Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #472: Fear LESS, Plan MORE, Achieve BIG with Seth Godin, ​​Founder of the Carbon Almanac, Blogger, & Author

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

In This Episode You Will Learn About:  Why fear is a SIGNAL, not a stop sign How to succeed by STRATEGIZING SMARTER, not hustling harder Why you should focus on WHO you’re here to help How to make empathy your SECRET WEAPON Resources: Website: sethgodin.com Check Out Seth’s Blog Read This is Strategy: Make Better Plans Instagram & LinkedIn: @sethgoodin  Twitter/X: @thisissethsblog Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/monahan Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/MONAHAN. Want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic? Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com/MONAHAN. Get 10% off your first Mitopure order at timeline.com/CONFIDENCE. Get 15% off your first order when you use code CONFIDENCE15 at checkout at jennikayne.com. Call my digital clone at 201-897-2553!  Visit heathermonahan.com Reach out to me on Instagram & LinkedIn Sign up for my mailing list: heathermonahan.com/mailing-list/  Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Show Notes:  What if success wasn’t about working harder, but working SMARTER? My conversation with Seth Godin completely shifted my perspective. Strategy isn’t about hustling faster—it’s about PAUSING and asking, “Am I headed in the right direction?” Seth made it CRYSTAL CLEAR: you can’t serve everyone, and that’s where your true power lies. FOCUS on who you’re truly here to help, and don’t be afraid to say “no” to the rest. My biggest AHA moment? Fear is ALWAYS there, but it’s not your enemy—it’s your signal that you’re stepping into something GREAT. If you want to learn how to navigate fear, sharpen your strategy, and make bold, impactful moves, Seth’s new book This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans is a must-read. Push through, STAY FOCUSED, and watch the MAGIC unfold. If You Liked This Episode You Might Also Like These Episodes: #79: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice #426: The Secret To Breaking The Glass Ceiling & Claiming Your Spot In The C-suite with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo Bestselling Author, Speaker, & former CEO of Celebrity Cruises #410: What To Do BEFORE You Get Fired: Build Your Brand, Find Opportunities, & Stay Resilient with Heather!

We are all afraid. We're all afraid. And that fear expresses itself in an enormous number of ways. The class clown in third grade isn't the class clown because they're Jerry Seinfeld. They're the class clown because they're afraid of something. And if we can find out where the fear is and help them

understand how to protect that little tiny voice to then get to where they want to go, Sometimes it will get us there. Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Hi and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with me this week. You know it is very rare that I have a guest on multiple times,

but today we are in for a treat. We've got Seth going back on the show again. I'm so glad you're back here with me this week. You know it is very rare that I have a guest on multiple times, but today we are in for a treat. We've got Seth Godin back on the show again. And we've got a lot of stuff to talk about because a lot has been happening. I mean, he's the author of 21 international bestselling books. He changes the way people think about marketing. His book's been translated into over 38 languages.

I mean, this is incredible what he's created and the value he's adding. And he's adding it today for you. His breakthrough books include Unleashing the Idea Virus, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes, The Dip, Lynchpin, The Practice. This is marketing. His newest book, This is Strategy. We're going to get into that today. It's an essential guide to thinking strategically in a complex, ever-changing world. He writes one of the most popular daily blogs in the world and has given five TED Talks. I thought it was big that I gave one.

He's the founder of the Alt MBA, the former VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo, and the founder of the pioneering online startup, YoYo Dine. Seth, thank you so much for being here today. It's a pleasure. How have you been, Heather? I have been great, but I'm excited to get into this. First of all, strategy is an elusive

thing, as you know. Myself included in this busy world that we live in where it's like, you're just trying to get things done. Oftentimes, I know for myself, strategy is the one thing I kind of dropped the ball on. So why did you write a whole book about it? You know, it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. And there are all these people online trying to tell you to go faster and faster and faster. And this hustle and this tactic and this technique

and this microphone, but it might be worth spending an hour to having a conversation about where you're going and why. Who are you here to serve? What's the change you seek to make? Because if you do it with the systems in our world, it's a lot easier than if you do it against them. That is well said, and I really appreciate the reminder. How do you define strategy in the context of the book?

Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It's not a promise, it's not a map, it's not a plan. If you follow all the steps you'll definitely get the outcome. Instead it's how we make decisions. It's our ability to see time, to have empathy for the people we're connecting with. It is an entire basket filled of choices that our grandparents didn't have to make because they just had a job. They just did what they were told. But every one of us gets tomorrow over again. And how you decide to spend it is one of the most important decisions you can make.

So where are you suggesting people begin to make this something that they can actually incorporate into their daily lives? Well, the first step is the hardest one, which is having the guts to talk about it. To be able to say to someone, it's not an intuitive strategy, I have a way to describe it. So I'll give you an example. A few years ago, I got hired by a financial institution to interview all these famous people.

