A Bit of Optimism - Down A Rabbit Hole with Seth Godin

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Our time, energy, and emotions are valuable because they are finite.And yet conversations with Seth Godin always leave me feeling more patient, energized, and full of love.  Seth is a prolific author and a marketing genius who knows first-hand how love can take an interaction from transactional to transformational.This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Seth and his work check out: https://www.sethgodin.com/A Song of Significance, out May 2023: https://geni.us/pdnqnz  

Great ideas are not magic tricks. You don't just pull a rabbit out of a hat and there you have it, it's a great idea. There's a lot of work that goes into great ideas. It's more like a sculpture made out of stone, where there's a hammer and a chisel and you chip away at something and it slowly takes form. a hammer and a chisel and you chip away at something and it slowly takes form. And one of the best ways to come up with great ideas is to allow someone to push you to chip further and deeper and harder, to round all the square edges. That's what happens whenever I talk to Seth Godin. He is a god in the marketing world and a prolific author who just came out with a new book called The Song of Significance. Whenever I get together with him, he pushes me and challenges

me and forces me to think deeper about the ideas that I have. So that when we get to the end, I guess it is a bit of magic. This is a bit of optimism. So I love you, and I don't think I've ever told you the reason I love you. When my career was just starting out, you and I had the opportunity to speak on the same stage. And I had paid money to go to events that you were speaking at in the past. So I definitely knew who you were. And you were sitting in the green room and you were off by yourself in a corner. And I walked in and I wanted to introduce myself. I mean, you were one of the people I admired and loved. And I knocked on the door and you looked up and you go,

oh, a bunch of people have told me I need to meet you. And you saw me do my thing and you came up to me afterwards and said, you were really good. You want to go for lunch? And already I'm like floating. We traded numbers and you said, call me if you ever need anything. And I called you when I needed advice and you always took the call and you always were honest withadulterated, honest input. Don't always agree,

but I know it's always unadulterated and honest and done with love. Well, if you're not going to do it with love, then what's the point? Because it's not a hustle. It's life, right? You don't get tomorrow over again. So how do you show up for people who you admire, who are kind, who you care about in a way that you do it again? And I don't understand why you would calculate what's going to be the best thing for me in this transaction when you have the chance to say, how can I turn on a light and open a door? And if this person wants to come, that's great. And if they don't, well, that's okay too. This idea of doing something with love, I think, is a really interesting one.

What does that mean to do something with love? And how do you know somebody is acting with love? Which is different than I really like you or I really respect you. Those aren't the same thing. I do things for people that I like. I do things for people I respect. And I can't say that I always do things with love though. What do you mean when you say do it with love? That's not a standard for everybody, is it? I think it's too exhausting for it to be

a standard with everybody. We want to have low trust, high stakes transactions often in order to live our lives. We want things to be the way they were supposed to be, cut and dry, even Steven, deal's a deal, we're done. Part of that is the idea of the transaction being over, no one owes anybody. What we learned from Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift, is that gifts connect us, whether they are physical gifts or the gift of an emotion. And giving someone an emotion for privileged folks like us is more expensive than giving them a candle, right? Because that emotion is finite and we can't give it out all day long. And the question is, my late friend Zig Ziglar

used to say, you can get everything in life you want if you'll help enough other people get what they want. I had a problem with that because it implies that the purpose of helping other people get what they want is to help you get what you want. And I am much more comfortable with, you can help other people get what they want, period. Because the period has so much joy in it to be able to say, without exhausting me or causing myself harm, I held the door open for somebody for an extra minute. There's love in that. And then real exertion on behalf of somebody else becomes even more special. It's a privilege to be able to say, this was truly inconvenient for me, and yet I did it because I could. I think there's also a fine line between doing things with love and giving and helping people get what they want and martyrdom. And I've definitely seen people do this where they

