amazing that was the best thing i've ever seen my entire life how do we refuse that well that the answer is thank you i appreciate you being present and giving me that feedback but it's reassurance if you then say and your book launch is going to go great because that you can't know yeah right that's the second half of that's what's implied is that i'm going to tell you about tomorrow and what's the alternative the alternative is to say nobody knows about tomorrow and looking for external validation that i'm going to catch that fish that that thing i am hoping for is going to work that other people will get the joke not only doesn't it help me it undermines my trust in myself it undermines all of the things that i need to merely do the work so you know you've been seduced by like me and everyone else with the just do it thing from nike and the problem with the word just is that some people think it means what the hell do whatever you want doesn't matter just do it and i think it should be changed to merely do it do it without commentary do it without drama simply show up and do the thing focus on the practice not hoping and wishing for the outcome that you need to be reassured by but the practice the best you can do it because if what could be better than the best you could do it nothing so do that learn from what works and then do it again but seeking reassurance is distracting you from doing a better job of what you set out to do in the first place i saw somewhere um i don't know if it was an article or video about oprah talking about almost 100 of her guests not everyone but i think a lot of them at the end of the up the the show would all say the same thing i think you know i'm gonna say it's like did i do okay was that good enough for you yeah did you like that and it's this kind of reassurance mindset right of like knowing that we got approval from the person who's interviewing us or working with us or our publisher where the number is okay for you did the sales go okay how do we gracefully remove that from our way of being moving forward so that we don't have to ask if we did a okay job and we learned to just say thank you so much for having me or i'm grateful and um whatever else what like how should we finish a project like that well i'm really afraid of the word should i think should and shame go right next to each other so i will just tell you that there are practices that you can engage in to help you insulate from feedback that isn't going to help so here's here's an interesting story uh a bunch of years ago a famous electronics company did a focus group the way focus groups work is you set up a trailer next to a shopping mall you pay people some money they come in for an hour there's hidden glass windows and the client can watch people touch the product and they had a clock radio and it had all these gizmos on and everything else and they got eight people in there and they're all looking at the clock radio and they're all talking about how much they love the clock radio and at the end the organizer says thank you so much to thank you for being here either you can get the twenty dollars we promised you or the hundred dollar clock radio which would you prefer and every single person took to 20 bucks why because that was the truth that was the moment that they were actually telling the truth oh so they thought the clock wasn't as worth as much as the 20 yeah and so what i have found is i i got an ego as much as anybody maybe more i like it when the people around me say you did a really good job when oprah says that was good for sure but i want to see three years later are people still talking about this idea or i just want to see in the afternoon after a blog post did someone engage with it in a way that changed them when they didn't know that i would notice right because it's not a performance in that moment it's did you have an impact so if you go to dear beacon uh in upstate new york and watch what happens when people walk into a richard sarah sculpture which weighs 2 million pounds i hope richard has seen that happen because that's genuine service he made this the curator doesn't matter the dealer doesn't matter this person had their breath taken away that's what was supposed to happen and it did and so we play this game with everybody around us do i look fat in this dress et cetera et cetera and some of that is totally legitimate it it papers over our momentary insecurities and there's nothing wrong with that but when it comes down to the practice and the art that we seek to make i think it makes sense to surround ourselves with people who say i respect you you're on to something you can do even better and for us to start a cycle of what happened when this went into the world because when it's in the world and people had choices what did i learn how can i help a different group of people or this group of people make a different choice and you know in the workshops that i do i get to watch all of it because i'm like up here you can see all the interactions that's different than looking at the test scores because you're watching how people are are going back yeah i think i heard our good friend gary vee talking about how when he started in his dad's wine business he would sit there and watch people walk through the store and say okay what if i move this this way and what if i put this in the front did people don't pick it up or do they walk right past it observing the results and the impact that you create on people whether that's an experiential design or a physical design whatever it may be i'm curious i'm going to try to be