And one of the people I interviewed was a very well-known fashion designer. And I don't know a lot about the fashion industry. So I read their two autobiographies, read both of them. And I came with all these detailed, thoughtful questions. And after about two minutes, it was clear that not only hadn't this person written their autobiography, they hadn't even read it. Either one, they hadn't done either one. They had no clue. They were just intuitive. They got lucky early, so they did it again, and then they did it again. But when the world changes, the luck runs out because you haven't talked about you're not resilient. So that's the first step is to talk about it.

Then what do we say? Well, I want to know who exactly are you here for? Because that tells me all the people you're not here for who you should be ignoring. And then I want to know what is the change you're seeking to make? Because if you're not trying to make a change happen, why are you wasting our time? And so if we can be very clear about that, then we can ask some honest questions about whether those people want to be changed and whether the system is going to help us connect and lead, or whether we're always going to be drowning. What do you mean by who we should be ignoring?

I've never heard it phrased that way specifically before. who we should be ignoring. I've never heard it phrased that way specifically before. Okay. So if there's someone in the Czech Republic or Bangalore who says, Heather's podcast is stupid because I don't understand it, it's not in my language, you should ignore those people because your podcast is only for people who speak English, right? Let's extend that a little further, right? If I am doing a project where I'm teaching people woodworking using hand tools and someone marches up and says, what are you doing? You should be using an electric planer and a bandsaw. I can say, it's not for you.

And we can get more and more specific. If you go to a fancy restaurant and say, this is ridiculous. It's so much more expensive than McDonald's. They shouldn't argue with you. They should say McDonald's is right down the street. Thanks for stopping by. So people like us do things like this. What are the things like this?

Who are the people like us? And it's not what you look like. It's what you believe. For people who believe blank, I am here to give you blank. If you're not willing to say that, you're always going to be frazzled because the false proxies you're measuring, your YouTube likes or your followers, whatever, are going to confuse you because the easiest way to be popular on social media is to do something that you're not proud of that just makes your numbers go up. But that's not why you're here.

You just remind me of something. When I wrote my second book, the first time I wrote self-published, I did whatever I wanted, right? And so I just wrote for whoever I thought I was speaking to. And I didn't get really granular to what you're saying, right? However, my second book was with HarperCollins Leadership, and they are very much in charge of what you're doing.

And they were very much like what you're saying, Seth. You know, no, Heather, you cannot write for men and women. No, you can't write for this massive audience. But I want to, and I know you don't like this, and I get it, people tell me I'm wrong all the time. I want to help anybody that needs help that could be, I don't care if you're a man, I don't care if you're a woman, I don't care if you're in this industry or that one

or you're at this age or not. So where is it that I'm missing? Because I struggle so much with saying no to people that I feel like I could help. Well, we're confusing psychographics and demographics. I don't care very much about demographics. What someone looks like naked isn't important, right? Who their parents were isn't important. I care about what they believe. So if someone walks into a bookstore and goes to the self-help section, they're already announcing what they believe. They're the kind of person that thinks a self-help book can help. And if your editor is pushing you to say, no, no, no,

make sure you include stuff for people who hate self-help books, you should say, this is not for those people. That is the kind of niching up I'm talking about. Being very clear about the beliefs and desires of the people we seek to serve. So let's talk about systems for a second and I'll start with weddings. How much should a wedding cost? Right? Now... The person and what type of wherewithal they have to spend. But if the goal of the wedding is to simply be a legal transaction, the answer is $25. The answer in our culture is a wedding should cost

exactly as much as my best friend's wedding, but a little more, right? Because that's a system. And there isn't an absolute right answer to the question, as you just pointed out. Instead, it's what context are you in? And so persuading someone that they should have a destination wedding with six attendees doesn't work

if their belief in the system they're in is, this is my chance to be princess for a day, it needs to be the big blow I've always dreamed of, and it's gonna cost $120,000. And so that's a systems choice. No one in the world to cost $120,000. And so that's a systems choice. No one in the world would have $120,000 wedding if before this the most anyone ever spent was $1,000.

That would never have happened. We incrementally got there because of systems. So when you think about your book, it has a genre. Other books came before you. It rhymes with some of those books. So I'm not saying don't help people who need help. I'm saying don't help people who aren't willing to believe what you need them to believe in order to help them. Does that go back to this concept of like defining the ideal avatar before we create the work?

Yes, having a persona in mind helps a lot. And it also helps us get to the truth of this authenticity nonsense. Because it's very tempting to say, I'm just being the authentic me. The fact is no one wants you to be authentic. They want you to be consistent. They want you to be the best version of you.

That if you're having a terrible day and you disappoint the people best version of you. That if you're having a terrible day and you disappoint the people in front of you, you're captured on YouTube doing something horrible, that's not good because it was authentic. That was authentically you having a tantrum, but that's not good. Professionals are consistent.

