Afford Anything - Put Yourself on the Hook, with Seth Godin

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

#287: Seth Godin is the author of 19 bestselling books on mastery, creativity, business and marketing. His books have been translated into 35 languages, and one of his books was the top bestselling marketing book of the last decade. He’s an inductee to the Marketing Hall of Fame (yes, it exists). Seth joins us today to talk about creativity, the importance of practice, and how to overcome your limiting ideas. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode287 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your energy, your attention, to any limited resource that you need to manage. Saying yes to one thing implicitly means, saying no to countless other alternatives. And that opens up two questions.

First, what matters most to you? Not what does society say should, not maybe even what did you previously think did, but what, when you examine yourself? truly matters in your life. And second, that opens into the question, how do you align your daily, weekly, yearly decisions in a way that reflects that, starting, of course, with daily, because as I say at the beginning of every one of these episodes, answering these two questions is a daily practice. And that is what this podcast is here to explore.

Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant, and on the topic of daily practice, I am thrilled to have the esteemed and prolific and brilliant Seth Godin join us as today's guest. How do you intro a person like Seth Godin? The purpose of introducing somebody on a podcast is to establish their credibility. It's to give the audience a reason for why they should listen to this person who is about to speak. Seth's ideas stand so strongly on their own that I am almost tempted to say, I don't want to intro him. You just listen to the interview, and at the end of it, you tell me if he's worth listening to. Forget his story, forget his achievements, forget everything he's done, just listen to his ideas. They are his distinguishing characteristic,

and yet to hear him explain it, as you're about to hear in this interview, he doesn't believe that he's necessarily more insightful than anyone at all. He simply delivers more often. He has a prolific body of work. And so it is perhaps no surprise that his latest book is called the practice and it's all about shipping creative work. In it, he talks about finding your artistic voice, the voice, the ideas that distinguish you. And he talks about why it is not important to have any type of formal credential in order to succeed. If your goal is to be a creative, whether that's in art or music or business, or the world of nonprofits, if your goal is to create, to have to a vision and bring it into the world and to do so with a spirit of generosity and productivity,

then what matters are not your credentials, what matters is your consistency, because with consistency, with practice, comes results. So in honor of his message, I will skip Seth's credentials entirely. And I hope you enjoy this discussion that he and I have about how to start that business, how to follow your passion, how to do the thing that calls to you, and how to contribute to society by building the skill of creativity. Here he is, Seth Godin. Hi, Seth.

Hi, Paula. How are you? I'm excellent. How are you doing? Fantastic, thank you. Seth, you are very prolific. You've been such a prolific writer for as long as I can recall. How do you continually get inspiration and creativity and insight? Well, you've made a bridge that's a little too far, which is that there is some sort of relationship between publishing your work and having a lot of creativity or insight.

I don't think I have more creativity and insight than other people. I have just made a commitment to shipping my work. Let's elaborate on that, because I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this are sitting in their cars right now thinking, well, geez, if I had to ship my work continuously, I would just be shipping the same thing over and over. Right. So this is what my new book is about, and the practice is about the idea of having a practice. So lots of us have a practice, for example, showering every day, saying something to someone over breakfast or of resume or at work, that isn't the same thing we said yesterday. That every single person who's listening to this has had at least one creative idea, generous idea, at least once has said something funny, has solved an interesting problem, everyone.

So if you can solve an interesting problem once, the question is, why aren't you doing it more than that? So to use sports analogies, which I don't really like, if you can shoot one foul throw and get it into the hoop, there's nothing keeping you from shooting two, except the persistence of a practice. So what I do is I look at the world and I say, is there anything in the world I don't understand? and then I try to explain it. As long as I don't run out of things I don't understand, I'm not going to run out of things to say. If you don't understand a topic, how do you find the confidence to start saying things about it

or even to start exploring it? Right. Now we're getting to the heart of it, which is how do we learn to trust ourselves and how do we lean into this opportunity to weave culture together to make things better when we can't be sure we're right because we've been brainwashed into believing

that we should only speak up when we're sure we're right. I understand why in an industrial setting we want to do that. But for example, back in the day when we could go to say a movie theater, if you're in the movies and you smell something that smells like fire,

you don't make sure it is a blazing inferno before you tell somebody else there might be a fire because that's a generous thing to do. And so in my case, for example, something that happened to me today. Google has a service called the Ngram, which has scanned in more than a million books, and you can do a search on what words appear in those books. So you would discover, for example, that Writers Block did not become a thing until the 1920s and 30s.