mindful of the word should is it more powerful for creatives to have goals and deadlines or is that destructive to the creative process right so uh deadlines are a weird word because they have the word dead in them finish lines our lodge lines whatever uh i am super disciplined about deadlines i have never missed a deadline because i just decided that some people need that tension that comes from being five minutes late i abhor that i want to go nowhere near that so for me it's fuel for other people it might be turbo fuel because they need that five minute over thing but there are other people who it completely destroys their work so you've got to figure out how do you engage with that but goals is a different thing so i was talking to somebody i wish i could give them credit who was explaining to me that goals are externally focused and this is one of the things that led to me writing about it in the book meaning if you say my goal is to be a millionaire that isn't up to you it's only partly from you and the rest of it is luck and so if you're going to say i'm a good person because i'm lucky and i'm a bad person because i'm unlucky now you're really in trouble instead what we need are practices that we call our thing that thing we call our goal is i'm going to be the kind of person that ships this much work each day that gets out of bed at this time that manages their expenses so they're always one-third of i mean you can make a list of things that are completely under your control call those your goals and wipe out anything that involves fish anything that involves something external happening that makes you feel lucky so folk i'm hearing you say focusing more on the things you can control daily the habits right the practices the actions your energy way of being your compassion daily as opposed to the end result right and let's get back to where we started which is the reason people don't do that because they don't want to hear from their other voice they don't do that because they don't want to be on the hook it is easier to catastrophize it is easier to say i'm distracted it is easier to say oh the world is way too whatever all those are external things that let you off the hook and what i remember is i was born a year and a half before the cuban missile crisis right the world is really in trouble in 2020 but the world was 10 minutes away from being gone in 1962 and so the question is how did we get from that to neil armstrong walking on the moon seven years later we didn't do it by saying well we can't because russia could end everything in any minute we said well if russia's going to end everything in any minute we might as well send someone to the moon and my friend roz zander helped me learn the difference between butt and and so here we go if you go on a long planned vacation and it's raining you could say i'm on vacation but it's raining doesn't that suck or you could say i'm on vacation and it's raining and the and leaves room for you to say so i can take a cooking lesson so i could have some quiet time with my spouse so i could figure out how to work for social justice all of those things happened because it's raining and so yeah it's raining right now it's really bad and you can do something you can fix everything but you can make one person better what are the habits that you believe would support more creatives if they did these habits on a daily basis from your 30 plus years of experience of what's worked for you and what you've seen other people you've studied do what are those few habits you think could really help them further their inner happiness and hopefully accelerate the luck on the outside as well yeah so we have to not fool ourselves into getting hooked on the external that we'll pretend we're we're not but deep down we are right and so you know chong young trump rinpoche said uh the bad news is we are following and falling and following and the good news is there's nothing to hang on to and as soon as you acknowledge that there's nothing to hang on to it gets so much easier to fall you just let go and you don't have to keep trying to graph or something right and so it's the grabbing is the biggest thing i write in the book a little bit about julia cameron's morning pages most people don't really understand how they work you're not supposed to get up and write three pages of good prose you're not supposed to write a get up and write three pages of interesting things you're simply supposed to get up and write three pages period about anything junk garbage cruft get it off your chest doesn't matter just put it down because as soon as you do for the rest of the day if you try to bring it up again your subconscious said i already wrote that down i don't need to revisit that it's taken care of i wrote it down i've discharged that and so part of what it means to have a practice is the practice defines who you are if you want to be a runner the best thing to do is go run every day if you run every day for 30 days your runner you don't have to subscribe to runner's world you don't have to have fancy equipment you just have to run every day if you want to be a writer you have to write every day and you don't have to show it to anybody you simply have to do it and not showing it to people lets you off the hook at some level but at least you can see yourself as that kind of person and then the step after that which i'm a huge fan of and the internet makes this easier than ever is publish it anonymously i think you should have a daily blog but don't put your name on it and after you've written 30 or 40 entries of your daily blog