Why You've Been Lied to About Where to Put Your Time, Energy, & Focus | Seth Godin on Impact Theory

hey everyone hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at peak tea hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with the legend seth godin seth welcome to the show well thanks for having me the last interview still sits with me you worked so hard you prepped so deep it was really fun awesome man well i'm honored by that and i am very excited to talk about the new book today i went just as hard on this one and i think that this book is incredibly important for anybody that wants to do something profound with their life and when i first was researching you for the last episode i came across an idea that is just it's something i repeat to myself it's something i bring up to people all the time and it feels like it's the central theme of this book which is show me your bad writing so for anybody who says you know i i can't write or i'm a bad writer whatever that question's so profound is that what you see as a central idea behind practice or is it something else well the practice involves several things all woven together one of them is definitely show me your bad video show me your bad public speaking show me your bad counseling show me your bed therapy show me your bad engineering designs because we've been trained to get attached to the outcome and there's this belief that the effort the process the practice doesn't matter and if the outcome isn't going to be great don't even bother but the only way to get to great outcomes is to show up with this practice and get better so that's one of the key things the second one is that we can get out of our own head by stopping this mindset of hustling people to get more than our fair share of attention and instead approach it with generosity because the purpose of shipping the work is not so you can come out ahead the purpose of shipping the work is to make things better so we will definitely get to the principle of generosity which shows up a lot in the book but there was another concept that shows up a lot as well that i think is important for framing the book why you wrote it and what the ultimate outcome will be and that's this idea of being brainwashed how exactly have we been brainwashed well so let's say i uh had a secret committee and i came to the government to the united states or any place in the west in 1850 and said here's what i want to do i want to spend over a trillion dollars a year in time and money i want every single child from the age of five to spend six to eight hours a day with me for 10 to 15 years in a row and then i want to build into the culture mindset of consumption and compliance okay like no one would go for that plan and that's exactly what we did and when you and i spoke previously we talked about the mindset of education versus learning but the brainwashing runs really deep because the industrial system needs us to be acquiring status seeking uh cogs in their system because the factories are so efficient they just keep making more stuff and what i'm trying to reflect back on people is you can pick yourself and you can show up and ship work that makes things better that you are proud of and you don't need anyone's permission now this is a period of pretty profound disruption and i'm curious to was that part of why you wrote this book now or was this book long sort of in development before all of this hit yeah i've been working directly on this book for three years so it has been i think a moment of disruption in our culture for at least 20. the internet uh did some amazing things and many of us were there at the beginning forgot to focus on the things that weren't going to be so amazing and one of the things it did was it gave everybody a microphone and that's a good thing because voices previously unheard were not heard before and now they are it helped focus a long overdue lens on racial injustice for example but the other problem was that it created these chambers of noise where you got ahead and the media companies got ahead by dividing us by creating breaking news that isn't breaking that isn't news by calling people friends who aren't friends and buttons likes that aren't likes and so we can't discount how hard the media worked against all of our peace of mind and well-being for the last 15 or 20 years and it took a toll and we're feeling that toll in politics but we're also feeling that toll deep in our soul so a few years ago i set out to make a workshop for creatives and it was a full year like i can usually make a workshop in a few weeks because it's based on years of my life but this was a year of really digging deep to understand how do you even teach somebody to be a professional creative to ship important work and then we ran the workshop for uh 500 people it changed lives deeply and as i was watching people engage with that work i said i have no choice even though it's so much effort i have to make a book so what is it about all of that that is so profoundly changing for people is there like a key insight or a key idea that unlocks something for somebody it streaks it seems really trivial it streaks that inside the creators workshop people wrote every day for 100 days without missing a day and the writing isn't the point none few of these people are professional writers uh one person who was in the workshop just got a major record deal from a famous record label because he did his lyrics he did his music he shared it and the average person gave and got 500 pieces of feedback a month and i would ask people who aren't part of something like that when was the last time you gave and got 500 pieces of useful feedback we're not supposed to do that at work we're not supposed to do that with friends where are we supposed to do that and it turns out if you can make a circle of five people you can do it with each other that this practice says i don't have to be in the mood it's my work and i don't have to be motivated and i don't have to have the muse talk to me i simply do this work i chop the wood i carry the water and then maybe it resonates with people or if it doesn't i learned something and i do it again there's a quote from the book that i wrote down that i want to read verbatim which speaks to exactly what you're talking about now which is the practice is not the means to the output the practice is the output because the practice is all we can control that that to me is one of the the most profound takeaways from the book to be sure and then in terms of that streaks being consistent putting in the work doing this stuff over and over is exactly