Friends can be authentic. And so what we seek to do is say, I have this avatar of someone I'm trying to help. I have this assertion of the change that I am trying to make and where they seek to go. And now I will work consistently to make a promise and keep it for them. That is the hard work of being a professional.

But for people doing that, and back to this idea of strategy, when do you know or not know, this strategy is panning out and working or it's not and I need to shift and try something different. So this starts us down the road of the smallest viable audience. That when Oprah first put her show on, the number of people who watched it was in the thousands, not the millions. That when your podcast started,

the first week you had 100 listeners. How do you get beyond that? Well, we start with the smallest group of people who if we could satisfy them, it would be enough. And then if we deliver the magic we promised, they will tell the others. So if you're doing your work and the people you're doing it for

aren't telling anyone else you need to do better work because the only way the word is going to spread is not by you getting the word out or hustling. It's going to spread because the people you changed told someone else because it helped them to tell someone else. But does that go back to this is an interesting point. I'm super curious to hear what you have to say about it. Does that go back to us? Asking for what we want make sure to share the show with someone, you know So you hear some podcast hosts for that example always promoting please share the show Make sure you share a show with one person I oftentimes just forget that because I get caught up in whatever it is

We're teaching or learning that day from our guests So are you saying that's something that happens organically when you're helping the right people or it's something that we need to ask more people to do more things? Yeah. I don't think asking is as effective as insurance brokers think it is. If you think about Susan Cain's TED Talk, which is one of the top 10 TED Talks of all time, she didn't finish by saying, hey, everyone who thinks they're shy, please share this with everyone you know. No. How did it get to 20,

30, 40 million people? The answer is people who are quiet, people who are shy said, if I share this, someone will understand me. I can send this to my boss or my cousin and I don't have to explain myself. She explained myself for me. That's why they shared it. When I made Purple Coward, put it in a milk carton, there were only 5,000 of these in the world with the first batch. People put it on their desk, not because they wanted to promote Seth Godin, but because if their boss asked them about it, work would get better for them. Their projects would get better. Their status would go up. So I offered them a tool that would help them get to where they want to go.

So a book like The Four Agreements, how has it sold millions and millions of copies? It's because someone in relationship hands it to someone else in relationship and says, if we can read this together, our lives will get better. So no, you don't want to say, or you don't have to say, please give us a rating and share this. That's not how it works. It works because you make something that other people decide to share. ["Purple Cow," by L.A.P.A.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N.D.A.N. I ask you to try to find your passion. But you make it sound so easy, right? Like the examples, the Purple Cow, the Four Agreements, these are like unicorns out there. They've done incredibly well. How do we create the strategy

to formulate something that can go viral like that on its own? I can't name something that's done very well because someone hustled and hassled and kept promoting it over and over again, right? That the things that work, ever since Kind of Blue, Miles Davis, or all the way back to David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, they work because they strike a chord with people in a way that caused them to change it.

The thing that's magic is the cost of you trying is so low. Right, so I've written 9,000 blog posts in a row, and not one of them has won the internet. Not one of my blog posts has gone insanely viral. But every day, I have a chance to write something that maybe some of my readers want to share. And that simple idea, repeated daily, got me from 100 readers to a million readers, without hassling anybody, without being written up in the New York Times, without being on 60 Minutes, drip, drip, drip. That is the way all ideas grow. All movements grow. Sigmund Freud only had a couple of patients

his first week and now, right? So that's what we seek to do. Is it a guarantee? Of course not. But seeing it is better than just hoping to get lucky. How long did it take you to go from a hundred blog readers to a million? Probably seven or eight years. It's a commitment to consistency, like you said, but you weren't based on the feedback you were getting in the shares, you felt you were on the right path. That's right. If you're showing up at a coffee house or a jazz club and at the end of your gig, no one comes up and says,

where are you performing next? I want to bring my friends. Your gig wasn't that good, right? When we think about Arlo Guthrie, the beloved Arlo Guthrie, how did Arlo Guthrie become famous? Partly because his dad was super famous. That got him invited to the Newport Folk Festival.

He performed for 15 people. Two hours later, they dragged him to a slightly bigger Festival. He performed for 15 people. Two hours later, they dragged him to a slightly bigger room and he performed for 40 people. And then by that night, he performed for everyone at the Newport Folk Festival. That's an accelerated version of what I'm talking about, right? Because there were plenty of other people

who performed that day at Newport. That didn't happen to them. So you're trying to catch lightning in a bottle when you're doing this work. But at least you know there's a bottle and at least you know there's lightning. One of the things that you talk about in the book is the role of empathy.