or made five or six episodes of your podcast you're going to want to put your name on it and then you can but begin with and if your name's not on it it's so delicious because there's no upside and there's no downside so you're simply doing it and that's all you're going to get out of it is that you did it yeah i want to ask you about money for a second because i think it's a topic that a lot of creatives uh shy away from and i think this will actually might be the some of the most powerful stuff people here is around the topic of money you've been financially successful you launched a business 30 years ago that you sold and exited you've had you know many hits in your books and businesses you've made money as a creative it's fair to say that um how can what should creators be thinking about in terms of what if they want to create great work but also they want to be rich they want to make millions they want to for the heck of it to support their family their lifestyle they want to make money yeah what should they be thinking about in terms of art and money and marrying the both without it feeling bad or icky or i'm selling myself and a bad way to make money how can they approach it mentally so that it doesn't them but they achieve the results they want i i my answer might surprise some people but here we go the odds that you will make a lot of money doing exactly what you want are zero to a rounding error zero it is possible to make a lot of money it is easier now for people of privilege to do it than most any other time in history because of the network effect because of the power software because of tools that give you reach to millions of people the way you make a lot of money is you figure out what people with money want to spend that money on to solve their problem now and you go solve that problem and then over time you amplify their need and you let them do it again that is how everybody with few exceptions who has made a lot of money has done it those people don't get to say oh but i also have this idea and i need to express it because i think it's generous those are different things and only in the last hundred years has it even been conceivable that you could get paid money to do what you love this is brand new idea so i am in favor of doing what you love and charging for it if you can because it holds you responsible puts you on the hook creating tension serving people you want to serve and maybe you'll get paid a little bit but if you want to make a lot of money listen to the market and show up to the market with something the market wants to buy because you don't get to insist that the market is wrong when you're asking the market to pay you something right you need to become so desirable in the thing that you're creating that is limited quantity or something that there's attention around it and people want it like right now pokemon cards are going crazy right now for whatever reason and they're selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars because there's a limited amount and people want it but they've created that desire uh who would have thought that a couple pieces of cardboard would be worth that much money um and and baseball cards are going to the roof i think one sold for four million dollars a couple months ago for the record sale of a baseball card and uh they've created the desire for it who would have thought that that'd be something you could do what are some personal practices on managing money that you've learned as an artist throughout the years in a creative that you would prescribe for people whether you learned the hard way or you had some good advice from someone so uh it's pretty simple money is a story and anybody who's listening to this has more technology than the last king of france did that we tell ourselves the story of sufficiency or insufficiency that has been amplified by the marketing industrial complex to make us buy more stuff or work more hours so the first most important thing by far is to get your story straight and i have worked with and known people friends who were addicted to debt they needed debt to go to work they needed debt to feel like there was a fire under them i knew other people who i worked with at yahoo and stuff who no amount of money was going to be enough and i got to tell you after you have 100 million dollars or 200 million dollars you don't need 400 million dollars you can't even tell the difference right right that didn't matter they're hooked on it every year when forbes publishes their billionaires list they make hundreds of people really sad because those people move down like really you're a billionaire why are you sad about that it's absurd so getting your story straight is super important and then the second part is debt is really really a problem because debt compounds faster than interest does by a lot and so what you do if you're serious about living the life of the creator that isn't getting paid well is you've got to dramatically cut your expenses cut them lower than you would think brown rice black beans sleeping on a friend's couch do that for two years until you have enough money in the bank you will never need to be in debt pay those dues early and then you get the freedom to do the work you want to do i paid those dues for seven years and it's i wouldn't trade it because what i learned there is i'm not entitled to do any project i want whenever i want and as soon as i didn't owe anybody anything i had the freedom to say i'm going to make this whereas if you owe chase manhattan bank or you owe goldman sachs or you owe wells fargo a monthly payment