what i've seen in my own life so one of the ideas that i'm always trying to get across to people is don't worry about you know whether you're a born this that or the other it's understanding that the human animal is the ultimate adaptation machine that as a species we've literally picked the strategy of improvement of being able to learn something so instead of coming out fully baked we come out with the ability to be baked as it were you know as you go down the path of something what i want to know and what you cover so interestingly in the book is how do you move from blindly doing something to doing something with intention so intention design thinking intentional action if it's a hobby go for it it's for you if it's work it's ultimately for other people it's ultimately to cause a change to happen if you're not causing a change then i'm not sure why you're taking up our time but if you seek to make a change in the world you have to ask three simple questions who's it for who specifically am i seeking to change who specifically am i building this for what's it for can i say what this does and what change am i seeking to make which is related to the what's it for if i can't say it then i'm just ranting right but if i can be very clear it's for people who believe this it's for people who want this it's for people who are aligned with this and after you engage with my work you will feel differently or you will act differently that is the work of the creator and we don't want to say any of those things because it puts us on the hook and being on the hook feels uncomfortable and so we wriggle away but i think being on the hook is the best place to be let's talk more about that in the book you give an example i'd actually never heard before of this old turkish custom of putting a loaf of bread on the hook which then led me to look up the etymology of the phrase on the hook and did it come from that and i thought that whole idea was so interesting one if you can walk us through that turkish idea of putting a loaf of bread on the hook which i think ties into your notion of generosity and and how that plays into artistry um let's start there rather than asking eight questions at once um so i guess it's still true i haven't been to turkey in a few years if you go to a local bakery and you can afford it you buy two loaves of bread instead of one and you say to the person behind the counter put that one on the hook and then somebody who's hungry stops by the bakery and says you got anything on the hook and they take a loaf of bread buy one give one and it's just beautiful in the sense that you know bread is the staff of life it doesn't cost that much to pay it forward but that got me thinking about the phrase on the hook because we usually associate it with fish and fish don't like being on the hook and it's not a generous act for a fish to be on the hook it's selfless but i'm not sure that the fish then goes on to live another day so i like this idea of putting your work on the hook and saying here i made this here i hear this and it might not be for you but i made this and that approach to it lets me shift my gears from please judge me please pay me please reward me to oh i had the ability to weave something together and i did here and most of us want to be generous and getting out of our own way is so important so i want to push on that a little bit i think there's something really profound in that for the person who's experiencing quote unquote writer's block who doesn't have the bad writing for them to begin to shift out of the inward focus to this concept that you have of generosity the story you tell in the book and i don't know if you i can't remember if you intentionally told this for this reason but when you went fly fishing for the first time you didn't want to hook which i thought was utterly fascinating and so you practiced all of the things around fly fishing but you intentionally did not want to catch a fish what what was it in that moment that made that act still useful okay so let's assert for a moment that fly fishing is not generous to the fish and that the other people i was with were throwing the fish back so we weren't trying to feed our families we were out there on this river in wyoming seeking to commune with nature and to engage in a process of practice being mindful about what we were doing and i just knew instinctively if there was a hook on that fly i was going to be using the all of my powers of telekinesis to will the fish to bite my hook that i would be measuring the quality and goodness of my work based on whether a a primordial being decided to bite the hook and i said that's going to take me totally out of my head i don't want to have the fish be part of my day that's not why i'm here and it turned out within a few minutes and for several hours after that i was casting better than almost anybody in the crew because i was simply casting i was merely casting i wasn't connected to the outcome and so there's a paradox here because on one hand we only do the work to make things happen we only do the work with this generous mindset but we must do the work with a practice that ignores the guarantee that it's going to work and back to your brainwashing thing from a few minutes ago if you've ever said to a teacher or to yourself will this be on the test you have revealed education will this be on the test says the following i will pay attention and learn this for a little while if you promise that you will give me an a that's the exchange that's not how you learned how to ride a bike that's not how you learned how to do anything that actually matters to you you did those other things because you could and then you enjoyed the benefits thereafter not in some transaction and so the practice says i seek to make things better for people i care about but the only way i'm going to do that is by not imagining them looking over my shoulder at every turn but instead to engage with this work now so as you get into the idea of generosity and you start focusing on um creating real art that changes people and it has this almost interactive focus i know a lot of people then slip into well then how do i even charge for this so how do you begin to integrate this into a real life where people have to feed their families and at some point you do need a fish whether it's a literal fish or not on the hook how do people reconcile those two ideas yeah so commerce has to show up in our western culture and i guess i would start with this please don't quit your day job today just because you heard us talking you can begin with your side hustle you can begin with