Before that, no one in any book wrote about Writers Block. It was just invented one day. what I did was I typed in three words just to see how they stacked up. And the words were kind, smart, and generous. And I discovered that kind appears 10 times more often than smart or generous does in the corpus of books. So I made a blog post about that and included the chart. Well, it turns out that hominims are a problem. Because the word kind means lots of different things.

whereas the word generous means one. And so I was wrong in my gift to the world of saying, look at this. So four hours later, I posted a new post saying hominims. The point being, if I needed to be right every time, I couldn't write anything. I couldn't post anything. I couldn't publish anything.

So I'm not reckless, but I'm trying to be generous in saying, it's dark in here. I'm going to turn on a light, and maybe we'll both learn from that. To the example of what happened today, you're certainly well established enough that a minor gaff like that would not impact your credibility. But for the people who are listening to this, who are worried that if they did the same thing as they are an up-and-coming, as they are trying to establish a reputation for the first time, they might be worried that a gaff like that would harm their credibility, would make them appear sloppy, so to speak. Well, I would be delighted to turn that on its head because I made a tiny error, not even a gaff, in front of a million people. And the person you're talking about might do it in front of 10. So, in fact, I have way more to lose than they do.

But I will tell you that the way I got to a million people was by posting things like the Provincet Helmet Insight, which I wrote 18 years ago, which was a blog post about why is it that if you go to a place that has bike. paths. If you see people riding bikes together, either both of them are wearing a helmet or neither of them is wearing a helmet. And I hypothesized as to why that might be true. I have no proof. It was simply a way of looking at the world. Now, who knows if I'm right or wrong? Maybe Adam Grant will do some actual research and determine the answer. But in the meantime, a whole bunch of people said, wow, that's interesting. I'd like to hear what you have to say tomorrow. And if we approach this with a mindset of generosity to say maybe this is worth thinking about, not because we're hustling people, not because we're hyping, not because we're getting paid to be an influencer,

but simply because we are saying things we'd like to hear, that feels like a generous act to me. How do you distinguish, since you brought up the hustle, the hype, the getting paid to be an influencer, how do you distinguish between acts of generosity that you do? in which you are providing a service to an audience, to a client, to whomever it is that that service is for, how do you distinguish between acts that you do in which you are justified in making a living versus seedyer elements of the hustle? Generous and free are not the same thing. The best way to be generous is often not to be free because you need enrollment and

commitment from the person you seek to serve. that I'm not sure that I want somebody who is doing their profession as a hobby showing up and offering it to me for free. I would rather pay them to have them be on the hook. Because putting ourselves on the hook is a generous act. When I'm talking about hustle and hype, it's simple. If we are manipulating people, what it means is when they find out what we already know, they're going to be annoyed.

when they find out that their doctor was taking kickbacks to prescribe a drug that ended up giving them side effects, they're not happy about that. If the doctor had disclosed it from the beginning, they would have made a different decision. And so what I'm talking about with hype and hustle is somebody who is selfishly trading in trust for attention. And it is a downward cycle, a race to the bottom. And the problem with the race to the bottom is you might win. And the alternative is to decide to make a living doing things where people would miss you if you were gone, where you are transparent about your motives, you are doing it in conjunction with the person you are doing it with and for, and they're eager to do it again.

Does that ever lead to essentially a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation in which people might look at you, on one hand, if you don't have a monetary interest in something and say, you don't have a monetary interest in it, therefore you must not really believe it, you must not be committed to it, you're not on the hook. But on the other hand, if you do have that monetary interest, does it not inherently cloud credibility in some regard? Yeah, that's very profound. I think we can quote Fred Wilson here, who says, no conflict, no interest, that conflict of interest is something that undisclosed can be toxic, but disclosed makes it really straightforward. So if you have an investment advisor who makes a profit when you make a profit, then there's no conflict of interest because you've

disclosed it. And that is different than when it's hidden. So again, you shouldn't take investment advice from someone you meet in a bar. But taking investment advice from someone where you understand that their upside is aligned with your upside, puts them on the hook in a way that might be appropriate for your next move. If the two upsides aren't aligned, like let's say some of the people who are listening to this might be interested in some type of a flat fee for service model. How do you square the circle then when the entrepreneur gets paid regardless of the outcome of the client. Well, the beauty of fee for service is, in fact, they are more aligned than the other direction, because let's say you get to keep a quarter of the upside. Hedge funds have an

incentive to swing big because it doesn't cost them anything to be wrong and they win big if they're right. Whereas fee for service is almost entirely based on word of mouth that I interacted, the surgeon gets paid whether or not you die. But living patients are much more likely to refer new patients than dead ones. So in fact, the surgeon has a real incentive to keep you happy and alive because that's where her next client is going to come from. So in a case like that, where it's disclosed, we basically say to our clients, look, I get paid whether the stock goes up or not, I get paid whether your savings go up or not.