And I'm wondering if you could get into a little bit of how empathy, because it doesn't sound to me, strategic sounds, you know, like strategy. I would never partner empathy and strategy together. So I'm interested in you explaining around that. Yes, so empathy is a form of kindness, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is you have

to acknowledge that other people have power. Other people have agency. They can make choices. So if you want to be in charge of the whole world and say, I worked really hard on this. Everyone has to buy it. You're going to be a frustrated person. But if you acknowledge that that person has a choice to buy it or not, I better make something

they like, that's empathy. To surrender our control to let other people make a choice. And again, so much frustration from people who've been brainwashed by the TikTok influencer nonsense thing is they want to be in charge. Instead of saying, I bet there's somebody who, if I elevated them, would make the choice to come with me. So having created as much as you have, right, you know, 20-something books, a million of the blog posts,

you're constantly creating, putting yourself out there, which a lot of people are afraid to do, and you know this, and I'm sure you, at some point, have struggled with it. At some point, you had something that didn't do well, right? Like one of the books didn't do as well as the other one of the blog posts didn't. How do you pick yourself back up to say, I'm gonna go back at it again tomorrow?

Well, this is part of the game and part of strategy, which is I'm not putting myself out there. I'm putting my idea out there. I am putting the thing I crafted out there. Here, I made this. I didn't say, it's me, because people in the world don't know me. I am playing the role of me when I am being a professional. And half my blog posts have done less than average.

Half my books have sold less than average. That's the deal. When I got started in the book business, I got 800 rejection letters in a row in the first year. 800 times. Someone bought a stamp, put it on an envelope, and mailed it to me. They said, no, no, no. And it was very easy to take it personally until I realized they don't know me. They just don't like this idea.

So what can I learn from this about the idea, not about me? And that's why authenticity is a trap and why it destroys people, particularly aimed at women. There's a misogyny that goes with it. It says, tell us who your true self is, and now we're going to hate you. As opposed to, put on a show, make a move, here it is. You like it or you don't like it.

And if you don't like it, I'm going to go do a different thing. Then why is the world telling us to be authentic? Because I feel like I'm hearing that message. If you want to find success, you've got to own your voice, step into your power, be your authentic self, be different. What does that mean? Well, there's two reasons. One, the crowd always loves to see someone on stage bleeding. And so there's a demand for that sort of Amy Winehouse meltdown.

And two, it's the easiest thing to sell to creators because creators feel like they deserve to be seen if they're going to be judged for who they are. And when I show up and talk about this, lots of people roll their eyes at me and say, no, no, no, I want to be authentic. I'm like, yeah, be authentic at home. Be authentic for your friends. But if you're going to have a microphone, please put on a show and do it consistently. That's fair.

That's very, very fair. And I think that will comfort a lot of women to hear that even though it's the opposite of what I'm hearing so often, popular, especially on social media right now. When you talk about strategies and you're sharing these tactics, and there's so many tactics here in the book around strategies, how does that differ than the more traditional type of corporate strategies maybe most people are dealing with or have heard of? there's so many tactics here in the book around strategies. How does that differ than the more traditional type of corporate strategies maybe most people are dealing with or have heard of?

Okay, so most corporations do planning, not strategy. They're managers. They wanna know, if I do all the steps, am I gonna get a promotion? If I do all the steps, is this going to work? Every once in a while, corporations understand strategy and use it in astonishingly powerful ways. So I'll give you an example.

When women started going to work outside the home, a combination of change in our culture and birth control, the folks at Duncan-Hinds figured out that things like cake mix would be a good strategy. Because all of a sudden, there was all this pressure on women to keep doing their full-time job of creating a home, and also do a full-time job of having a job. And so keep making food convenient was a 60-year-long strategy for General Foods, General Mills, Duncan Hines, and the rest of them. Every time you made food more convenient, sales went up.

That's a strategy, right? You're not always going to be right, but the guy who launched Gogurt was right. Gogurt is just yogurt in a more convenient form. That's a strategy. IBM had a strategy of you can't get fired for buying IBM, meaning we sell expensive stuff that's not cutting edge, that might not be the best thing, but we have so many salespeople and such good support, you're not going gonna get in trouble. We're gonna make everyone in your company happy all the time.

And Microsoft came along and they said, our strategy is to be the IBM of software. And every time they did that, things got better. So what we're looking for is a simple arc of, for the kind of people we're seeking to serve, this is the change we offer them. And Oprah has done that beautifully. My friend Krista Tippett has done that beautifully. Martha Stewart has done that brilliantly. She's taken an interesting turn in the last

couple of years. But the strategies, let's take homemaking, which everybody used to do because they had to, into something that some people weaponize as a hobby. And Martha is going to teach you how to like do that, how to paint things that are named after eggshells and, you know, alphabetize your crudite and stuff, because there was going to be someone who did that might as well be her. So that's a strategy, simple to describe, hard to stick with. So how often should people be trying to create a new strategy or evaluating if they even have a strategy in place?