your practice because it might take a while for it to get to the point where you have created something so peculiar and particular and unique and remarkable that people will eagerly pay for it and if you need to paint your masterpiece in the next hour i don't know how to help you so that's the first place i start that you may have to be a cog in the system for a little while longer as you develop trust as you develop a reputation as you develop the permission to talk to your followers so um you know we've been talking about art art so we'll start with that abby ryan abby ryan decided i don't know 10 or 15 years ago to paint an oil painting every day and when you say that out loud you realize that's a pretty unusual thing to do and then she started videoing her work as she did it and she started teaching people generously how to do it and over time as she got better and her reputation improved her ebay sales went from oh this painting was a hundred dollars dude this painting is 800 but you're making eight hundred dollars every day making an oil painting in an hour and a half that's a gig right and then it was featured in oprah magazine and then people are buying it not because they saw abby painting it but because she's actually really good at it okay but it all began with this germ of an idea which is i can connect people to my practice but let's just go totally in a different direction let's say you're a real estate broker most real estate brokers are freaking out correctly because zillow makes it clear we don't need them right that you can look at every single house for sale in vermont anytime you want from your the safety of your covid free living room so why are they getting paid six percent of eight hundred thousand dollars this is a problem except for some real estate agents who know every single person in town who coach the little league team run this organization have people have meetings in their office all the time have a point of view and only sell and buy in a very particular place whether it's for a community or based on geography that person is worth more than they charge because that person is bringing a level of humanity that is not in the playbook they cannot easily be replaced and so one of the things i mentioned in the book is the origins of the word peculiar and peculiar comes from the latin for cattle and it means private property you own the cattle peculiar means you are in and of yourself all the systems in our life push us not to do that you're an uber driver well you better be invisible all their rules are you can't be a particular peculiar uber driver you have to be the standard one so my advice is don't be an uber driver figure out what you can do instead where you actually benefit by being you you have a quote in the book and i'm forgetting now who it came from but it was like genius is the person who can be most truly who they are and i found that really interesting and it got into this concept which you talk a lot about in the book and i'd love to get your real-time explanation of uh the alternate title to the book before you ended up settling on that one was like be yourself or the power what was it trust yourself trust yourself so what what is this you end up separating the word self in the book um so you put your and self why what's the distinction what's the power of the self what was that whole idea um trust yourself when you're talking to yourself who is talking and who is listening right this is a fascinating thing that we don't examine very often someone's talking and someone's listening and it's still you so i'm arguing that the verbal fearful compliant sometimes scared voice is the frontal cortex the part of our brain that isn't particularly good at creativity and then the one that's listening the one that's getting shut down the one that claims it wants to be authentic is that other one that one that's willing to push us forward and what i'm saying is we are a dance of both to trust yourself does not mean that you just do whatever you feel like and are guaranteed it's going to work it probably won't what it means is you need to listen to that voice more often and if you can develop a practice that lets that voice show up in a way that it can your work your life gets better and you can start today if you want to be a runner you don't do a lot of planning you don't get runners world magazine and change your sneakers and sign up for this and sign up for that if you want to be a runner you go running it doesn't matter how far and you do it again tomorrow and if you do it for 30 days in a row you're a runner and if you keep doing it you'll get better that is the practice the practice says i'm committing to this method and i'm going to have streaks whatever form they take and one day i'll get better at this and when i do i'll be able to serve the people i hope to change one of the coolest things in the book i think this is so profound is this idea that if you want to change your story if you want to change your own self narrative if you want to begin to shape your identity you change your behaviors first and not the other way around why is that how did you come to that that's pretty counter-intuitive it's true and there's a lot of brain science that goes to this it has to do with where our narrative even comes from we what we do is we see the world around us and then we make up a story about it not the other way around that uh dan dennett the great philosophy uh professor at tufts has proven that dreams happen in the moment we wake up that all night there's electrical activity in our brain but it's not till we wake up that we try to make sense of it that's interesting i've never heard that before yeah it's pretty cool and it makes perfect sense how they proved it was tricky but it makes perfect sense to me because the storytelling part is our conscious brain and if you are somebody who always goes out of their way to open doors for other people and help them then you will start telling yourself a story that that's the kind of behavior you admire not the other way around and so just choosing a behavior if you want to be a writer right if you want to be a runner run that will change how you think of you and your work you talk about passion as a choice how is that true and if it is then how do we go about making the right choice right so this is um a little bit controversial because a lot of people want to find their passion they say how do i find my calling and i point out to them that there are plumbers who think they found their calling and there are plumbers who wish they could sing opera and there are opera singers