EntreLeadership - #124: Seth Godin—It's Always Your Turn

Episode Date: December 7, 2015

Do you ever wonder what’s holding you back? Marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin joins the show to answer this important question, plus he'll discuss the power of being childlike and leaping into places that feel uncomfortable. EntreLeadership Coach John Felkins also stops by to answer your business and leadership questions. Listen in. This is the perfect episode to start the new year right. Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, we are so thankful for your download. Feature conversation this episode, one of the brightest minds in all of the world. Seth Godin. If you don't know who Seth Godin is, shame on you. Sethgodin.com will do the trick.

Simply put, beyond one of the brightest, minds in the world, a great authority on observational marketing, observational leadership. This guy is just a wonderful, wonderful observational thinker. And everything the guy does is through his unique point of view. And it just so happens that his point of view is absolutely brilliant. He's been on the podcast many times still to have him back. I did something with him that I've never done in an interview before with him. And that was literally pull out my favorite pages from his latest book, what to do when it's your turn. Really fun stuff. You're going to love it, fast-paced, and just gobs of content. Then we bring coach John Falcons in the studio with me, taking your questions.

You're going to love this, answering your questions. As always, this is brought to you by Infusionsoft. We'd love for you to check them out. It is time for you to engage in how they can help you, the small businessman and woman, change the game. Infusionsoft.com slash entre. Well, let's get right to this because it's just so good. And I hope you are taking notes. I tell you this all the time to take notes. I really want you to take notes. Seth Godin is such a delightful conversationalist.

And for you, interview nerds. And we get a lot of feedback from you from time to time. People who really enjoy the interviews, and we appreciate that. But I want you to, as you're learning and listening here today, I want you to focus on on how quickly Seth delivers the goods. He doesn't talk for seven minutes. Each answer, short sweet, to the point. I love that.

It's a great lesson in communication. So here we go. My conversation with Seth God. Seth, it's a privilege to have you back with us, so we love you here, as you know. And I want to go to the book, the latest book. I love kind of pulling out my favorite sections, and I think our audience trust me enough to pick stuff, I think hits them right in between the eyes. And the book is what to do when it's your turn, and it's always your turn. And I want to start with Monica Hardy.

You reference her and her four steps. Those four steps are notice, dream, connect, and do. I can't think of four more important steps for entrepreneurs and leaders who are listening to this conversation than those four. Would you break those down, how those string together? But we almost do none of them. So let's start with notice. It's super easy after someone is successful to say, oh, well, of course they're doing that. Of course we needed a pizza place.

Of course we needed a nationwide network of car services. of course we need this. Part of the work, then, is to learn to see, to see things that aren't being done, to see how something can go from one place to another, right? And that requires not only seeing where there's a hole, but imagining what you could put in that hole. And the reason that that's so hard is it might not work, that the reason it's so hard to do this kind of work that isn't a job is when you have a job and it doesn't work, it's somebody else's fault. But when you have a job and it doesn't work, and when you have a project and it doesn't work, it's your fault. How are you doing with that fault thing?

Because it's the only way you have to dream. And then the third part is this idea of connecting, because we don't live in an economy where you're likely to make a living just by making a thing. Even back in the days, how to be trusted. The blacksmith had to be connected enough to the community that the cowboy knew that the horseshoes were going to do what he said they were going to do. So these four steps, one after the other, make it really easy for you to identify what's holding you back and what you're afraid of. That's so good. I remember years ago, I don't know if it was in an interview I did with you or just conversation backstage at an event or somewhere, but I asked you how do you come up with all the different things that you write on?

what's your process. And I remember you basically saying, I'm always paying attention and noticing things. And when I get an idea from something I see, whether I'm in the car, running errands, or something of that nature. And then it inspires an idea, and then you write it down and you write all the time, and then you post later. So on this first step of noticing, are you a natural noter? And if you aren't, did you train yourself? How did you train yourself to always have that antenna up. And because it opens the door for someone to say, well, of course, Seth can do that. Of course you can do that. Because they're different than me. And it lets us off the hook. The real answer to where do you get all your good ideas is, why don't you ask me where I get all my

bad ideas? Right. Because I have more bad ideas than anyone. If you have enough bad ideas, it's inevitable that you will have a good one. So the challenge isn't to be perfect. The challenge is to be bold. You don't have to bring your bad ideas to market, but you do have to write them down. And I've written down literally 10,000 bad ideas over the years. For every blog post I write, I write five bad ones.

