EntreLeadership - #399: The Practice of Shipping Creative Work with Seth Godin

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

Most people wouldn’t consider HVAC companies, occupational therapists or construction contractors to be creatives. Seth Godin, bestselling author of leadership staples like Linchpin and Tribes, disagrees. He joins EntreLeadership to talk about the essential practice of shipping creative work and inventing the future—even if you aren’t conventionally “creative” and there are no guarantees the idea will work.   entreleadership.com/podcast Seth Godin's website The Practice: Shipping Creative Work by Seth Godin The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber Good to Great by Jim Collins Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin Seth's Blog on The Practice Seth Godin's altMBA Seth Godin's blog The New York Times Bestseller List Seth Godin's Akimbo episode The New York Times Bestseller List EntreLeadership Reading Guide Schedule a FREE 20-minute consultation with BELAY Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, I got a question. When you think about the word creative, what's that word mean to you? If you're like a lot of business owners, if you're like me, you know, a creative's a person that you hire to design things to make things look pretty, to work on your brand. But here's the thing. If you're a business owner, you've got to think about creativity broader than just that. In fact, I'm going to tell you, if you want to build a peak performing company, you have to be creative. from the Ramsey network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Seth Godin. Guys, are you kidding me?

Seth is one of the most brilliant marketers, thinkers, thought leaders on the topics of, well, a lot of things, leadership, business, certainly all things, customer service, and guys, I'm telling you, even if you think you're not creative, you've got to listen to this, because creativity, it's not just something that you do where you're creating things that are visual or designing things. Being creative as a leader

means you have a vision for the future. You see what could be and what should be and then you create that reality. That's why it's called creativity. And you do that through casting a vision and showing people a better version of the future. Creativity isn't just about designing things. Guys, it's about leadership.

Let's first differentiate between leadership and management because they're not the same thing. And most small business people just do management. Management is having the power to tell people what to do, to get people to do what they did yesterday but faster and cheaper. And we need management because that creates the industrial economy. It enables us to make and keep promises. But leadership, leadership is not mandatory. Leadership is voluntary. leadership is I choose to lead or I choose to follow you.

And because it's voluntary, because we're doing something that might not work, it's not for everybody, but it's where all the juice lies. Because when we lean into leadership, when we assert to people that we think something might work, we might feel inside like we're not so sure. But we're offering this tremendous privilege, this gift to the people we work with, which is they're hoping that someone will open a door and shine a light. That's our job. All throughout building the Entree leadership area,

I was the first employee of Entree leadership. We don't call ourselves employees. We say we're team members. We don't like the connotation of employees because it implies punching a clock and exchanging dollars for hours. As the first team member in this area, believing in this thing, believing it could be this massive thing that's making an impact

in the area of small business, I know I can relate to times that I had a massive vision and desire, but I wasn't sure how we're going to get there. I didn't know for sure that we would get there, yet I was telling people we're going here. And there's this paradox in our minds a little bit of we're really clear and certain we're going. And I don't know if we're going to get there. And you can feel a bit like a fraud at times. You can feel like, I'm making this thing up. Why are these people even following me? Yeah, imposter syndrome rears its ugly head. A lot of people, people think that they're the only ones with imposter syndrome, but everyone has it, unless you're

a psychopath. Imposter syndrome is that feeling that you haven't proven it, that you can't be sure. What are you to do to speak up and to lead? You must be a fraud. And people say, how do I get rid of imposter syndrome? And my answer is, you don't, because you are an imposter. In the moment you are leading, in the moment you show up and say, over here, you can't be sure. And if you feel like an imposter, that's a good sign because it means you're leaning into the work. And so I'm not proposing that we defraud anybody. I'm not proposing that we guarantee anything because a guarantee and a confidence are tricky places to hide. But I think we get to say to people, let me paint a picture for where we might be able to go if we're able to make this thing work. And if people like that

picture and they're willing to follow and lead with you, that's the best way to get to where you hope to go. I think I'm tracking with this idea of we're always an imposter to some extent. And yet there's also a wisdom and having a sense of what we're doing so we don't lead people off the cliff. What's the difference between being foolish and the perpetual imposter in the way you're talking about it? Yeah. Yeah. So all of this comes down to generosity. First rule, no one wants to be hustled. No one wakes up in the morning saying, I hope someone hustles me, uses social pressure, close talking, extortion, whatever it is to get me to do something. No, we don't have to hustle to make a difference. The alternative is to say, what's the generous

thing to do? You know, if you saw somebody drowning in a few feet of water and you had a chance to jump in and save them, even if you weren't the best swimmer who ever lived, even if you didn't have a certification from the Red Cross, would you do it? Or would you walk away and say, I can't prove I can rescue this person. No, you jump in the water because it's not about you. It's about them. It's a generous act. And if what you're doing is a hustle, please don't read my book because I don't want to help you.