who think they found their calling and there are other opera singers who think it's just a grind it turns out it has nothing to do with the profession it has to do with our narrative about the profession so to your previous point doing the work changes our story about the work and i think it's so much more reliable and so much easier to love what you do than it is to do what you love making the choice to love what you do means that whatever you're doing you can be in love and you know i'm super lucky i don't have to dig ditches for a living or work in a toxic waste dump i'm really grateful for that um but there are also plenty of people who if you said you have to write a blog post for free every day 7 500 times in a row would say that's horrible for me i love that and that was just a choice i decided that i would love doing that what's up guys i'm excited to tell you all about peak tea peak tea is your daily antioxidant powerhouse i can't emphasize enough the importance of gut health you guys have heard me talk about that obsessively for your overall health immunity energy and just basically every function in your body it's absolutely critical my wife lisa is needfully fanatical about her gut health and we're always looking for ideas to help fermented tea can be incredibly helpful for gut health that's why you have to check out peak teas fermented poo or tea it delivers powerful and concentrated antioxidants and probiotics first off it's wild harvested from 250 year old trees so it's literally had centuries to extract super rare nutrients and minerals from deep in the soil it's also naturally fermented so it's loaded with probiotics to support healthy digestion the unique type of antioxidants called polyphenols actually act as prebiotics too two for the price of one my friends tea is the original superfood and peaks fermented poo er is the holy grail of tea one of our impact theory team members has not only tried pt he is especially obsessive about the poo or green the flavor is fantastic and it's become part of his breakfast routine it's also a great way for him to naturally stay focused and calm during a busy day they have over 20 different flavors so you're sure to find something your taste buds will love and your body will crave peak tea delivers concentrated antioxidants and nutrients to support healthy immunity digestion and weight management their cold crystallization technology extracts the active ingredients in superfoods at the maximum potential peak triple toxin screens for pesticides heavy metals and toxic molds so you get pure benefits with no junk peak dissolves in seconds in cold or hot water you can drink it on the go or add to smoothies there's zero prep it's so delicious that pique won three gold medals at the global t championships pt also has 15 thousand five star reviews more than any tea brand in the market with a thirty day satisfaction guarantee so you can either love it or get your money back and if you go to pt.com slash impact right now you'll get five percent off your first order peak hardly ever offers discounts so guys don't miss this exclusive offer that's five percent off at peak t dot com slash impact spelled p i q u e t e a dot com of course slash impact all right guys take care and be legendary okay so we're in that moment we're gary goldman we know what we're trying to do which you talk a lot about in the book i think that's really important how do we get better like how how do we march down that path in my experience the best creators have learned how to see they've not learned how to see by using one of those digital please stay on the phone after this call and rank our service kind of survey they learn how to see because they understand genre because they develop good taste good taste is knowing what your audience wants 10 minutes before they do so diane von furstenberg burst onto the scene with her wrap dress in the 1970s revolutionized a corner of women's fashion how did she know and i've talked to her about this she's completely non-verbal she's unable to explain how she knew she has nothing but she knew because she learned how to see because she exposed herself enough she developed pattern matching abilities and domain knowledge is so important genre is so important it's not generic it's genre what does this remind us of what does it rhyme with when i touch the emotion you're seeking what other emotions are right next to it we develop these things some people are really lucky get lucky early and some people takes 10 20 years to develop this sensibility the first year i was a book packager i sold my first book the first day to warner books chip conley and i five thousand bucks we split the money and then chip went back to doing his gig which was hotels and i said i'm gonna be a book packager if i could sell a book a week i'll be fine and i got 800 rejection letters in a row 800 times over the next 12 months someone in the book industry cared enough to buy a stamp send me a letter saying this is a bad idea go away 800 times and i didn't keep making the same mistake i kept making new mistakes and in that industry it was socially acceptable to send people a proposal and it was totally understandable that they would write back and then something clicked into place and i learned to see and within two years after that i'd sold 20 books and over the course of 10 years i did 120 books and i could tell about half the time i was right about half the time if i said this one's a big one it was a big one can you walk us through that process i i know your story well enough to know like when you were trying to get better at writing you were looking at james bond we talked about this in in our first interview that process to me is incredibly important how were you asking yourself new questions like how did you make sure you were making new mistakes not repeating it and how were you making sure that you were getting incrementally closer to so that you were analyzing okay i did this i got this result and right great question the first books were how to hypnotize your friends and get them to act like chickens and the fortune cookie construction set so the fortune cookie construction set was the only book at the time where you could look up a recipe for fortune cookies because fortune cookies don't have their recipes in american cookbooks and they didn't have the recipe in chinese cookbooks and so the first page was the recipe for fortune cookies and the next uh 100 pages were little perforated fortunes that you could tear out and put into the 14 like any young man fortunes this voice and effort no one wanted to publish that