And that posture of saying, I have to say it, before I get rid of it, is where good ideas come from. But let me ask you again, though, to go back. Have you trained yourself to notice? I would say it's a little bit like, you know, how do we train ourselves to go to meetings? How do we train ourselves to answer the phone with enthusiasm? How do we train ourselves to drive a car without crashing? These are things we've decided to do.

And so I didn't go to noticing school. What I did was I was in the book business, Sunday. At my section in the bookstore, there were a thousand books in that section, and I could tell if a new one showed up. And if a new one showed up, I picked it up, I looked at it, I tried to understand and predict if it was going to succeed or fail. I made assertions based on its cover, based on its topic, based on all the elements I saw. You do that 52 times in a row, and you will notice more things in the book business than anybody else. That's right. I love that. All right, I want to move forward into the book, page 41.

By the way, I want to tell our listeners the four steps, page 35 in Seth's books, what to do when it's your turn. Page 41, a section growing up, and I want to read just this short little paragraph and have you expound on this. There's a huge difference between being childlike and being childish. When we embrace joy and look at the world with fresh eyes, we're being childlike. When we demand instant gratification and a guarantee that everything will be okay, we're only being childish.

That's a real shot to the gut for us adult leaders, but it is so important. What were you trying to inspire us to do there? Start by trying to inspire people not to watch cable news. That's right. Because if you think about it, what do they do on cable news is nothing but the latter. It's filled with childish people who are playing for short-term attention. And what I hope to see in our world are more professionals. and professionals are people who show up and do the work even when they don't feel like it.

And professionals don't play for today. They play for the long run. But in order to truly be a professional to make this impact, we have to do the things that children are so good at, which is looking at the world with fresh eyes, giving people another chance, being enthusiastic. If we can be childlike and professional at the same time, we can change the game. I love that. And I think another derivative from your challenge to stop watching cable news ties into this challenge about being childlike again. And with children, you know, they embrace everybody. They don't see the negative. It's just kind of exciting every situation they run into.

So I want to ask you about this. If you're watching cable news, Seth, it's like the world's coming to an end. It's bad news all the time. And yet when I'm traveling with Dave, for instance, around the country at our entree leadership events and there's 1,200 leaders. in the room and we're talking to them in the hallways. They're winning and you're seeing people win. So is it a big part of our goal to be like a child to kind of just not stick our heads in the sand but filter out all the negative whining and crying about how awful things are? You know, I wrote this book about fear. Sooner or later, someone who's stuck, you will discover fear at the center of the donut. And fear is hardwired into us. We evolved to be a afraid. It keeps us from being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, but there are no saber-tooth tigers anymore.

So we are confused now. We're confused because things that sound scary actually aren't risky. And the media makes money. They make a profit by making us afraid. And so if you've got nothing better to do and you're trying to hide, the media will say, please, go ahead, hide. That's a good thing. But if you want to make a difference in the world, You cannot make the fear go away. The fear cannot disappear. What you can do, you can welcome the fear. The smartest, most successful entrepreneurs I know, are afraid all the time.

And they use that fear as a compass, a compass to help them decide what to do next. My favorite page in the book is page 53, unprepared. It's maybe one of the few pages where it's an entire page. And I want to read again just an excerpt. And Seth, I thought this was one of the most. brilliant thoughts that I've ever read from you, and that's saying something. Well, thank you. We've been so terrified into believing in the importance of preparation that it's spilled

over into that other realm, the realm of life where we have no choice but to be unprepared. So that's teasing the thought there. I want you to break this down. Unprepared. It's kind of a bad thing in our minds, but you say it's a good thing, and I believe you. Important moments of my life for the moment I was unprepared to look my son in the eye for the first time when he was born. I was unprepared to hold this book in my hand when it came back from the printer.