and you're paying your student loans and you're paying this well then it's really easy to hide from the creative work that you want to do yeah you're a prisoner third thing is there are very few shortcuts with money if someone says you can get rich quick you should run away what's the biggest mistake you've made in your last 30 years as a creative whether in business or art or a relationship that happened that ended up being the greatest mistake you made and because it taught you a lesson it got you out of something that you you know it it made you more humble whatever that might be what's that big failure mistake thing that happened that was actually a great blessing for you well the one that i eat out on a lot is i saw the world wide web before anybody and i said it was stupid and it was slow and there was no business model and it was we'll stick with prodigy and aol thank you very much so that that cost like 40 billion dollars and once you make a 40 billion mistake you start to forgive yourself about other mistakes that involve the money right um but i don't beat myself up about that at all because it worked out just great for me and if i owned half a yahoo i don't think my life would have been better um i think the mistakes have been when i have had a creative instinct on how i can make things better and i blinked and i said i don't trust myself enough to lean into this one and maybe the journey is too long or maybe it's too fraught or maybe i'm worried that i'll get blamed and so i i didn't contribute in the way i could have when i could have and it's that thing of omission again now maybe that's just a story i tell myself to get me going again but this moment in time so fraught is also going to be a moment when a lot of great stuff is going to get built and you can wait it out but then we won't have your great stuff i tell people when i'm coaching people that i i'm kind of harsh but i say you're doing a disservice to the people that need your work you're doing a disservice to your friends your family humanity like if you have a gift that you can share and can help people and pick them off the ground and you're afraid that's doing a disservice you're doing more harm correct than good by your insecurity of not shipping right and you're also eating yourself up alive and this is where the reassurance cycle is so toxic if you are seeking reassurance it's because you're trying to put out a fire inside of you that can only be put out by actually making things better and the creatives that i know it's interesting i know 11 billionaires because of the whole ted world thing they're not that interesting and they're not that curious they're just not they're just proud of the fact that they figured out how to corner the market in something right and they scaled it yeah and i know a lot of creatives i know people who have won tonys and grammys and oscars and people you've never heard of and some of them have money woes and some of them are bitter about this or that but when you talk to them about the work their eyes light up because they are not looking for me or you to reassure them and tell them that they're okay they just know that they made a piece of work and it's for you or it's not for you here i made this and that simple sentence here i made this for a lot of people that's what it means to be alive yeah i've got about four questions left for you to be respectful all right we'll do a speed round yeah yeah exactly i love the creative the writer's block physical block you have i'm curious because you got a lot more about this in your book and i want to make sure people get the book the practice shipping creative work which shares a lot of these things about finding your passion uh becoming creative especially when it's very frightening to do so trusting yourself and your voice in a time when everyone's comparing you and judging you uh all these different things model being positive in their practice which i'm constantly trying to live in being positive because i think you attract more so many other things that are great in the book so make sure you go get the book it's called the practice uh you can get it online you can get it anywhere um but for the people that feel like they're just blocked creatively whether it's writer's block podcasters block business block relationship block how do we where is that block coming from and what are the steps to overcoming the writer's block of our life when in doubt look for the fear i had an interaction with somebody a couple weeks ago and they were really brutal and difficult and i was being defensive and also blaming them for not being a good human and then i figured out this person's boss was kicking their butt on a regular basis and so they didn't have any problem with me they were just afraid they were afraid of what the boss would say when in doubt look for the fear if people are given you a hard time about forward motion where's their fear if you are finding yourself blocked where's your fear so there's this old expression which i find completely useless which is what would if you knew you could not fail what would you do it's useless because you should just wish for invisibility and three more wishes right but here's a better question if you knew you were gonna fail what would you do that's worth doing go do that ooh that's interesting if you knew you're gonna fail what would you do that's a good one i like that question if you knew you were to fail what would you do i'd write this book yeah that's i love you know then you know you're on the right path and you're you're following your passion okay