and the other one was one of the first uh not first one of the only books anyone had ever pitched on hypnotism how to do stage hypnotism at home and how to hypnotize your friends to get them back like chickens no one wanted to publish that either and i just kept kind of one thing after another that was either clever and i was proud of myself for being clever or because i had a mba i had spreadsheets to prove that people would actually buy the book and then what came to me no one explained it to me but what i figured out was the people in the book industry who tended to go to famous colleges were dramatically underpaid really underpaid and they weren't in it to sell a lot of books because they didn't know how many books they were selling it took a year and a half after a book was bought purchased for them to know how many copies it was had sold and by then they weren't even interested they moved on so no one in the industry had a spreadsheet cared about spreadsheets or was keeping track of spreadsheets and no one in the industry wanted to reward me for being clever so what i realized was book people bought books that they were proud of and they bought books that they wanted to talk to their colleagues about and if i made books like that they would publish them happily particularly if i was the kind of person they wanted to buy books from not that i was well liked in a willy loman sense but that i was a professional who was in it for the right reasons not somebody who was trying to hustle and advance so i could make another clever book and that led to a real shift on my part of who's it for what's it for what change am i seeking to make because what i realized is first it has to be good enough in quotation marks to appeal to the gatekeeper but i wasn't actually doing all this effort just to make them happy i wanted to make the readers change i wanted to reach readers but i had to do a bank shot first i had to get it through the editor and then i had a chance to get to the reader and that's one reason why my blog has been around so long because my blog was disintermediated my blog meant i didn't have to please an editor i could just write for my reader and that's a huge shift in our culture but it also means you don't get anointed by an editor the way you used to and get a guaranteed audience the typical failed book in new york now new york publishing um has gone from 20 000 copies is what a decent failed book would do to 200. because 20 000 used to be you would fill up all the barnes and nobles we fill up all the local bookstores you'll sell 20 000. now it's well amazon doesn't reorder and we only ship them 10. i want to talk about imposter syndrome and the reason that i'm bringing it up now is as you were going through that i thought there's there's really something here about is it just that seth godin is inordinately good at that analysis or is it that the practice itself of doing something over and over and over is going to yield a result and for the person whose self-narrative is i'm not as good as seth godin they're of course going to get into that imposter syndrome and you've already addressed that hey you probably really aren't good enough at this yet you talk in the book about so many things being a process that you think you're sort of either born with or not i'm working on this concept i call the physics of being human that there are just certain things that the brain does whether you want them to or not they're universal to all of us and one of them that i was thinking about yesterday while researching you is this idea that we we analyze and you analyze by default and so journaling is powerful because whether you want your brain to or not it is going to analyze what you're writing what you're doing practicing being a plumber you're going to analyze submitting all the book proposals you're going to analyze is there a way for us to sharpen our skill of being able to see that gap to recognize oh what's really going on here is the you know the guy with the harvard mba or whatever he's underpaid and he's doing this for a whole different reason i don't think most people verbalize as much as i do and that's fine that some of the most successful people i know don't verbalize in almost every field so i'm looking to see uh if i can show you yes here it is so this book was a turning point for me so i'll give you the background of this book um cliff notes used to be a very big deal cliff notes used to be the single biggest profit center at a lot of bookstores and the guys from cliff notes because it was reliable you had 100 titles they sold and sold and sold and the margins were good and the guys at cliff notes in publishers weekly published the list of their top 30 sellers to help bookstores know which ones to stock but it also told me which ones to compete with them on because they revealed their short head and i said well who wants a cliff notes who wants a cliff notes is some kid who doesn't want to read a 30 page cliff notes they want to read four page cliff notes so why don't i just take 35 of the best-selling cliff notes and put them all in one book so for the price of two cliff notes you get all the cliff notes and i need a credential so i got college students to write them all a students from tufts university and this is a brilliant idea i can prove spreadsheets back and forth that this is a brilliant idea and it wasn't going to sell because i still was floundering about trying to figure out what people wanted and i met this guy named john boswell and john boswell wrote o.j legal oj's legal pad and he created french for cats and he'd done million sellers one after another a real nice to me profane guy and i went to see him on a mutual introduction and he ripped my proposal apart and said i will help you with this but we're going to split the book we're going to split it i'm like fine i got nothing go for it and he said the first thing you're doing is you're laser printing your proposals i said yeah it costs a dollar a page i gotta walk down there and print it out on the laser printer he's like no no no and he calls the secretary in and has her retype my proposal using carbon paper on that onion skin paper and like what's that about he said because authors have typewriters and he didn't have words to explain why you needed to act like an author when you weren't being it blah blah blah so i decoded some of what he had learned right and then i learned that i watched him interact with the editors who we were trying to sell it to and he was mean to them one after another and i tried to decode this because many of the most successful agents in new