However, you're only going to talk about me if I've served you well. Essentially, the root of that is reputation. Trust and reputation are at the heart of an economy where the gatekeepers have left the building. So you can trick somebody into buying a Kindle book that isn't what it says it is. But you can't trick the 10th person because you got nine one-star reviews along the way. And earning permission, the privilege of talking to people who want to hear from you, is the asset of our time. So on one hand, I'm hearing you talk about the importance of trust and reputation.

On the other hand, there's very much this idea that in order to produce your art, to a certain extent, you need to not worry about what other people think of you or fall prey to the temptation of design by consensus. Yep. How do you find the wisdom to balance those things? too. If you say to the people you want to trust you, I am always right. Everything I bring you is completely without defect and you will never have a problem, then I could see how you could get really trapped. So this is probably what happened to Western Union in 1910 because Western Union

said telegrams always arrive. They're not cheap, but they're guaranteed. So when the telephone came along, they ran away from it. They refused to engage with the telephone because the telephone was flaky new technology. If I compare that to Apple, Google, Microsoft, I can make a huge list of things they've launched that haven't worked or that have been removed from the marketplace because they have never promised that they are perfect. Instead, they have promised to their early adopters that they are interesting. We all have different niches that we can fill that can match our art. So if we look at someone to use art in the literal sense, like Jeff Coons,

who is certainly the highest-grossing artist of my lifetime, Jeff Coons, every five to 10 years, blows up the art he makes and invest everything he has to make a new kind of art. And sometimes he's wrong. Sometimes the world doesn't want it. And he says, but that's my job. My job is not to guarantee that this is the next thing. My job is to have a next thing and to see what you think of it.

What I'm hearing then is to follow your core self without regard to what others may think of it in the creation. and then pull it or iterate if it's not well received. Pretty close. In the practice, I talk about a few variations of this. First of all, everyone is a myth. You will never reach everyone. Even when Carol Burnett was the most popular show on TV, only 50 million people were watching it, 30 million people.

That's not everyone. In my case, 20 bestsellers into it, fewer than 1% of the people in the United States have bought one of my books. That's not everyone. So you begin by getting rid of all the people who don't get the joke, all the people who aren't on the journey, all the people who it doesn't matter what they think.

So if you're an investment advisor for people with assets of $10 million, your mother-in-law's opinion is irrelevant because not for her, right? And then the second thing is the idea of being true to ourselves, I'm not sure there's a muse that is whispering to us about what to do next. I think it is more calculated than that. And what we have is the ability to say, this group I'm serving, this tiny group of people, maybe it's 100 or a thousand, do I have enough empathy for them? Is my taste good enough that I can invent what they're going to say is obvious,

10 minutes before they realize it, because if I can bring them that for them, I will be doing my work. How do you know if your taste is good enough? Right. So what's good taste? And when I was writing the book, I had to do a fair amount of cycling to find anyone who had defined good taste. It's a difficult definition to find, so I made one up.

And my definition of good taste is knowing what your audience wants just before they do. And I think that holds up. So where do you get good taste? taste. While you might be super lucky and have intuitive, magical, nonverbal good taste. And there are definitely people in the music business or the fashion business who have no words for what they do, but just seem to do it. But if you don't have that, and I don't have that, the next best thing is to be able to, through practice, articulate it. That if you talk to a world-class teacher, he or she can say, oh yeah, this lesson's going to work and that lesson isn't going to work.

And you say, well, how do you know? And they say, because I've been in the classroom because I've looked those kids in the eye, because I've tried things like this before. And we discover that good taste is a skill. It is not a gift. And because it's a skill, you can learn it and you can earn it. You mentioned through practice, but it strikes me that there are very, of practice, there's the kind in which you are continually getting rapid feedback and improving,

and then there's the kind in which you're repeating the same mistake over and over. How do you make sure that you are engaged in the type of practice that leads to improvement, particularly if you're in a situation in which you can't get good outside feedback? Well, I think getting good outside feedback is in itself an asset. and one of the reasons that Silicon Valley works is because it is a feedback machine. That everywhere you go, there is somebody who is thinking what you're thinking and is ready to engage with you. Sometimes you get really bad advice. Sometimes there's too much copycat thinking.