hold themselves to this. And I don't think they're not virtue signaling, like, look at all the things I did for you with love. It's not that. It's that they genuinely believe that it's good to give a life of service, give, give, give, give, give, give to the point of burnout, exhaustion, and self-destruction. And so we believe in giving, but we don't believe in giving to everyone. We believe in serving, but we don't believe in serving everyone. We believe in loving, but we don't believe in giving to everyone. We believe in serving, but we don't believe in serving everyone. We believe in loving, but we don't believe in loving everyone. And I think the thing that I'm trying to sort of get to is when do we give with love and when do we know to hold it back because it actually is too much or overdoing it? Or in this case, I'm being exploited and I don't even realize that it's not worth it to the point

where I exhaust myself or I burn myself out and I hurt myself. The best B2B sales book ever written is by Manon Koslow. It's called Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play. And I don't want to talk about that book, but I want to talk about the title, which I mentioned several times in my new book, Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play. And what it says is, this bus is going to Cleveland. If you want to go to Topeka, don't get on this bus. Don't complain about where the bus is going. Turnover is a good thing. We're going over there. Come if you want to come. And so a big thing for me about the intention of relationship is let's get real about what change we're seeking to make, about what kind of interaction we are seeking to have. That there are people that I have met who I got off to a good start with, as I got off to a good start with you, who then came

back three too many times and made it clear through their behavior that I was going one place on this bus and they were going someplace else. And I don't want to sign up for that. I'm not here to bleed for people who aren't going to get real. That's not a healthy relationship. And so this isn't about how do we keep score. It's not about how do we trade favors because trading favors in itself is a significant turnoff for me. And so just to give you a trivial example that I think people can possibly relate to, one of the things that's been going on in the book business since the term was coined by the person who wrote the poem Purple Cow, I might add, blurbing books. Blurbing books have been around for about 100 years in which one author says something nice

about another author's book. And it used to be an actual gift, an actual true connection. And in the last seven years, hustle culture has turned it into how do I collect as many of these blurbs for the back of my book as I can, which is why I don't have blurbs on my books. And I am trying still to pay forward what Tom Peters did for me all those years ago, when he blurbed one of my books and made me feel like I was a member of the community. And what I found is, first of all, people show up with a pre-written blurb, which offends me. Second, they don't expect me to read the book, which offends me. Third, I have a two-page memo where I say, before you ask me to do this,

these are the things I'm going to ask in return about how you use my name and stuff. And about half the time, they angle to get a better deal. And as a result, I can't blur books anymore because it sucks. It's like no good deed goes unpunished because good deeds don't matter anymore because it's trading favors. Who wants to live a life of hustle and trading favors? I want to live a life as a human. Before I forget, I have to share two funny stories about the blurbing topic, semi-unrelated. Number one, someone I love and care about said, I'm in a jam. Somebody asked me if you would blurb this book. And it was an obscure book about an obscure topic.

Yeah. And I was like, but I'm not going to lie, but I needed to do it. So I wrote, if you're looking for information about obscure topic, this is a great place to start. I love that blurb. But the second thing is for the new book, I needed a blurb. So I got one from GPT-3. I'm the first person who's had I remember I asked you a bunch of years ago, what is your standard for blurbing? And you said, there has to be at least one idea in there worth $24.95. And I want that blurb on the back of my book. I want to have my next book published that says, there's at least one idea in here worth $24.95, Seth Godin. That's going to be the only blurb I'm going to have on the back of my book. That's my dream. So I think the point we're making is what used to be done as a gift has now become a transaction. In this hustle culture, a lot of things that used to be done with generosity have now become part of the hustle because somebody said, you got to have this,

and now everybody looks for that. Even on TikTok, where people used to genuinely buy a product, genuinely like a product, genuinely make sort of a homegrown commercial saying, I don't really like this. And now, because that seems to quote unquote work, people are being paid to appear like they genuinely bought it and appear like they genuinely like it. And those things are all over social media. And I can't believe that companies think that we can't tell the difference between somebody who is actually into something and somebody who's kind of into something and might be into something, but taking money for being into something. And all of these things that used to be done with generosity and

kindness and not asking for anything in return, I don't want free product, I don't want free money, I don't want anything, have now become a business. I was with you into the last clause. Companies only do this because it works. And it works because human beings are components in a giant system, not people who truly want to show up as people. I mean, some people are making millions of dollars doing what you're describing. And it's because the companies are making tens of millions of dollars paying them millions of dollars. There's something sad about advertising, I think. When TiVo first showed up, when digital recorders first showed up, one of the great promises is you can skip commercials. Now, digital has forced us to watch commercials.