I'm guessing you don't have a strategy in place. And it needs to change when systems change. And systems change when they are forced to. They never want to. They change when communication changes, or computing, or technology changes. So AI is massively changing all of these systems, right? So the system of buying not particularly expensive illustration and art is gonna be completely turned

upside down, because now you can buy it for free. And let's say I'm a publisher of science fiction novels. I used to pay $300, $400 for every cover, and there were people who could make a living doing that. Now I can get it for free, which means that whole system is going to be upended. In the middle of that shift, someone's going to come in with a new strategy,

because the system is going to want something new to deal with the massive shift that we're doing. Work from home was this complete upending of an old system. So someone like Zoom can show up and say, we've got the answer for all of these companies that need the power that comes from having meetings. Don't worry, we got you covered. It's the same goals, but the system changed. Does that make sense? It does. But to your point with AI now, that's essentially disrupting every industry. So it's based on what you're saying that everybody needs to create a new strategy right now. I mean, I'm not sure Pizza Place does, but in general, if you are used to working with

ideas or images or data, all of that is going to change so much. You're going to have to figure out what to do. My friend Lisa worked with the Kodak company. Kodak was everything. Kodak completely owned the film business. Turns out Kodak invented digital photography. Kodak had the patents on all the original digital cameras. Kodak had everything they needed to win at digital.

And they bought Lisa's company, which was a digital photography company, and she's sitting with the chairman of the board or the president or something in Rochester, New York. And she says, what are you doing? It's obvious film is going away. And you own all the stuff for digital. Why don't you just shrink film over the next three or four years, five years, so that you can shift? And he said, Lisa, how many processes do you think are involved in making a roll of film? And Lisa says, I have no idea.

And he says, 34. Come over here. And they're on the sixth floor, the biggest building on the Rochester Kodak campus. And he points out the window, he says, how many buildings do you see? And there are 34 buildings. There's one building on the Kodak campus

for every process to make a roll of film. So they couldn't shrink it, because all the buildings had to stay open. And they were paralyzed, because their strategy of 100 years is make photography cheaper and more convenient, and you will win. And so film was everything and they went bankrupt

because even though they saw the system was gonna change, they didn't have the guts to do anything about it. So how have you changed your strategy now that AI has come into your world? The biggest shift in my daily life after I worked on the carbon Almanac as a volunteer for a year and a half, is I stopped flying. So my main source of income was flying places

and giving speeches, I did that a thousand times. Haven't been on a plane for work in three years and I'm in no hurry to start again. And that shift coincided with COVID, coincided with conferences becoming virtual. So now I show up around the world digitally. So yesterday I was in 90 countries. And that would be really hard to do on an airplane.

So that's one shift. Another shift is that technology changed the social media landscape, beginning with Twitter and then all the other social media networks, TikTok. And I looked at that and I said, there's an opportunity here for someone who wants to make aggressive, slightly in your face, really short form content. And I said, I am not going to do that because what I want to stand for doesn't match that. I didn't want to become that.

So you can't go onto those media and insist that they make you popular the way you want to be popular. You got to go on that media to do what the audience with empathy wants from you. And so I knew that my blog readership was going to go down. I knew that the amount of inbound I was going to get was going to go down and that was fine. Because my goal isn't to be popular or more well-known. My goal is to make a difference. And even if that difference is for 40 people, that's fine. So for people who aren't anywhere near as established and successful as you are, what do you recommend they do? Do you recommend they ask their audience what they want before

they start building the strategy? Well, Henry Ford may or may not have said, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, faster horses. And people have no idea. No one wanted the iPhone. No one wanted the desktop publishing. No one knows what to want. What we can do is watch them and watch how they spend their time and money to get what they dream of. So the bride who's spending all that money on her wedding doesn't actually want salmon and asparagus, right? She is buying salmon and asparagus to get peace of mind or status with her friends or connection.

So if that's what she wants and we can see this happening all over, now we know what we could do. We could build a shortcut to help people get that thing they say they want. And that is when all sorts of magical opportunities open up. Because when we show up and say, you know that thing you've always wanted? You were right to always want it. Here it is. And we have to be responsible for what we offer. So if someone wants a wasteful shortcut that's gonna bankrupt them, I'm not sure you should be on the hook to give it to them,

but it may be that that's what they want. Basically what I'm hearing you say is that most people don't have a strategy. The real opportunity is when systems change, that's when it's time to activate, deploy, test, try a new strategy and put something into place. Yes. And given the conditions that we're in right now, ultimately for everyone, this is the time. So when they sit down, is it important for them to have many different voices around them from

people from different industries to advise? Like what are your ideas around collaboration and creating strategy? Right. So I have almost never seen a committee come up with a good strategy. And part of the reason is the people you're gonna Have surround yourself with care about you and they're gonna encourage you not to do something that's gonna fail And so they're gonna keep pushing you to do this conservative simple thing in the middle It's not gonna work, but they think it's safe and you won't blame them, right? And instead the best tactical advice I have for you is to write three completely different strategies

in as much detail as you can, knowing that you're gonna have to randomly pick one of them. So all three better be good. So now we're not gonna justify to ourself and get ourselves into a corner believing that the one we picked is the best one. I need three really great strategies, right? And then you need to stress test them. I am asserting that if I open a billiards club on the outskirts of