But you're definitely getting feedback that would be much harder to get in a different part of the world. So part of this is building a circle of the right people. because you don't need to get your feedback from the masses. You need to get your feedback from people who can be a useful barometer of your taste. And that's why I stand-up comics practice in small rooms, not at Madison Square Garden. Because in the small room, the right people are coming if you go to the right small room, and you can learn from your tryouts faster about what's working and what's not. Now, there are certain fields where we don't have as easy a time of practicing our cycles.

And in those cases, what I recommend to people is you want to be completely open and eager to cycle about your strategy, but you might want to keep your tactics fluid and private until you try them out. Your strategy isn't something that changes very often. your tactics are ways to achieve your strategy. What would be an example of that? So Warren Buffett's strategy has not changed since 1965. He tells everybody what it is. It's really clearly laid out.

He doesn't care because you can't easily steal his strategy because it takes discipline and persistence. The tactics, well, he's not going to tell you the day before he buys some stock what he's going to buy because you'd go buy it, right? And so in my field, I've told people what my strategy is online over and over and over again for a very long time, partly because I would like other people to do what I do, and partly because the tactics are different than the strategy. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. The holidays are right around the corner, and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared.

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This is great. So first off, I'm no fan of confidence because confidence is a trap. You will never know for sure that whatever art you're making is going to work. And if you're waiting for confidence, it's not going to arrive. It is important that we trust the process, that we have a practice, and that is sufficient. efficient to get us to where we want to go. So then the question is, well, how do we gain enough trust in our strategy to rely on it? And the answer is, you should steal one. You should find a strategy that has worked for other people and use that because it would be wonderful if you could

invent a brand new strategy for bringing your work to the world and doing your work. I am not going to discourage that. But there's no prizes for inventing a brand new strategy. The prizes are to have the discernment to see the strategies others have used and to use one of those. With regard to strategies that others have used, others have used their own strategies within a specific context, a specific time, place. How do you develop the discernment to know if that is transferable? So here's a strategy. A strategy is I will gain the trust and appreciation of 20,000 people who care about a specific topic.

And then once I am in an empathic loop with them will create a Patreon situation or a Kickstarter situation where I can actually engage with these people on a financial transaction that solves one of their problems. We have seen people use that strategy 40,000 times. You can learn an entire range of tactics about what works and what doesn't work for that strategy. And now you can apply it to stamp collecting, or you could apply it to butterfly hunting, or you could apply it to whatever thing turns you on that you think is unaddressed. But the strategy, the compass, it's pretty clear. You don't have to invent a new way to engage with humans. you just have to bring it to a tribe of people, a group of people, a problem that's underserved.

Let's stay on that example for a while because so many of the people who go that route who develop a relationship with an audience of 20,000 people who are all very enthusiastic about stamp collecting, many people who do that begin by being purveyors of personal narrative. and as you yourself talk about stories connect, but at the same time, it strikes me that, at least my perception of you is that you're better known for your ideas than for your personal story. How do you become something bigger than a single anecdotal case study? Right. So the personal narrative is another trap. It was invented by the social media people to turn well-rounded, comfortable people into ball. of insecurity because that's how they make money. They make money not by having you as a customer, but by having you as the product,

by making you insecure until you have enough likes, by pushing you to do something that feels easy at first, which is, what are you doing? What's your taste? Be authentic. Authentic is a ridiculous concept, and it's a trap, and no one wants you to be authentic. They want you to be consistent. They want you to be the best version of the person that you are saying you are. That's who we want when we hire any professional.

That's who we want when we go to see a concert or turn on a record. We want the best version of this. And very few people knew the personal life of Joni Mitchell. Very few people knew the personal life of Spike Lee. It wasn't important because the stories that resonate are the ones about us. and we want to hear a story about us through the lens of somebody else for sure, but it's all invented. And we only recently have gotten into this whole Kardashian ridiculous mindset of I want to know every detail about the authentic version of this person. There's no business there.