I was unprepared to give my first speech. How could I be prepared? It was the first time I'd ever done it for our first bestseller and we're unprepared for our first giant failure because we hopefully will have done our homework. But when we leap, when we connect with another human being deeply, how could we pause it? We can't.

Back to this idea of which game we're trying to play. If you want a job, go get a job. If you want to lead, understand that leading and managing are not the same thing, and that we lead by doing things that we could never be prepared for. I have to ask you, I know the feeling. I know you know the feeling. A lot of our listeners know the feeling, but there's somebody out there right now who this is hitting right where they need to be hit on this. And I want you to describe what happens when we willingly jump into those unprepared moments. what happens to us after the fact?

The good news is we never use it up. But the other news is by the time you've shaken the hand of a hundredth person, you're less likely to be afraid of strangers. You know, if you are afraid, if you're not, my suggestion is you don't start with $20,000 life insurance policies. You go buy a box of pensions, and you sell them for a nickel each. Right? And being able to look someone in the eye and make a transaction with them

feels exactly the same whether you're selling something for a nickel or $10,000 once you get into the habit of leaping into that connection with another person. Okay, folks, just a couple pages over. This is tied in beautifully to what we're talking about. Seth writes on page 55, are you taking it seriously or are you taking it personally? What's the thought here, Seth? Well, when you take it seriously, you're being a professional. When you take it seriously, you are doing your homework.

You are work that's necessary. When you're taking it personally, the outcome feels like a knife to the gut. So if you watch a seven-year-old play Monopoly, he kicks the board over and he was taking the game seriously, or is he doing it because he feels like a loser? Not like a professional who in this interaction lost, but like a loser. and it's really fascinating. The difference Eugene playing chess on your phone and chess against the human being are, when I lose to the computer, it's just the computer beat me.

When I lose to another person, I feel slightly humiliated. I take it personally. And so one of the things that professionals have to do is understand that your best work is your best work, that you can't be an emergency room surgeon if you're going to quit the first time someone dies on you. People are going to die. You're going to do your best work, and it's not going to work. That doesn't mean you're a bad surgeon. It just means it didn't work.

And you can get better at your work, but taking it personally will cripple you because the fear will arise. Now, this is huge. This is a great point because you are somebody who are, you're the product. So we get people listening into this, Seth, and they're out there selling a service. they're selling a tangible good, but you, Dave, like Dave is the product. You know, his radio show is the product. When you speak, you are the product. When you write a blog post, you are the product when you write a book, so on and so forth.

And I know that it's very hard not to take that person when somebody critiques it. And I've always loved your approach to criticism. And so I want to refresh that. We've talked about that before, but I think it falls beautifully into what we're talking about here. How did you learn to filter that criticism when someone would criticize something that you wrote? Okay, so you have to be able to say the sentence, it's not for you. If you do your best work and bring it to the market and someone doesn't like it, but does that mean you shouldn't have made it?

Of course not. That would have been stealing from the person who likes it. The person who doesn't like it, it wasn't for them, right? So someone walks into an ice cream store that sells chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream, and they say, you shouldn't sell chocolate ice cream. I hate chocolate ice cream. But that makes no sense, right? The ice cream guy doesn't take that personally.

He says, yeah, chocolate's not for you. Have some vanilla. So being able to honor the person who doesn't like your work by saying, I didn't make it for you, let's both of you off the hook. But the second thing you need to do, at least figure out why you're interacting with people who don't like your work in the first place. So I've never met an author. became a better writer.

Right. And as a result, I have not read my reviews on Amazon for more than three years. Why should I? What will I learn? I don't go there. This idea that we have to show up in front of the haters and the trolls makes no sense. I don't have comments on my blog. Why should I?