york at the time were mean to their clients but i realized again it's all a club and it's a club people want to be a member of and they only have a few tools to use to get them to be members of certain clubs and if this club is seen as difficult to get into the whole groucho marx thing they will try harder to get into it and like so all and i never did the whole mean thing but i got the joke immediately about he didn't know have words for what he was doing even though he was a really successful book guy he just knew what had worked how did he know because he went through the process i went through he showed up and he showed up and he showed up and we look you know i was talking about this just the other day um go look on the streaming services and you can listen to one of joni mitchell's first demos she does a cover of house of the rising sun and when i saw it show up on my browser the other day i was really excited it's not good it's not good and if she hadn't made it she wouldn't have made all the other ones so that's what we got to do we show up we cut the wood and we chop the water or catch off the water and whatever you get the idea chop the wood carry the water uh you mentioned joni mitchell in the book it is a really interesting moment and i'm curious how you think about this so one of the things that i worry about as people go down this path of okay hey seth told me that i'm going to have imposter syndrome i'm not i'm probably not good enough yet but i need to become peculiar i need to be myself really lean into that don't worry about alienating those people and then you tell this wonderful story about joni mitchell and joni mitchell realizes that she's going over people's heads but instead of being like oh my god i feel terrible about that and sort of dumbing it down which was a very famous jay-z lyric about how he dumbed it down for his audience and doubled his dollars um she goes even more highbrow and now we obviously remember her you know decades later is there a danger in leaning into that where you may not actually you may be being arrogant instead of being accurate yes okay so the first thing i want to put a pin in that's super important i do not believe in authenticity i do not think you have any right to do whatever you feel like and whatever pops into your head as the version of you that you think is the authentic one is not correct the audience does not want an authentic you you do not want an authentic anybody when you hire anything when you go to a concert now if you go to a jay-z concert and he's in a bad mood you don't want him to be in a bad mood you want him to be the best version of jay-z that's what you paid for consistency consistency is part of being peculiar consistently generous consistently showing up rhyming with yourself in a way that you're proud of but no not authentic you're not entitled so with that said the joni mitchell story has a key piece of nuance in it joni mitchell like most successful musicians as i mentioned with the doobie brothers was becoming a hack she was a legend she could every record that she was doing was breaking every uh sales record there was she could have done it for 50 more years she could have been the rolling stones that was the path she was on but to do that you need to play covers of yourself you need to make sure it sounds like a joni mitchell album what joni mitchell did bob dylan did the same thing she intentionally alienated her audience she intentionally made them go away she made don juan's reckless daughter breaking the hearts of her record label because she didn't want to be joni mitchell with a capital j and a capital m she knew that her smallest viable audience was smaller than the audience she had get rid of the people who don't get the joke make the music that you want to be proud of back to art away from being a hack there's nothing wrong with being a hack because the fact is rolling stones made a billion dollars being a hack but joni mitchell said i only want my people who want to go on this journey enrolled where i am going and the happy medium there is the is uh grateful dead gravel dead sold 500 million dollars worth of tickets but the promise was you don't know what you're going to get when you come and the promise was there are going to be parts of this that are boring and we're gonna explore the edges that's what we do and so you can earn that right to show up and say i know i'm doing that or i'm doing this so when permission marketing became a new york times bestseller i had a big choice to make because i'd been in the book world for a long time and now i was finally an author and that book sold so i could have done the permission marketing handbook because that book would have been easy to sell to an editor or i could have started mailchimp because that business would have been really good and then i would have been the email marketing guy because that was my background i had earned the right to show up and say this and i intentionally did not do that because i wanted the feeling you get when you launch a book like survival is not enough and then it comes with the feeling of what happens when it only sells 13 000 copies right that's part of the deal if that's the journey you want to go on you quote joni mitchell in the book and she says i'm paraphrasing but they're going to crucify you if you stay the same they're going to crucify you if you change staying the same is boring change is interesting so i'd rather be crucified for changing i thought whoa that's actually really powerful yeah as different groups are doing the crucify right if you stay the same the real joyous fans are thrilled they want you to play coverage it's the other people the fancy opinion leading people that are going to say you're not relevant anymore you said you wanted to do something different because you wanted that feeling you get what is that feeling you get when you do something that might not work um you know the book ends with a quote from papa walenda of the flying wallendas which he may or may not have said but which is quoted in the movie rounders by my friend brian koppelman and david levine and he says something like uh life is on the tight rope and the tightrope is the only place to be and what it means to be on the tightrope is that our job as humans is not to eat sleep and die our job as human humans is to sing or to dance or to connect or to lead and all of those things have tight ropes associated with them and it's in that moment of it might not work that we are at least me that i become alive because you built something you it's you organize the surprise party you put together