That's an exception. The reality is what people really care about is the noise in their head. and whatever way you can show up for people to serve them is what they want. So I've worked really hard not to answer the softball questions about what I had for breakfast because I don't want to be well-known personally. I'm not here to do that. I'm here to help people get to where they want to go. How do you avoid that, though, when I'm assuming you go to interviews where people just want

you to elaborate on your bio? I don't answer those questions. How do you politely decline? Because what's behind the question is what's juicy here that will help me with the noise in my head to get to where I want to go? And what I learned a long time ago is telling you what I had for breakfast will not help you get to where you want to go. Just like telling you what kind of pencil I use will not help you become a better writer. What you're actually looking for is reassurance. Reassurance is futile because there's never enough of it.

So instead, what I tried to do is answer a different question regardless of the words that were asked to me. You answer the question that you want them to have asked. Well, it's the one that they really were asking. They were just looking for a different way in. Do people continually try to make you tell your bio? I'm asking because this is a problem in my own life where I try. to steer the conversation towards ideas and people just keep wanting to hear my rehashed story, which I am so bored of.

Well, being bored of one's story is a symptom that you're onto something. Jay Levinson, who I worked with years ago, said, don't change your logo or a tagline because you're bored with it or because your spouse is bored with it. Change it because your accountant is bored with it. But leaving that part aside, telling stories about people who aren't me is what I've been doing my entire career. Because you can pick the stories from the billion that are out there and match them to what the question is about. So I am resisting the temptation to say that I am talented because I'm not, that I am gifted because I'm not, or that I won the birthday lottery, which I did, but is ultimately a prize. problem for other people because they maybe didn't win the birthday lottery as well as I did.

With all of that said, if I can say, wait a minute, think about this person, think about Abigail Ryan, think about this person, think about that person, and I can put together enough of a portfolio of stories that match the pattern, then I can open the door for people to realize they can do it too. But if I were to say to you, tell me about the first business you started. how would you respond? Well, I'm happy to answer questions like that because I think that counts almost like trivia. And there's a desire of human beings to feel some level of intimacy on the detail level

because we don't want to be surrounded by strangers. And so one of the things I've discovered is if you meet somebody, say, in a B2B setting and say, so how did you get this job anyway? they will always say, well, it's a funny story. And then they will tell you a story that's not funny every time. Because the detail is a form of connection that matters. So my origin story involved low-risk copywriting and entrepreneurial ventures when I was a teenager. And the key lesson from them is that they were low-risk.

And I think that that normalizes the behavior for people who feel like their entries are high risk because they're not. And so if I talk about the thing I donated to the public television auction when I was 15 or the ski club I started when I was 17, I wasn't able to do those things because I was rich because I was a teenager who had $7 a week and allow it. I was able to do those things because I had nothing to lose. There are a lot of people who are listening to this who are disenchanted with what they're currently doing in their daily life. And they want to start something different, ideally as soon as possible. But they feel as though they don't have currently the time. They feel as though they'll have to quit their jobs, quit their day jobs before they're able to begin their act too. what would you say to them?

I would say if it was 1982, they might be right. But it's not 1982. So start by saving yourself $200 a month by canceling all your cable subscriptions. And then in the seven hours a day, you have freed up maybe four, if you have self-discipline, start selling things on eBay, start building a substantial body of work in whatever. it is that you do, start figuring out how to solve an interesting problem for people who have money. Maybe it's not interesting to you, but it's definitely interesting to them. That would be a generous act. And if you can solve an interesting problem for people who have money to spend,

to solve their problem, you will discover that within, I don't know, months, you could keep your day job if you want to, but you don't have to. Two objections come to mind right away. There are people who would say, Seth, I don't have four hours a day. I have a full-time job and children and when there's not a pandemic, a commute. Yep. That's the first objection. The second would, well, actually, let's just stay on that for a moment. So how many hours a day do you have that you are currently spending on social media or other forms of digital entertainment? because my hunch is even people who are super busy have one. And one is enough to discover a niche of a group of people who need to be connected.

So I'll give you a super simple example. Back when I was starting one of what company was it, Yoyodun, one of the first internet companies, back when you couldn't get funding. I met this guy, Joe Mancuso, and Joe said, hey, I put together packs. Would you like to join one? And I said, what's a pack? He said, a pack is a group that meets once a month. There's only 12 people in it.