this town, I can get this many people to come every night because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you can test that with a friend and say, ask me some hard questions. Like, are there any other cities that have a billiards club? What does this rhyme with? Who has done this before you in any way that has ever worked? So I defend it, defend it, make it better, defend it. Now you've got three really good potential strategies. And a friend of mine did this with a nonprofit he started. He wrote business plans for three completely different nonprofits. As opposed to constantly being on defense and justifying why his was the best one, he said, I got three, and I think all of them are great,

so I'm just gonna pick one at random. And you're capable of this, you're capable of saying, okay, I'm gonna have a YouTube interview show, and it's gonna be sponsored by ads. I'm gonna be a coach for people in my town who do in-person meetings with me, and I'm gonna be a consultant to real estate firms that sell to the wealthy.

Those are three completely different ways for you to spend your day. Now, articulate how could this work? Who has come before? Who are you gonna serve? How are you gonna find clients and keep, right? It's only gonna take you a weekend. Why wouldn't you spend a weekend to do this

before you spend five years on the wrong project? It makes such sense. Obviously, we put it that way. But you know what happens. People get busy, and once they start taking off with something, it's hard to get people to pull back for a moment. But to your point earlier, if you don't know where you're going, then you're just going and it sounds not very strategic. How do games relate to everyday strategic decision making? All right. So games aren't just fun things like Scrabble. Games, game theory is any situation where there are players and rules and outcomes. So if you get pulled over by a cop for speeding, it's a game.

What does the cop want? What tools do you have to talk yourself out of the ticket? If you can give the cop what they want by, let's say in this moment, a small smile and a feeling of respect, maybe they'll just give you a warning. And if you play some moves and you're wrong, you'll get a ticket. But you played a game and it came out one way or the other. And it is a game to figure out what you're going to stand for, say with a podcast in a world that has infinity podcasts. You make a move, if it doesn't work, you're not a bad person, you just made the wrong move.

And we can learn a lot by watching the moves other people who play these games make. Oh, these six podcasts switched from audio to video. That was an interesting move. What happens when someone makes that move? Am I too late to make that move? What would be a version of that move that's not what they did, like going to Oculus and being on Apple virtual stuff? Maybe that's a move, but at least we can talk about the move without saying this is authentically me. If I'm the world chess champion and I move my knight in front of my pawn, that's not me. That's the knight moving. And if the move

doesn't work, I just learned something. Don't you see, because when you're describing that, the first thing that popped in my mind is so many people that I see that I come across, they want to build a strategy. They want to play the game. They want to view what other people are doing. But then that's where they stop. They'll correct. They start obsessing about what everybody else is doing

and over analyzing it and never actually test or try anything. So how do you get people to get beyond that point to say, I'm actually gonna move forward and try one? It's super simple. When in doubt, look for the fear. We are all afraid. We're all afraid. And that fear expresses itself in an enormous number of ways.

The class clown in third grade, isn't the class clown cause they're Jerry Seinfeld. They're the class clown because they're afraid of something. And if we can find out where the fear is and help them understand how to protect that little tiny voice to then get to where they want to go, sometimes it will get us there. In the Navy SEALs, they just create enough fear of something else that you're no longer afraid of diving into cold water and swimming because if you don't do that, you're going to get in trouble with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's a conservation of fear going on, but we should name it.

How often does someone say, yeah, I know I could do that, but I'm afraid? That's the truth. I practice saying that all the time. You still get afraid even with your own strategies, your own business? Oh, yeah. There are all these things that I don't do, and I'm honest with myself that I don't do them

because I'm afraid. Well, that's freeing to hear that. You just made everybody feel a lot better, Seth, because I think so often people have someone on a pedestal, like international bestseller, you know, 20-something books. People think, oh, this person finally figured it out. But wouldn't you? I look back over, you know, 20 something books. People think, oh, this person finally figured it out. But what did you, I look back over, you know, my career, and I think as I get older, I am more apt to step into fear because I've done it more times. I have more resilience at this point. Don't

you think it's something that you get better at? I am not afraid before I get on stage in front of 15,000 people. I'm not afraid before I hop onto a legendary podcast like yours, but there are so many other things that I'm afraid of that I'm not doing. Yeah, if you get good at something, I hope that you're not filled with fear every time you do it, but this is chopping wood and carrying water. This is the practice and the craft,

but the frontier is conversation that you're afraid to have with your dad before he passes away. And so you're hiding from it, right? That's fear. And the fear is enervating and cancerous. And instead we can say, I'm afraid of talking to my dad, but I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah, that, I mean, that's real.

That's the real stuff, not the I'm afraid of launching this marketing campaign to see what happens. Yeah, but they're the same flavor, because the impact if you actually address it, though. Yeah. But the theory is, if I launch this marketing campaign, and everybody hates it, then I won't sell anything, and then I'll lose my house, and then I'll be thrown out, and no one loves me. And so I'll die alone outside. Like the MailChimp button is one inch away from I'll die alone outside. That's how close the two buttons are. It's so good. And that is so true.