the pieces and now in this moment you're about to learn something that is so different from taking the truffles from the conveyor belt and putting them in the box all day that's not what we were born to do i don't think so we're living on the tightrope i want to make the most of that so if we're going to experience the danger if we're really going to put ourselves at risk which has obviously huge potential upside but also has potential downside one of the things that seems to me to be the core of where you're at at this point in your life is that notion of feedback that you brought up earlier certainly the seems like the soul of the alt mba is the feedback one how do we receive that feedback because most people are going to feel attacked most people you know they put up the psychological immune system and they reject that um how do we deal with that or some people do the opposite and they take it all in and they're crushed that's interesting so i've made these things on my my glowforge these are uh writer's blocks and they take a long time to make um because you have to like laser each side and this one says all criticism is not the same that is the key to the whole deal i have not read an amazon review of my work in almost 10 years and the reason is simple because i've never met an author who said i read all my one-star reviews and now i'm i'm a better writer never because what does a one-star review mean a one star review means this book wasn't for me all right well you just told us about you you didn't tell us anything about the book or me he told us about you okay thank you for telling us but i don't need to read that in detail on the other hand if nikki papadopoulos the amazing editor at penguin putnam says at uh portfolio says you need to change the title i'm like i just paid you hundreds of thousands of dollars so you would tell me to change the title thank you very much because i got to self-publish this book all by myself with no feedback from anybody and no one would have told me to change the title this criticism is magic and so you know at akimbo what they have built is institutions workshops the alt-mba where the only feedback you're getting is precious and they filtered out all other stuff and you can build a system like that you can figure out how to make sure you're listening to the right people this is why being an opening act for a rock group is a really bad idea because you're going to show up in front of the wrong people who are going to give you the wrong feedback it makes way more sense to figure out who's it for and bring it to them it might take a few extra steps but the feedback you're getting is the useful feedback are there a few landmarks to knowing who the people are that you should be listening to to building that group well i think it's two parts in the case of me in the origin of my book world there are the people who are going to pay you and when those people give you feedback you have to listen to them or else they're not going to pay you anymore but then there's this other thing which is as we discussed earlier people are really bad at verbalizing where they're coming from when you see someone who is angry look for the fear they're not they're probably not angry at you they are probably afraid of something afraid of what they'll tell their spouse afraid of what they'll tell their boss afraid of insufficiency or afraid of death and they are expressing it to you by being angry about something you did if you over index for that feedback you're going to make a mistake on the other hand if you ignore all feedback then the people you seek to serve will choose not to be served by you and they will simply walk away and so that's why this is so nuanced and so complicated because what you've got to figure out how to do is thread a needle between being a hack and having a hobby and there is a needle there is a way to do it but there are also people who were contemporaries of his that didn't make a living that died in a gutter somewhere because they turned it too much into a hobby and then there were other people who got too famous and i put miles davis in that category and went from being magnificent artists to being bitter because they turned into a hack and then they wanted to go back to being an artist and they couldn't why couldn't he that's interesting because he got hooked on playing for 80 000 people right i just watched a great documentary about him about a year ago and you can see the turning point when bill graham put him on stage when he realized that he liked being a rock star but if you're a rock star you don't also get to make kind of blue you can't do both and so he listened to a group of people who told him what he would need to do to be more of a rock star but deep down he didn't really want to be a rock star he wanted to make his art this is fascinating now i'm super curious if you could go back in time and you get like 20 minutes with him is there an idea that you would try to plant in his mind around self-narrative that would help him understand like hey you can actually reshape this so that you can get closer to rhyming with yourself do you just go hey look this is the way it is and some people get you know hooked on that and there's no bringing them back because there are so many people like they're chasing money they're chasing wealth they're chasing fame and you know jim carrey's famous quote i wish everybody could be rich and famous that you see that it isn't actually what you want it to be or it isn't the answer um i'm so curious what would what if anything would you say to him at that moment well i think i have a slightly different take but it's specific i would just say thank you um to have sacrificed so much to be who he was and to make the change he made for people in the face of overt racial oppression he had so much to prove to himself to other people he was disregarded he was spat upon he's entitled to sell out all he wants and to someone today what i would say regardless of your background regardless of where you came from i would say what do you want what do you what is it that you're seeking because if you're trying to fill an infinite hole and the filling part isn't making you happy i need to tell you about math and math says infinite holes never get filled and so you know every year when forbes publishes their billionaires list they ruin the day or the week or the month of at least 100 people who have at least a billion dollars because they're not ranked as high as they want to be that's absurd that's absurd that you're keeping track of that that you care about that in any way that's an