Every month we meet at a different member's office. On that day, you bring your staff in, and they make presentations to your 11 peers for three hours. And then we spend the rest of the day ripping your business to shreds talking to you about your staff, your goals, where you're headed. And then for the next 11 months, you do that for the other 11 people, and around it comes. And you can talk to people who are in my pack. They will tell you that it changed their life. And it costs $3,000 a year. And so I joined, and it was transformative. Some of the people had been in this pack for 10 years. What I discovered is Joe Mancuso only came to one meeting. He didn't come to the rest of the meetings. We didn't

need him there. And what I discovered is he was running 30 of them. Do the math. Right. So what would it take for you to find five entrepreneurs or professionals or people who do a thing where they make a living who feel disconnected, who need a mastermind group, who want to be supported, who would meet once a week in Zoom for a guided conversation about where they're going next, right? What would happen? What would happened if you built one just with people who trusted you and didn't charge until you were good at it and then started spinning them up. Do you think you could do something like that in an hour a day? I think you could. With Alt MBA, the message or the focus there is that recognition that you can do more in a day than you previously thought. But many people are so tied to a

limiting belief around their time, that what you're challenging isn't simply a mathematical reality of 168 hours a week. It's an identity that's formed around the notion that I don't have time. How do you challenge successfully something that is so tied to identity? This is great. So the Alt-MBA is now an independent B-Corp that we saw. spun off a little while ago. I am not in it. I never have been. It is a structured community that transforms people's lives. And it does it exactly the way you just described. Here's how you were trained to put yourself off the hook. If you do what you're told in school, you get good grades. If you get good grades, you go to the placement office. You go to the placement office. You get a job. If you get a

job, they tell you what to do all day. And if you do what they say, you are off the hook. Then you can go home at the end of the day and you can relax. That's how we built the industrial system. But what happens if you decide to be on the hook? What happens if you insist on a job where you actually make decisions for which you are responsible? What happens if your job is not to do your job? What happens if your job is to figure out what your job is? Because that's what all the good jobs are. In this age of AI and outsourcing, we are seeing more and more that any job where someone tells what to do all day is not a good job and is not a safe job or a stable job. That what we seek to do is to become linchpins, people who are hard to describe because

our job is to figure out what to do next, which puts us on the hook. And so, you know, in the course of this conversation with you, where I've learned at least as much from you as you have learned from me, we cannot possibly persuade everybody that there is a risk-free off-the-hook way to get to where you want to go, because there isn't. But it is entirely possible, and there's a preponderance of evidence to show that when you're ready to put yourself on the hook, the world is ready to say yes. Putting yourself on the hook as an action, does challenging your identity precede the action? We become what we do.

We don't do what we've become. It's too late by then. You become what, if you want to be a runner, you just go running every day for 30 days and then you're a runner. The first day you were not a runner. You were pretending to be a runner. And one day, the doing becomes who you are. Well, Seth, we're coming to the end of our time. I'll wrap up with one final question.

And this is not even remotely related to what we talked about, but it's a topic of interest for the audience. What do you invest in? The one thing I don't have enough of is time, and the one thing that I truly treasure is trust. So I try to invest time to earn trust so I can make things better. Excellent. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Oh, what a privilege. Thank you for turning on lights for so many people, Paula.

It's really a lot of work to do what you do. And showing up on the regular to do it, I for one appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much to Seth for spending this time with us and for sharing such amazing wisdom. What are the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? We're going to take one final break for a word from our sponsors and when we come back, four key takeaways that you don't want to miss. Stay tuned.

What are a few of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are four. Number one, start before you're sure. Many people think that they need to be sure of something before they do it, before they write it, before they say it. as long as you are clear that you are exploring ideas, that you are not expressing opinion as though it's fact, as long as you are honest about the fact that you are musing with concepts, that you're asking questions, playing with ideas, and that you're willing to change when you realize that you're wrong or when you obtain new information. So long as you do that, then you will always have something to contribute.

What I do is I look at the world and I say, is there anything in the world I don't understand? And then I try to explain it. As long as I don't run out of things I don't understand, I'm not going to run out of things to say. It is okay to learn in public. You do not need to be absolutely right before you say something, before you write something, before you tinker with something. In fact, the only way that you will become better is when you start at the beginning. As a beginner, practice in public, learn in public, but start before you're sure. Because ultimately it's not about being right.

It's about learning alongside those whom you serve. If I needed to be right every time, I couldn't write anything. I couldn't post anything. I couldn't publish anything. So I'm not reckless, but I'm trying to be generous in saying, it's dark in here. I'm going to turn on a light, and maybe we'll both learn from that. So that is key takeaway number one. Start before you're sure.