That is so well said. And I don't think people really think about it, but you are absolutely right. And that's why they get petrified and that's why they get paralyzed. And that's why they never press the button. Yeah. How does this strategy build upon the previous works that you've created around leadership and marketing, building off it, redirecting it?

What does that actually look like? You know, I was just thinking about this yesterday. Sometimes before I go to a meeting, I will listen to one of my audiobooks because I want to hear what the old me had to say. So the practice is about how we tell ourselves stories. It's about getting over writer's block and imposter syndrome. This is marketing is how we tell other people stories.

And this is strategy is what stories should we tell if we wanna get to where we're going. But it's so interesting to hear strategy and the inclusion of storytelling. I would not again again, have put those two things together. But I mean, let's say I want to defeat you at chess, I'm going to make some moves that are going to tell you a story about what I'm going to do next. And if the story I'm telling you about what I'm going to do next causes you to move in a way I'm hoping you will move,

I will win. But if you can see through my story and know what I'm actually gonna do next, we'll probably tie or you'll win. And so this story of Microsoft is the IBM of software, that's the story. And that story told to their employees will help them make better decisions which will shift how the market responds. Humans are just story processing machines.

Meet a different guest each week. Turn it on and detain. Confidence cleared. Confidence cleared. I asked you to try to find your passion. Who's a company that you look to today that you feel like is a nailing strategy that we can look at as a positive example? Well, every time I name a company, then they do something that embarrasses me.

So I try not to do that too often. But if we go back a little bit, when Google launched Gmail, you may recall that you couldn't get in unless you had an invitation from someone who was already using it. That was a brilliant strategy. Because everybody wanted in so badly. Well, not only did people want in,

but the people who had an invitation, their status went up. So they were reminded that they were already doing something valuable. So Google had this thing that was free. So things that are free are often seen as worthless, because they don't cost anything. And by artificially creating scarcity, they created tension, the tension of I'm

going to be left behind, the tension of how do I get one of these. Now people are talking about Gmail, whereas before they wouldn't have been talking about it. That's a strategy. That when I was at Yahoo, I wasn't in the room for this meeting, I'm glad to say, they had the chance to buy Google for $10 million.

Now, for people who aren't keeping track, Google's worth about a trillion dollars now. That's a big difference. And they said no. And the reason they said no is Yahoo strategy was the web is a weird place. People don't like it that much. We want people to come to Yahoo and stay at Yahoo. So we have Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Weather and Yahoo Kids and Yahoo This and Yahoo That. So we want one click to turn into 100. And Google showed up with a new strategy. Their strategy was the internet's growing up. We only want people to stay here for one second.

That the entire model of Google has come here and go somewhere else. And so it didn't match. So Yahoo, which was afraid of change, said we'll just spend the $10 million on Yahoo Kids instead. And Google, when they did their strategy, almost no one wanted to follow them

because it seemed absurd. Why would you build a search engine that makes people leave? And it turned out to be brilliant. And now, when artificial intelligence shows up in ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude, each one of them has a different strategy. What story are they telling? And who is listening to it because it's helping them

get to where they want to go. So we see it in Patagonia Clothing, we see it in whoever's selling waterproof eyeshadow or reef safe sunscreen. My friend makes reef safe sunscreen in the Philippines. Who's buying reef safe sunscreen? Probably tourists. Which kind of tourists? Tourists who look around the Philippines and think, I don't want to wreck this place. Okay, now we know the story and the product and where it can go. But don't try to sell this in industrial sized bins to people who don't care about the reef because they're not going to pay extra for it. When you just described the situation with Yahoo and Google, which I wasn't familiar of, all I was thinking of is yet again, it's back to fear and looking at the opportunity costs

that people are losing out on still just driven by fear back to your point that afraid of ending up losing being alone and having no one. Yeah. And you know who feels this more than most are billionaires. That's why they behave so poorly. That's shocking to what would they're afraid they're going to lose a billion dollars? It's more than a billion dollars. They have measured, they have protected themselves from the fear in their head by being one of the richest people in the world. And so if they lost 90% of their money, they'd still have more money than anyone could ever spend. But they would have to live with the fact that the fence they built around themselves wasn't

there anymore. And so they have to keep doing things to stay on the top of the list, things they're not proud of. One of the first billionaires bought millions of acres in Brazil and proceeded to chop them down, destroying priceless parts of the ecosystem to make more money. But he already had money. Why was he doing this? Because the Forbes 400 game of I'm winning is the game, the only game they know how to play. So I'm fortunate enough to call some people who have a billion dollars friends and when they stop doing that, they get way happier.