If someone wants to write their own blog, they should write their own blog. But coming to my house and dumping dirt on my floor so that I will feel bad and not post again, who is that helping? And so what we do is we need to say, can I interact with the people who this is for? Can I talk to my best customers? Can I talk to the people who most need what I sell and find out what they don't like so I can make it better? But I must be able to say the people who don't get it, who don't like it, who don't understand it. Oh, well, it wasn't for you.

That's so rich. Page 103, another one of my favorite parts of the book, The Nature of a Gift. This is huge for us to understand. Really in line with what we were just talking about again, that not everybody's going to like everything we put out there, but what we're doing is a gift. Explain what you're telling us here with the nature of a gift. So Louis Hyde wrote a magnificent book.

The essence of it is tracing 5,000 years, a gift even mean. So if you think about the prescription against usury and why you're not supposed to charge interest, in the Bible what it really said was you're not supposed to charge interest to a tribe member, but you welcome the charge interest to a stranger. And the reason is because keeping it in the village and the family, that's personal.

You don't charge your sister interest on a loan. But a stranger, you can charge interest because they're strangers. We're pushing people away when we ask for reciprocity. Real gifts, never. Real gifts are not, you know, you don't open the door for someone, so they'll open the door for you. You open the door for someone because the act of opening the door makes you feel good. that's it. Enough.

They don't even have to say thank you. That's not why you did it. You did it for the act of giving the gift. Here, I made this. So what we must do as creators is let ourselves off the hook and let the other person off the hook. Because if you're busy measuring the audience response every time you do something,

they will never measure up. They will never repay you for how much you put into what you made. So don't give them the chance to let you. down. Just say here, I made this. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I'm listening to this, and I'm reminding you of something I read recently about Simon Cowell, who, of course, helped create American Idol and had great success in Britain before coming over here, and largely changed, you know, culture in a big way through entertainment. And I was reading the authorized biography of his life. And essentially, Seth, he did not have a lot of success early on in his

career and was kind of just frustrated as he was trying to find music acts. And at one point, he made a decision to just go after a girl band, a couple boy bands, because it was the kind of music he liked. And he had been trying to break an artist in the mold of what maybe the industry would suggest or the leaders above him would suggest. And when he went after, you know, the boy band, girl band type thing, because he liked that type of music, he began to have great success. And what essentially said in the book was I began to get very, very popular as a producer, talent finder once one of those acts took off, and I attributed to the fact that I began to make music that I liked. There's something to that, isn't it? You can't please everybody, and so what do you think about

creating things that we would buy, that we would consume, and then just put it out there? Part of the challenge of doing this for a living as opposed to doing it as a high. And what taste means is, are you in sync with other people? So a painting that someone today might pay millions of dollars for would have been thrown in the garbage 300 years ago, same painting. Right. And the reason is because tastes change. So your job, if you're Simon Cowell, is to have good taste, not to please an executive, but to find a part of the market that agrees. ease with you. So if you are able to develop good taste and you are in sync with that,

and then by all means make things that you like. On the other hand, I am not saying to anyone, you are entitled to a living. Make whatever the hell you want. I think you should go ahead and make stuff. Please do. But that's so good. Page 113. Tell the truth. I love this. This is four paragraphs, but it is so good and so needed now. I want you to share with us what you mean here in the book when you tell us. Tell the truth. What you're thinking. We need your contribution.

Yes, for a long time, for most of your life, we demanded you ask for instruction and that you comply. We're ready now, though, ready for you to show up and to lead us. Ready for your contribution. We are ready for you. Not the truth, but your truth. The truth of the world. So good. Folks, that's just a little bit of Seth's latest book,

What to Do When It's Your Turn, and it's always your turn. It's so good, as usual. It's like reading his blog, and I wanted you to hear some of the things that really moved me. Seth, Forre, I let you go. Tell us what you can. What are you working on next? What's exciting for you? Well, I've spent the last six months building a new kind of online course.