Key takeaway number two, create accountability, both for yourself and for the people around you. If there is something you want to do, whether it's start a business, start a nonprofit, go back to college, write a novel, invest in real estate, whatever it is that you want to do, create some type of external forcing mechanism in which you are accountable. You are on the hook for taking the first step towards doing the things. that you say you want to do. And not only must you be accountable, but the people around you who are involved in that project must also be accountable. They must also be on the hook. Their relationship with you and their reputation must be tied to your success so that your interests are aligned,

you're doing good work, and you're both or all on the hook. Generous and free are not the same thing. The best way to be generous is often not to be free because you need enrollment and commitment from the person you seek to serve. That I'm not sure that I want somebody who is doing their profession as a hobby showing up and offering it to me for free. I would rather pay them to have them be on the hook because putting ourselves on the hook is a generous act. So create accountability both for yourself and for the other people involved in your project. That is key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three, it's not about you.

It's about them. When somebody asks, how did you do it? What they're really asking is, how can I do it? And the problem with answering the question at face value, the question of how do you do it, is that you are simply one single anecdotal case study whose efforts and results may or may not be replicable. This is true regardless of whether the conversation is, how did you start a business? How did you begin investing? How did you parent? Whenever anybody asks, how did you do it? What they really want to know is, is this possible for me? And if so,

how? What will I face? What are the challenges? What can I learn from your story? So ultimately, you might think that you're telling your story, but it's never your story. It's not about you. It's about them. People want to learn about themselves. What can they do? How can they improve? How can they solve their own problems. And your job as the person on the other end is to help them answer that question. Because your knowledge about a given field, whether that field is business or investing or parenting or quilting or stamp collecting, your knowledge about that field is not limited solely to your own experience. If that was the limitation of your knowledge, it would be rather myopic. Your knowledge about that field comes from hours of thinking, writing, listening, talking,

asking questions, playing with ideas, as we talked about in Key Takeway Number One, learning in public and learning out loud. And so if somebody is asking you for your story, what they really are asking is for your help. And it is your job to get to the root of what they're asking and to be a guide that helps them find the way. Now, when Seth said, personal narrative is another trap, I was thrilled. I was thrilled. Because here's someone who has built a reputation on his respect for the power of storytelling, and yet even he understands this thing that I have long felt, but have heard very few people articulate, which is personal narrative is a trap.

Personal narrative is another trap. It was invented by the social media people to turn well-rounded, comfortable people into balls of insecurity because that's how they make money. They make money not by having you as a customer, but by having you as the product, by making you insecure until you have enough likes, by pushing you to do something that feels easy at first, which is, what are you doing? What's your taste? Be authentic. Authentic is a ridiculous concept and it's a trap and no one wants you to be authentic. They want you to be consistent. They want you to be the best version of the person that you are saying you are. That's who we want when we hire any professional. that's who we want when we go to see a concert or turn on a record, right? We want the best version of this. Very few people knew the personal life of Joni Mitchell. Very few people knew the personal life of Spike Lee. It wasn't important because the stories that resonate are the ones about us.

And we want to hear a story about us through the lens of somebody else, for sure, but it's all invented. Exactly, exactly. I have been feeling and thinking this for a long time, and this is one of the many reasons why I cannot stand the oversaturated how I did it genre, which features nothing but rehashed case studies over and over and over that are never tied into a broader context. The preveillance of personal narrative when stripped away from its context, when sanitized into digestible sound bites, and when told without the greater context, of underlying principles or universal principles, when told without any reference to frameworks or prisms or mental models or any hint of introspection, those stories, those aren't going to provide the help or insight that you're looking for. As Seth says, at most it will provide momentary reassurance, but that's not what we need.

What's behind the question is, what's juicy here that will help me with the noise, in my head to get to where I want to go. And what I learned a long time ago is telling you what I had for breakfast will not help you get to where you want to go. Just like telling you what kind of pencil I use will not help you become a better writer. What you're actually looking for is reassurance. Reassurance is futile because there's never enough of it. Reassurance is futile because it's a bandaid trying to cover a much deeper wound. You don't need and you are not optimally served by someone giving you pat reassurances in the form of simplistic stories with clean,

uncomplicated narrative arcs that are told in a way in which they're fancied up with platitudes. People may say that that's motivational, but to quote the late legendary Tony Shea, there is a distinction between motivation and inspiration. And he says, quote, inspire through values and motivation takes care of itself. So this is all to say that the takeaway from this section of our conversation is that as you go out there and create your work and serve your communities, whether you run a quilting business or own a gardening supply chain, whether you're writing a screenplay or creating a community group to raise funds for cancer, as you go through the daily practice of creating whatever it is that you are creating, remember, it's not about you, it's about them. So focus first and

foremost on how you can be of maximum benefit and service to others and focus on ideas rather than getting distracted by narrative comparison. So that is key takeaway number three. Finally, key takeaway number four, if you want to get to where you want to go, put yourself on the hook. This is something of a callback to that second key takeaway, create accountability, but it's subtly different. Because in this key takeaway, which happens towards the end of the conversation, Seth describes how society is set up to let us off the hook and how it's up to us, each of us, to do better. Here's how you were trained to put yourself off the hook.