But the thing that I find is hilarious is now we live in a world, and I don't care what platform you're watching on, where commercials have a countdown. You know, in a minute and a half, 30 seconds or only five seconds more, and then you can skip the commercial. Now, if you think about it, how bad does your product have to be that you actually have a timer to tell people how much they have to suffer? And so my question to the advertising industry is, why don't you make a great product so we actually want to enjoy it? Oh, Simon, Simon, Simon. So one of the most beloved TV commercials of all time is the Mean Joe Green commercial from Coca-Cola. And one of the other ones is I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing. So beloved, it became a top 40 song.

Evidence shows that neither one of those commercials sold one bottle of Coke. On the other hand, TV commercials that are run on the Super Bowl in the first half that promote chips or beer, computers are now in place so sophisticated that they can find out how many people ran out during halftime to the convenience store and bought that brand in the minutes afterwards. And they have discovered that it is obnoxious, annoying commercials that human beings actually take action on because we have been indoctrinated again to be in this Pavlovian relationship with interruptions. And then the last part is, if you think about a magazine like Vogue, people who read Vogue magazine would pay extra for the issue with ads in it. They would pay less for the issue with no ads. So we say we hate the ads, but we still buy the things that are in the ads. That's just the way human beings click. A bit of optimism just became a bit of depression. Sorry, but I have to share things that are true. One of the challenges we have of end game industrial capitalism is stuff that would

have been completely unacceptable 15 or 20 years ago. And the way we treat other people is now, well, I have to do it. It's my job. And this really bothers me. So I came up with a phrase that made me think of you when I wrote it, which is the whole idea that there is a department in a company called human resources gives away the whole game. And my point is humans are not a resource.

Humans are the point. Advertisers have been treating humans like a bank instead of treating them like people. You're one of the great marketers in the world. treating them like people. You're one of the great marketers in the world, and your work has from decades been the Bibles that we turn to, to learn how to market. What about marketing doesn't work now that used to, and also vice versa? I guess the first thing I would say is I have, on a percentage basis, been one of the most ignored writers in any field ever. Lots of people who are in the field may be aware of my work, but the pressures of their work short term caused them to ignore it. So permission marketing says, take your time, earn permission. Being heard

and trusted by people is way more valuable than spamming them and interrupting them. entrusted by people is way more valuable than spamming them and interrupting them. Nobody disagrees with this idea. And yet, in the time since you and I started talking, 14 pieces of spam ended up in my box. Some from brands we've heard of, right? Because the person who did it didn't say, I'm a jerk and a thief. They're just acting like a jerk and a thief because they think that's what their boss wants. So I would say the biggest shift for sure is we have shifted from brand advertising, which is an ad you don't know if it's going to work and you can't measure if it's going to work. So you want to be proud of it, which is almost all the ads there were until 20 years ago to direct ads, which can be measured.

So anything that's happening on the internet can be measured and you can bet they can tell if you're clicking. That's why you see so many weird things online, because they're not doing it to talk to a human, they're doing it to talk to a database. I wonder how much of this is because the nature of brand has changed as companies went online, right? Because the barriers to entry for an online company are very low, but the barriers for exit are also very low. So like, oh, I loved Friendster until MySpace came along. And I loved MySpace until Facebook came along. And like, we all loved it until something else came along because it's really quick and easy. And if you think about it,

some of the big, expensive, famous brands that are purely online, let's take Amazon. Amazon is a great example, right? We like Amazon because Amazon is super convenient. But few, if anybody, loves Amazon. No matter how much they spend on advertising, we'll never love Amazon because we never get to interact with Amazon other than online. The question I'm asking is, can we fall in love with something that exists solely in

a virtual space? There's so much juicy stuff here. I would love to decode this. You ready? The original name of Amazon, which they still own, which still redirects to them, is Relentless.com. And Jeff's entire point of view is he wants to be direct marketing driven and transactional. The turnover at Amazon is so high that it costs 25% of their company's total profit last year. And that more than half the people who are hired lasted less than 60 days. And in some cities, they are worried that they have run out of human beings to hire who haven't already worked at Amazon and quit. So Amazon is an algorithm, a machine. And he could have built a brand that people decided to love, but instead he chose to have no voice, no feel,