It's a workshop. It's not for very many people. We only take 100 people at a time. It's called the Alt-M-B-A, ALT-M-B-A. It's easy to find. And other than that, I'm doing a lot of work with various charities. We launched a reader this year for Thanksgiving, which I know is just over. But you can get yours for next year.

It's free at the Thanksgiving Reader.com. And it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever worked on. Awesome. He is Seth Godin. The website is Sethgodin.com. Again, the book we discussed in detail today was, to do when it's your turn and it's always your turn. Seth, we appreciate you so much, man. Thanks for spending time with us.

Thank you. It's a pleasure. Go make a ruckus. So what did you take away from Seth? I took away a whole bunch, but I want to highlight one thing that hit me right between the eyes. Page 53 of the book, and I asked him about his quote, we've been so terrified into believing the importance of preparation that it has spilled into that realm of life to the unprepared. It hit me so hard because as I look back on several facets of my life, marriage, parenting, broadcasting, three biggies, there were so much of those journeys and still is that I was unprepared for. And I think this is such a freeing statement that there are just certain things in life you can't be prepared for. It's not anti-preparation. Preparation is great.

But to me, it was a wake-up call to step fully into the moments that are presented before me because I'm in the right place. And in those moments, I've got to step into them with the wisdom I have gained, the knowledge that I have learned, the courage that I can summon, and just be in the moment. because the fact is there are so many huge moments of life that you actually cannot be prepared for and failure is not final so i was just overwhelmed by that piece of wisdom there i think he's absolutely right again preparation is huge we have to stay prepared we have to be prepared at all times for the things that we can be prepared for but for those areas where we simply cannot be prepared well it's okay you still have to step forward and step in good stuff there from Seth Godin. Hey, the book, what's it doing. It's your turn. You can learn more about it. Get it at

your turn.link. That's right. That is the actual website. That's Seth's website. Of course, Seth Godin is going to give you a website that you've never even heard of. Your turn. Dot link. So go check it out. Hey, by the way, Seth is speaking at our summit event. This is the second summit that we've done. The first one was a wild success out on the West Coast at the Onni La Costa. We're going back to the Omni Hotel this time in Dallas, Texas. May 22 through 25, Seth will be on stage with Dave, of course, Jim Collins, Pat Lincione, Dr. Henry Cloud, and then two of our Ramsey personalities, Chris Hogan and Chrissy Wright, and the special mystery speaker, which by this point, I assume everyone who listens to this regularly has gone to Entreeleadership.com slash summit to see who the mystery speaker is. It's going to be a great, great time.

So we'd love to see you there. May 22 through 25 still do have some tickets, but it will sell out. And so here we go as we head into the first of the year, you better be ready. It's going to be great fun. Eric, the producer and I will be there doing it. interviews. So that's going to be a lot of fun. Well, we always love it when Coach John Falcons, our head coach, I like to call him, of our All-access community, comes in to the studio to take your questions. All right, coach, here we go. First question, if you have existing debt, but only three

months of operational expenses in retained earnings, and the cash flow is very seasonal, what's a good rule of thumb to eliminate the existing debt? Well, awesome job, first of all, getting the three months retained earnings in the bank. A lot of people don't do that. So, you know, we encourage three to six months. So I'd like you to keep chugging away until you get six months, especially with the seasonality of your business, right? But you can, as time goes on, as you get closer to that six months, you can start to prioritize that debt service a little more because ultimately we want you to have that six months in the bank plus no debt. So start going after that debt a little more.

There is no magic number. I'm not going to tell you a percentage. but you want to start to increase that prioritization of getting rid of that debt. A lot of people get excited about paying off the debt, Ken, and then what they do is they cash starve their business. They get a hiccup. They can't make payroll. That's a real problem. So good job on getting the three months, keep working towards six, and then get after that debt. Good question. Yeah, good question. And let's stay on this topic when we talk about cash flow. Here's the next question. We face cash flow problems as a truck stop because we draft $20,000 of fuel every two days, and do not bill our customers once a week. How do we improve our cash flow?