If you do what you're told in school, you get good grades. If you get good grades, you go to the placement office. You go to the placement office, you get a job. If you get a job, they tell you what to do all day. and if you do what they say, you are off the hook. Then you can go home at the end of the day and you can relax. That's how we built the industrial system. But what happens if you decide to be on the hook?

What happens if you insist on a job where you actually make decisions for which you are responsible? What happens if your job is not to do your job? What happens if your job is to figure out what your job is? Because that's what all the good jobs are. And in this age of AI and outsourcing, we are seeing more and more that any job where someone tells you what to do all day is not a good job and is not a safe job or a stable job. That what we seek to do is to become linchpins, people who are hard to describe because our job is to figure out what to do next, which puts us on the hook. And so if you want to do the things you dream about, if you want to transfer idea into action, Put yourself on the hook.

Those are four key takeaways from this conversation with Seth Godin. But that is today's episode. There's one last thing that I'd like to talk about, a tragedy that took place over the weekend. Earlier, I mentioned a quote from the late Tony Shea, the founder and CEO of Zappos. Over this long holiday weekend, over Thanksgiving weekend on Friday, Tony passed away at the age of 46.

He died of complications that arose from being trapped in a housefire. The rest of the world may recognize Tony for creating Zappos, as well as for some of his innovative management styles like Holocry and his over-the-top commitment to customer service, which is a big, big piece of what made Zappos what it is. But as most of my longtime listeners know, I have lived in downtown Las Vegas for the last five years.

And Tony is the reason that that was possible. When Tony first arrived in downtown Las Vegas, it was a largely dilapidated, rundown neighborhood with a bit of tourism, but almost no residential. No residential vibe, no feel, no community, no collisions that happen as people are walking down the sidewalk.

When Tony first arrived in Las Vegas, downtown had none of that. And he had the vision to recognize downtown Vegas, for what it was at the time, but for what it could be. He was a man who reasoned from first principles and did not accept the status quo as a given. Both his vision and his generosity helped shape downtown Vegas into what it is today, and it has been my home for the last five years. So I want to dedicate this episode to the memory of the late Tony Shea. I'd like to encourage you to go online, read some of his quotes, watch his speeches, read his book delivering happiness. I'll be

honest, I own a copy of it. I haven't gotten around to reading it. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years now. He and I crossed paths about a dozen times, but I never knew him well. Most of the time, whenever we cross paths, we would exchange pleasantries, but that was the extent of our conversation. About three years ago, one of my friends texted me and asked me if I wanted to go to a movie, and I said, sure. It was in the middle of the day, on a weekday. I went and Tony had been the one to organize the outing and there were five of us in total. Tony arranged for the car and the driver and we went out to a casino way out in the suburbs, like a nondescript suburb with a gigantic parking lot and a sprawling casino that has a

movie theater in the back. So we go out to the suburbs and we see a movie. Like I said, the theater's in a casino, so of course there are bars everywhere. So afterwards we come out of the movie, we go to a bar. He orders a round of Furnay, which is a. this Italian liqueur. And it was a small group of us, so we were able to spend some time chatting then. But the main thing that I noticed was he's not very talkative. He tends to be quiet. He tends to observe. He tends to listen. Every time that I saw him in a social setting, he was doing precisely that he was the linchpin, and yet he was quiet, not being in the center of attention through being ostentatious or showy or clamoring for attention,

but rather attention was thrust upon him because he was so good at leading from behind and encouraging people to come together from the grassroots up. He placed enormous value on community and humility, and I think that that is a legacy that I hope will ripple out for years to come. So thank you for listening to this homage, and thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community.

I am so honored that you decided to spend this time here, listening to this, that you chose to spend this time with us, and that is something I will never take for granted, so thank you. And if you enjoyed today's podcast, please share it with a friend or a family member. You can find links for sharing and access the show notes at affordanything.com slash episode 287. That's afford anything.com slash episode 287.

You can also subscribe to the show notes at afford anything.com slash show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pan. And I will catch you in the next episode.