to have no voice, no feel, nothing but convenient transaction. Because he asserted that he could get so far ahead of anybody else, they could never catch up with him on that axis. And by refusing to be distracted by the clever teddy bear that they could have built. He said, no, the only way we're going to keep winning is by being more relentless than anybody else. And he delivered on that. A couple of years after Google started, I was in Union Square in New York, wearing a Google shirt that they had given me instead of paying me to give a speech, I got a shirt. I'm standing in Union Square and this woman who's like 100 yards away, Union Square. And this woman who's like 100 yards away, who has a beautiful dog, and she's sort of attractive. She sees me and she says, Google. And she starts coming over. And she looks at me and says, do you work at Google? I love Google. And proceeds to chat me up, right? Because in those

days, the search results you found on Google were undifferentiated from the search results of Yahoo. If you switched the logos, the search results were the same. But Google presented itself in a way that had mystery and delight and surprise as part of it. And this particular woman fell in love with that feeling. Google, because it is run by technocrats, also veered away from being a brand you could fall in love with. But there are plenty of brands, including Simon Sinek, who human beings have decided to fall in love with in a digital space because it completes them in some way. I can go down this rabbit hole for a very long time because I find it endlessly fascinating. And, you know, I'm a huge fan of the human being.

And I'm even more fan of the human relationship. I have a story to tell everybody. That's one of my favorite stories in the world. And it is a story told of sheer love. And I think my definition of love, what I love about time and energy is they're non-redeemable commodities. If you have two friends and you're moving and one friend says, I'll give you $5,000 towards the moving van, super generous. And the

other friend says, I'll come to your house. I'll fill up the boxes with you. I'll spend all day with you. I'll load the van with you. I'll drive with you to the new house and I'll help you unload all the boxes. And six months later, both of them asked for a favor on the same day, you're going to go with the one who gave their non-redeemable time and energy because it's actually worth more than any amount of money. When we talk about what is love, my definition is that they give without desire for return, but they give time and energy. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I love Thanksgiving. And I came to your house for dinner shortly after Thanksgiving in early December. And because it was close enough, the conversation was, how was your Thanksgiving?

And I went on an unfortunate rant that my Thanksgiving was awful. I went to a friend's giving of a friend of a friend. And this guy fancied himself an amateur chef and he ruined Thanksgiving because he thought it would make it better to take every dish and make them worse. To add foie gras to fricking stuffing and to add too much butter to everything and put caviar in everything. It makes everything so rich and so awful that everything was inedible. One dish like that, two dishes like that is a luxury,. One dish like that, two dishes like that is a luxury, but every dish like that ruins Thanksgiving. And he ruined Thanksgiving for me.

And I told you the story and then we had dinner. Four months later, five months later, many months later, I came to your house for dinner and you made me a full Thanksgiving dinner with all the turkey, all the stuffing, all the traditional things done traditionally. And I think it was just the three of us having dinner, you, Helene, and me. And we had a Thanksgiving feast. And I don't even want to make a full Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving. And you made me a full Thanksgiving for dinner. And if that is not an act of love, then nothing else is. Well, thank you for reminding me of that story. And I that is not an act of love, then nothing else is. Well, thank you for reminding me of that story. And I want to say I probably got more out of it

than you did. Let's go back to the beginning of where this started. Like, when do you know when to do something and when not to? And when do you risk burnout? And I think to your point, which is there is a cost, there is a payment, an emotional payment. And when you say, when the giving of the time and the energy, that I got more out of that expense than your receipt of the gift, I think that is the test of love. That the joy that the giver derives from the extreme expense is actually greater than the receiver. of this is in a post-village world where we all live now, particularly as people seek to become famous, is the difficult work of choosing to be less connected and less famous than you could be. And so most people who send me an email will get an auto-reply that if somebody is going to have a Zoom call with me, it's only going to last 15 minutes. That I'm going to make it very clear to them that there is a bound in the kind of promise I want to make them. Because what I have found is two things happen with people who don't make those bounds.