But some of them can't stop. They need to be in the public eye and they need to win this silly game as opposed to getting back to being alive. Do they know that's their strategy? Like, are they cognizant of that? I think they often are though, they want to deny it because they're, you know, capitalism as one of its myths,

people who create the most value get the most money. This is absurd, this is not true, is one of the myths of capitalism. So they're saying, well, if I'm making a lot of money, I must be creating a lot of value. And it's so easy to measure that that's what they do. They're lazy and they measure the thing that's easy to measure,

as opposed to realizing we're all gonna die. They only got 30 years left, what should I do tomorrow? And the answer is probably not turn four billion into $5 billion. That's probably not the best strategy at this point. What strategies do you suggest for working within existing systems rather than against them? Okay, so if you're working against the system,

what you need to say is, hey, you're wrong. Don't do that, you're wrong. And getting people to admit they're wrong is very hard. So let's think about the healthcare system. Healthcare system doesn't make health, it makes treatments. That's what they measure, that's what people get rewarded for. So if you want to change the healthcare system,

you could pick it outside of Kaiser Permanente and say, they are wrong, they should make health instead. That's probably not going to work. But what you can do is get to what the people in the system do all day and what they want. Right? So nurses want to have good shifts and want to see patients get better and they want the people they work for to say you're doing a good job. So back when my dad was alive, he had a hospital crib company and he invented a new kind of hospital crib. And instead of just launching it, he went to the nurses at the Dornbecker Children's

Hospital in Cleveland, and he said, here's a crib, here's some clipboards, make it better. And they spent days giving him advice on how to make the crib better. Now nurses don't get to pick which cribs get bought, the purchasing department does. And if he was going to fight the system, he could go to the purchasing department and yell at them and try to get them to buy a better crib. But instead, he named the crib after the hospital. And the nurses, when they started using this crib, found how much better it made their day.

So they would tell other nurses, you got to get this crib, your day gets better. So then the nurses would go tell the purchasing agent, we got to go buy this crib. And it became the bestselling crib in the country because he showed up to work with the system to get the system what it wanted, which is not purchasing agents wanting a cheaper crib. It was nurses feeling like they could be professionals. It's like completely reverse engineering what everybody else is doing. Yeah, exactly. And finding success, which is so interesting and so smart, but so obvious when you just laid it out

that way. But then why aren't all businesses approaching things like this? Because it takes patience and you have to confront your fear. It's much easier to just do what everybody else is doing, which is the equivalent of TV ads, late night TV, yelling at people. And so someone says, yeah, I'm gonna go spend some money to get some TikTok traffic, because if I can get a million TikTok views, then everything will be fine. But if you talk to people who have a million TikTok views, their life doesn't get that much better. So true and so surprising. I just had someone on the show a couple weeks ago as millions of followers and said exactly that. Everyone thinks that it's just so easy once you have millions of followers, but it really is not. We're glamorizing something that really isn't meaningful. The way

that you wrote this book, I feel like is very different, very tactical. What was your strategy and the way that you wrote it? Think for a minute, Heather, when you were growing up, did your mom, when you were four, have a day when she announced, today we're gonna learn all the vegetables, and she started with asparagus and worked her way to zucchini? No. Of course not.

We get a little of this, and then a couple days later, we try that, that's how we learn anything. So I couldn't write a book in alphabetical order that started with this. Because every time I was talking about systems, I needed to talk about games, and then I needed to bring in a little bit of empathy. So I just wrote it the way people learn,

which is, let's talk about this story. Let's go through this example. Oh, what about this thing over here? Back and forth and back and forth, and then organized it so we could talk about it. So I made this deck of cards that has 104 ideas in it that can be played in five million combinations. Because if you play four cards and you see the combinations,

you gotta talk about them. It'll jar something in your head. Because that's how the human brain works. So that's how I wrote the book. Because I don't think people, including me, have the patience to read war and peace ever again Nor the time definitely not the time and this is much more manageable Who did you write it for who needs to know that this is strategy?

I didn't write it for people who need to know it I wrote it for people who want to know it because if you need to know it and you don't want to you're not gonna Engage with me. I'm looking for people who are saying, I'm aware that I'm not getting the results I need from the effort I'm putting into it. And I am brave enough and smart enough to ask, is there a better way? And vulnerable enough. So where can everyone get This Is Strategy? So at Seth's.blog, there's 9,000 blog posts, they're free. And it says stop blog slash TIS, which stands for this is strategy. I have videos and links and all sorts of nonsense.

And I will link all that in the show notes below for you. I mean, this book is incredible. It is so this is the most tactical book that I have ever read. I'm blown away. And it definitely gets you thinking so differently in regards to the system that we're in and the process that we just keep repeating and the fears that are holding us back. Seth, thank you so much for writing this book and thank you for all the work that you keep creating. Thank you, Heather. Keep making a ruckus. We need you. We're going to keep trying. Until next week, guys, you keep making a ruckus and check out Seth's book, This Is Strategy, link it in the show notes below. I got it for you. Until

then, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be.