It seems nearly impossible for us to get three to six months of expenses of cash on hand. Yeah, so that part that you're saying is nearly impossible. That's actually the solution. It's that simple. It doesn't mean it's easy, but you've got to do everything you can. Focus on ways to generate revenue that's got a higher margin, get a little profitability, cut expenses. But this is the thing. It takes intensity.

It takes time. You've got to just continue to focus on that. And the answer to your question is those retained earnings, so you can just stroke a check for that fuel bill, and it's not an issue. You've got the money in the bank to do it. It's going to take a while, but that's the solution. All right, coach, this is a fun question from all the way in Brazil. Love our international listeners.

Oh, wow. I need good full-time employees, but as a business owner who loves being his own leader, how do I think like an employee and understand how to keep them happy for the long term? Well, here's what you do. You don't think like an employee. Don't worry about thinking like an employee. Think like somebody who wants to be a part of a great team. And think about the people that you're working with as team members and give them something to rally around, give them something to do that matters, and you'll find all kinds of people that are excited to work with you. I love that. There's a reason why we don't use that word. I used it in the question because we wanted to address it. That's right. But why does that matter so much? The vernacular. And then actually how it translates to actual culture of teamwork.

Sure. People that are employees are people that show up for a given amount of time to trade for a paycheck. And that's not what we're looking for. We're looking for people that want to join a cause, that want to join a mission and accomplish something real in the world. Now, we, Ken, you know this. We're business people. We operate in the marketplace, right? We're not apologetic about making money at what we do. but it's first the mission and it's the cause and then the applause of the marketplace is the revenue.

All right, coach, this is a practical but also emotional question. This is a tough one. Am I going to tear up? Are you trying to get me to tear up? I hope not. I hope you don't because I don't have any Kleenex here in the studio. All right. So a full-time team member suddenly needs a raise because things are tight for them.

Yeah. How do we approach helping them with their budget? Yeah, so there is a lot of emotion around this, right? Once you start playing around with people's paycheck, the stakes go way up. Well, as a leader, you feel for them. They come in and drop this problem on your desk. This is not an easily dismissed issue. No, it's not.

And really, there's a tension here between two things, being responsible and just being generous, right? On the being responsible side, you don't want to enable somebody, right? If they've got financial issues or financial behavioral problems, then how we address those things and we do this, right? We suggest we help people with their financial behavior. You know, we would send somebody through FPU online, right? Financial Peace University of Dave's financial teaching. We would help people get right in that world. So that's what I'm going to say to do with this person is, no, we're not going to give you raise because you suddenly have a problem. You suddenly have a problem because you've had a problem all of long of not creating

savings for yourself. So we're going to help that person learn and change their behavior around their finances. Now, you bring this great point up. There's emotion involved in this because the other end of this spectrum is, gosh, we want to help this person, right? If they truly have some crisis, and we've seen this in our business and the way Dave treats this, we've got somebody that goes into the hospital. We've got somebody that, you know, I don't know what, an asteroid falls on their house, right? We're just flat going to help that person. And so we might not give that, well, we're not going to give them a raise, but what we might do is we might just stroke them a check and say, hey, we want to help you out. We might go over and mow the lawn for them. We might go help them

move. We might go visit at the hospital. We're going to do all kinds of stuff to be generous to this person, but we're not going to just give them a raise and further enable bad financial behavior. I love that. Folks, that's the key takeaway. I'm thinking of Psalm 23, and I'm thinking of the rod and the staff. You're going to protect them by maybe stroking the check, but make sure you use that staff to correct them and say not again. And you've got to go this direction. That's a key part of leadership. There is a protectionary thing there, but boy, oh boy, we certainly do have to correct and teach as well. It's good stuff. Coach Falcons, thanks for being in there with us. Thanks for having me. I want to thank Seth Godin and Coach John Falcons for being with us on the

podcast. And as always, on behalf of our producer Eric Anthony and the entire Ontario leadership team, we want to thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.