Either they end up really disappointing you because they have confused the signals they've been sending you. This first started for me when I left my job in 1986. A guy I had been working with who was in the industry I was moving to said on four occasions, as soon as you leave, come to New York. I will introduce you to the people you need to know. We will make sure you get a good start. Four times he said that. And when I really needed it and the time came, nothing. Crickets never, ever got anything from him, with him, to him, whatever, for the next five years. Because he didn't mean it. He just needed to have the feeling in the short run when it wasn't going to be anything that mattered

to feel good. Or people, and I've seen this and you've seen this a lot, people who mean well keep promising it and then they run out and they just break. And they think that they are living a life of substance and meaning, but what they're really doing is sprinting away from the noise in their head by trying to serve as many people as they possibly can. And then they end up disappointing everybody. Yeah. Are you good at saying no? I'm really good at saying no. Have you always been good at it or did you have to learn it? Saying no and failing, I think are two of my best skill. So how did you, I'm not going to ask you how you learned to fail. I'm assuming that that's natural. No, learning to fail was an intentional act, actually. Go on. But this is more interesting, I think, than the no part. The learning to fail, the expression, this might not work, makes some people very uncomfortable.

I made a bunch of t-shirts for a dozen people who spent some time in my office years ago. And it had a picture of Humpty Dumpty and it said, this might not work. And I wear that shirt all the time. A lot of people have trouble wearing that shirt because just saying it makes people really uncomfortable. So what I learned when I was 12, probably 13, I decided to get joy out of anything that was generous, not selfish, but generous where I could add, and this might not work to it. And at first I didn't get joy, but then I did it enough times that I could find the joy. Do you know what I find genius about that?

Is it's an expectation setter. We're so afraid of failing and we're so afraid that our self-worth comes from our success. And if we have any kind of failure, people would judge us. And to say, this might not work, puts the possibility of failure on the table. And so all you have to do is enjoy it. I think you're right. I think for all of us to say this might not work before we say our ideas out loud takes the accountability off of us and makes it a team effort. Right. This might not work.

Let's do this is what the team decides versus I think we should do this. Now the accountability is on me and now it has to work. Otherwise I look like an idiot and I have pardon the Humpty Dumpty pun, but egg on my face. Well done, right? Thank you. Thank you. All right.

So the no part, it's the yeses that end up getting you into trouble because you've sold tomorrow. Whereas if you say no, now you're on the hook for the stuff you've already said yes to. Oh, that is such a good definition. That saying no is what gets you out of trouble. So you don't think of it as rejecting someone and hurting someone's feeling. You think of it as getting yourself out of trouble. The amount of things that I agree to because I'm so worried about how they'll respond,

I end up screwing it up for them and for me. No keeps me out of trouble. Oh, I love that. How do you decide what's worth writing a book about? Like, how did you decide that your latest book was worth writing about? Because you are more prolific than I am. And I'm curious, is it just,

it's partially because you just have discipline to write that I don't have, but I'm also curious when you decide an idea that you have, because you generate a lot of ideas when they're worth writing about. I used to be significantly more prolific than you because I was so close to bankruptcy for so long and new books were the only way forward. So I would wake up in the morning saying the way to to relieve my situation is, what's the next book? So there was a book on a regular schedule. That stopped a bunch of years ago. Now I only write

a book as a last resort. And the last resort is, can I get rid of this idea by sharing it as a blog post? Can I get this idea to the people who need to hear it by doing X, Y, or Z? Or does this idea demand this thing that's going to take a year of my life, that's going to give me sinusitis, that's going to be physically difficult and be a significant professional risk because we look at books differently. So the song of significance happened because I was face to face with a few forms of tragedy and mortality. I was staring at industrial titans belittling and harassing their employees. I was looking at a signal change in the way our culture works. And I said, I feel I have to do this because if I don't, I won't be able to tell myself why. And as I explained to Rich when I was talking to him

two days after it happened, when I was in California, right when I was going to see you, after it happened, when I was in California, right when I was going to see you, I almost drowned. And being in the ocean and knowing that that was probably the end of that, I thought about my family and I thought about the fact that I had to do this project. I didn't know you nearly drowned. Yeah. It's your fault because if I had been at your house, it wouldn't have happened. I have no witty response for that whatsoever. I will accept that responsibility if you are willing to pay for the therapy bills.