this is a question i ask everyone at the end it's called the three truths it's a hypothetical question so imagine it's the last day on earth for you okay on this earth it's uh as many years as you want to live you live till it can be a hundred and something whatever but you gotta turn the lights off for yourself and you gotta say okay i'm leaving this earth and you've accomplished every dream that you have where you've lived intentionally you've done the practice and the work daily you've shown up the things you wanted to create they were created whether they failed or not it's irrelevant you did it but for whatever reason hypothetically you've got to take all of your work and creative uh stuff and your blog and podcast it's all gonna go with you to the next place wherever you go so no one has access to your work anymore no one has access to this interview nothing and hypothetically you've got a piece of paper and a pen you get to write down three things you know to be true from all of your life's experiences and all the lessons you've learned and you could share three lessons to the world and this is all we'd have to remember you by what would you say are your three truths i think that bounding the question makes it more helpful so i'm going to pick three truths that i am particularly associated with as opposed to all the truths in the universe perfect people like us do things like this that is the definition of culture figure out who the people like us are figure out what the things like this are and that's how you can make something change and how you can understand how the world is number two attention is precious they're not making any more of it so earning permission to talk to people who want to be talked to is way better than having a megaphone and yelling at people and number three is the best way to make things better is by making better things those are powerful and you just reminded me of one of the first i think it's the first time we met where we were doing a magazine shoot 2009 times square and they had us holding megaphones i'm sure i don't know if you remember this that's what i told you at the beginning of the call yes exactly and the whole idea about permission marketing and i refused to hold them you said i'm not holding this up to my mouth and you held it down and i was like this is something that i truly acknowledge about you seth is your ability to do what you want to do what your beliefs are even if it's unpopular even if it's frustrating people for the art director was going to kill me he was so mad and then i said well it's like the abbey road cover and i can just beat john but the fact that you are not compliant or enrolled in something and you stuck to what you wanted to do this is the only thing i've seen you do in the last 11 years since i've known you since i met you that day and you let me rub your head thank you again for that i know if you remember that and i acknowledge you for constantly showing up every day for yourself for your passion because you decided to because you made a commitment to yourself not for anyone else but for yourself and that consistency and your uh people know what they're gonna get when they're with you the way that you are willing to be confrontational in an interview sometimes even if it's gonna upset the host uh i'm not talking about me but in past interviews you've done the things you do i feel like people could really learn a lot from your way of being and your consistency over decades and i really acknowledge you for constantly showing up and giving your best i believe you do that every day so i appreciate that about you i've got one final question for you uh and again i want to make sure everyone gets the book uh the practice shipping creative work i don't have a physical copy i only have the uh the digital copy but if you've got it you can hold it up yes the practice shipping creative work i got it two hours ago and still have that new book oh you got that that's got to feel good yeah make sure you guys get that book you can follow uh seth on twitter this is seth's blog instagram seth godin and seth godin on facebook and check him out daily on his blog as well final question for you ready and you already answered it so let's see if you answer it again or if you share something new what's your definition of greatness would we miss you if you weren't here that's beautiful you just got me into my heart instantly from that response i think that's beautiful we'll leave it at that seth you are a great human being i appreciate you very much you're very special thanks for making this fun if you want to learn how to become happier in your life then make sure to check out this video right here sky's the limit possibilities but if it goes through the lens of who i am is this past story this limitation this person that tried to achieve it and failed is someone who gets loved by failing over and over is someone who has to stay small significance by failing right

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 176,311

Rating: 4.8232627 out of 5

Keywords: lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, seth godin interview, seth godin speech, seth godin, seth godin marketing, seth godin ted, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, motivational speech, inspirational video, inspiration, motivation, motivational video, success principles, wealth, keys to success, linchpin, how to be a linchpin seth godin, habits for success, millionaire habits, life advice, wisdom

Id: EffIjcVOUbg

Length: 70min 3sec (4203 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020