infinite hole it's not helping you get where you want to get instead maybe it makes sense to say where is your fuel what is the work you do where when you do it it makes you feel like you contributed something stop buying into metrics that were invented by other people to help them get where they want to go and you know a simple example is people who buy their way onto the best seller list right that they're spending 50 100 000 to game a system that every insider knows is not very hard to game why are you doing that what do you get in return and how could you stop keeping track of something that shouldn't be kept track of and keep track of something else instead that's up to all of us every one of us gets to make that choice who are you trying to please if there's that person that you're trying to please that is always unpleasable you found an infinite hole stop trying to fill it and go please somebody else seth like if i had to i don't have to conjure an image i have an image of you in my head of somebody who tap dances in the most graceful beautiful way around all the sort of mental traps that we all fall for and i'm saying this specifically i've never sort of put these things together so forgive me i'm just sort of thinking out loud you have this beautiful ability to be moved by people people maybe that you've never even met so we talked about leonard nimoy the first time and now miles davis is it do you open yourself up to that are you just naturally impacted by people do you seek the beauty and things like that was such an interesting framing around miles davis and to see that it obviously hits you in a pretty real way just curious like that seems like a beautiful place to live for people that want to live there what have you done to sort of end up there i always resist something being natural or a talent because i think it lets us off the hook way too easy um i do believe that people have different emotional thermostats and they're set maybe by the way we're raised in the traumas that we have or don't have but yeah i do also think that people are on various spectra about where they are on that thermostat thing in my case i think the practical discussion is what are you training in like i can't bench press 10 pounds because my shoulders don't work very well from surgery but even if i could i could train to get to 20 or 30 or whatever it is and so we don't walk up to somebody who has a lot of muscles in various parts of their body and say were you born that way no they trained to get that way and if you ask patricia to play scales she can play scales blindfolded because she trained for years and years and years the fact that her father was a jazz musician didn't give her any genes in music she just trained and so i've been training for a really long time to answer the question why did someone just do what they did how do i get rid of some of the magic of the world is just a giant magic trick and i don't know how it works right like i know what freon gas does and i know how a refrigerator functions it's important to me i know that when you flip the switch on the lights why the lights go on that's important to me and i needed to understand why that person who turned down my book on spots and stains turned it down and why the person who tried to buy the book and couldn't was really angry with me i needed to understand that the same way i need to understand why the lights work and often i'm completely wrong but i'm closer than if i hadn't asked the question in the first place and so i think the training is can we develop practical empathy they don't know what we know they don't want what we want they don't need what we need and that's okay what do they know what do they need what happened to them that led them to believe that in this moment they are being reasonable and if we can ask that question enough times not only i think does it help us make change it helps us live with the world as it is because we can't change the whole world but if we understand it at least we can decode it and and figure out a way to make it better it's amazing one final question what do you hope so knowing that you go into the book asking how do i want to change people what what are you hoping people take away from this concept of the practice two things uh for all of us we need what you could contribute if you contributed it and for you the reader uh i think it would be horrible if you died with whatever you've got still inside of you and it's not formed yet you will form it when you have a practice when you start believing in yourself don't wait to get picked oprah's not going to call but instead adopt this practice of making things better because 2020 is a year we all want to forget but the only way forward is not going to be because some space alien comes and fixes everything it's going to be because we made something better for 10 other people if we all do that it multiplies and then things get better i love that where can people find you i'm at seth's blog and um i'm thrilled to announce that at kimbo the workshop organization i started five years ago is now a b corp uh legally obligated to work in the public interest as well as a for-profit and it is run and owned by two of my senior people so i am part of it in that they publish my workshops but it's them and it's now 20 000 plus people who are learning together it's at akimbo.com i have a podcast not like you but a podcast at akimbo.link and uh yeah i'm sort of hard to avoid if you just click around you'll find me i love it guys this is in my opinion one of the most profound authors for sure thinkers if you haven't already subscribed to everything he does i highly highly encourage it and speaking of things you should subscribe to if you haven't already be sure to subscribe here and until next time my friends be legendary take care heroes are an enormously large supply you can say what would bill gates do what would elon musk do what would jacqueline novogratz do and you can study their work enough that even from afar without them knowing you exist because they're your hero you can start to model it

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 628,560

Rating: 4.8925266 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Seth Godin, IT, focus on the outcome, outcome vs effort, brainwashed, streaks, intentions, criticism, feedback, on the hook, generosity, build your art, trust yourself, be yourself, be generous, passion is a choice, seeing, good taste, know your audience, new mistakes, don’t make the same mistake, imposter syndrome

Id: sB2_kKynq-4

Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020