I didn't mean to harsh your mellow. You didn't harsh my mellow at all. I'm just glad that the god of the ocean sought fit that day to leave you on our planet. I think it's similar to what you said. It's the similar thing about the turkey, which is, you know, when I write a book, I really don't want to. I do everything in my power not to write a book. You know, I'll give a speech. I'll do a post. Anything not to write it.

I'll give a speech, I'll do a post, anything not to write it. But the idea, it either, instead of things pulling that idea out of my head, the problem is, is everything I see, everything I learn and everybody meet keeps adding to it. And it becomes so overwhelming that I decide to write. And I enjoy moments of it, but as a whole project, I don't enjoy writing books. But to your point, the joy comes afterwards. The joy always feels worth it. Well, for one, I got it out of my body. But two, I get to become a follower of the idea as much as everybody else, because now it's not mine anymore. Now it's a thing all on its own. It's interesting. I used to be able to do a seven hour audio book in eight hours in the studio in one day wow that's the way i recorded

my first 12 but now i i do it in the uh bathroom here which is all padded and everything and they they let me but i can only do 10 minutes a day and um i finished recording it yesterday and i read the acknowledgements and I burst into tears and couldn't stop crying. And I don't think it was because I found joy that I was done. I think it's because the satisfaction of hearing myself say these words and listening to them, I was glad to hear it. It resonated with me.

I felt more human. This all goes back to doing something with love. Yeah. If you can make yourself cry because the project you've given so much of your life to is over, it's because it was a deeply emotional experience and it wasn't transactional. When people come up to me and I've heard people have said this to me, they go, I wrote a book. I'm like, amazing. What was that like? That was super easy. I wrote it in like six weeks. And I always think to myself, oh, that's a shitty book. And the reason is the same as cafeteria food. You can

take the exact same proportions as a home cooked meal and make cafeteria food. The ingredients are the exact same proportions, but home-cooked meal and make cafeteria food. The ingredients are the exact same proportions, but the cafeteria food will taste like shit because it's missing the essential ingredient. It was missing love. And I think the ingredient of love comes with sweat. It comes with energy. It comes with rigor. It comes with sacrifice. It comes with pain. It comes with laughter. It comes from mad fits of inspiration. And at the end of whatever it is, whether it's a book you wrote, a cake you made, or someone you fell in love with, it is overwhelming and hard to put into words. And that's the test. Yeah.

When I think about loving friendships, you know, friendships aren't transactional, to your point. You know, nobody walks around with a notebook in their back pocket and keeps score of what you did for me and what I did for you. Oh, sure they do. Well, true friendship is not based on- Friends don't do that. Sorry. A plenty of people do that. Fine. Friends don't walk around with a notebook where I keep track of everything. And at the end of every month, we account for how many favors you owe me, vice versa. And true friendship is you could have done 15 things for me, 100 things for me, and I've done nothing for you. But the reason we're friends and we love each other is because

you know the one time, the one time you want or need me, you know I'll be there. Or it could simply be that there is a liminal space between us that is worth the effort. And it has nothing to do with incurring an option on future reciprocity. But in fact, it's this liminal space of trust and possibility that fuels, for me, the most important relationships in my life. The friendship I have with you is about liminal space, which is we don't talk that often. The reality is we don't talk that often. And when we do talk to each other, sometimes it's a little transactional.

Hey, quick favor, quick question for you. Sometimes we call each other with a challenge. We try hard to make time for each other when we're in each other's cities, but sometimes we miss each other. But I have unbelievable love for you. It doesn't fit any of the traditional metrics. And all I know is I love you to death and I would do anything for you any day, any time, no matter what. Wow. I might even make you a Thanksgiving dinner without turkey

because you're vegetarian. That's the other thing. You made me a non-vegetarian Thanksgiving, which means you didn't even eat most of it. I mean, who does that? Who does that? All good. I love you.

You're the best, Simon Sinek. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 on-demand classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself.

Take care of each other.