But if your goal is to make things better by making better things, this is the only way forward. You know, it sounds like you're saying that leadership in this context, it's so much less about coming from the head and more from the heart, this human to human connection of a desire to help. If somebody's drowning, of course I want to help them out. Yeah, I mean, there's an expression, servant leadership, and a lot of people don't get it, because management is not servant management. Management is for you and your shareholders, and this is the deal. I pay you and you do what I say. But leadership, voluntary leadership, if we are being truthful,

is about helping the other person get to where they want to go. You talk about in your new book, The Practice, that leadership is our, I work with a lot of leaders, and I know many of them who would not claim to be artist. I'm thinking about my friend Amanda, who's the director of an occupational therapy clinic, and she does amazing work, but she would say I'm not creative, I'm not a designer, I don't take pictures. And, of course, you and I know that our society has defined art in a very traditional myopic sense. What do you mean when you say leaders are artists? Yeah, so I fear that Amanda is mistaken.

we can all agree that Jackson Pollack was an artist. We might be able to agree that Marcel Duchamp was an artist, but certainly a musician like Philip Glass, a composer, they're an artist. Well, we're going to make it a little bit bigger. What about a playwright? What about someone who writes a novel that changes your life? These are artists as well. So what makes them artists if they don't have oil paint?

What makes these people artists is they're doing something that might not work. They're creating an opportunity to try. touch other people. Well, Amanda's an artist too. Because if she's able to calm a patient, if she's able to encourage a coworker, if she's able to get a difficult budget through the process, she doesn't have a playbook. She doesn't, she's not sitting there as a cog in the machine check in the boxes. She's doing something just as creative as Marcel Duchamp did when he put a ready made into an art exhibit, which is, this might not work, but I see the genre. I'm I see what I have to rhyme with.

I see who I'm here for. I made this. And I think the best word we've got for that is art. But if we come up with a better one, I'm happy to use it. I love the concept. I'd like to dive into it a bit more because I know often as small business owners, we're looking for best practices. We're looking for ways that are proven to work because we've got to create a profit.

We have to make payroll. And there's a fear that if I'm too original or if I go out of bounds, it might fail. And I might not be able to pay my people. And Seth, lives are at. And so how can I practice this idea of art and originality and things that don't work yet still guarantee to our team that I'm not going to screw it up for them? Yeah, what a great question. So let's think about the beautifully executed small businesses in your town and mine, the hardware

store, the travel agent, the person who had a test prep center. Oh, that's right, they're all gone. Not one of these places made a mistake. Not one of these places didn't follow best practices, and now they're all gone. Where did they go? Well, the world changed. The world changed because somebody else showed up and invented online travel, and someone else showed up and invented the big box store.

And so you get the idea. So if the world is standing still, please be a manager. We need you to never make a mistake. But if the world is changing, if it's upside down, if we're paralyzed by a worldwide recession and a pandemic and long overdue focus on racial injustice, well, all of a sudden, the rules are different, aren't they? And if the rules are going to be different, you're going to have to do something that isn't proven. Because if you just wait for someone to copy, it's going to be too late. So I think we all discovered in 2020, there are no guarantees that black swans are

around every corner. If you were showing people pictures in 2019, of the red skies over San Francisco. And they said, oh, that's coming? Is that related to the pandemic? I heard? No, they're totally unrelated. You know, the black swans around every corner. Maybe it's a chronic slow thing.

Maybe it's an urgent emergency. But no matter what, each of us is being called upon to act as if to show up without a playbook and to invent the future, not just participate in the present. And I think that work is best done with the practice. I don't think you should wait till it's an emergency, and I don't think you should just do it a little bit. I think you should do it on the regular. You still have to manage. You still have to make a profit.

You still have to make payroll. That's a given. Those are table stakes. Now what? Now what are you going to do? I love that. I'm thinking about my friend David. He owns an HVAC company in Kansas.

And if David were on the call with us right now, I imagine he would be saying something to the effect of, wow, that's inspiring. That's really great for companies like Dave Ramsey or people like Seth Godin who write books or technology companies that are always having to be on the bleeding edge. We have an HVAC company. We have technicians who are trained to do this a very specific way because there's science that's involved and we don't need them to be creative in people's crawl spaces. We might start a fire if we do that. So for David, who's trying to lead his company forward and he realizes, I want to be a peak performing business. I want to figure out this creativity thing. But the nature of our business is so utilitarian.

It's so, you might even call it basic, white rice. How does someone like David tap into this idea that as a leader, and for him to be really responsible and be generous with his team and in his work and their community, they impact, what does it look like for him to go on that hero's journey of becoming an artist the way you describe it? All right, well, David, let's get real practical. I think you only have two choices. Either your motto is you can pick anyone and wear anyone, or your motto is, you can pick anyone,

or your motto is we're the only one and we're worth paying extra. You'll pay a little bit more, but you get more than you pay for. It's one or the other. If it's the first one, if you are following in the footsteps of so many you have come before, then in the old days you'd buy a bigger yellow pages ad than anybody else. Or in the old days, you'd hire a salesperson who would call businesses in your community one after another. In the new days, maybe you hope that you win in Yelp or Google when someone searches on you,

but basically you're a victim. You're a victim of, did I get picked? If I got picked, can I get away with charging a nickel more than the standard price? But if all you're doing is making average stuff for average people, showing up for average customers and doing an average job for an average price, why exactly are we calling you the boss? You're doing very little. Your technicians are doing all of it. The alternative is to say what we really sell in addition to reliable heat and air conditioning is a story, a story of peace of mind, a story of what you tell your spouse, a story of more than just nickels or dimes. And I can tell you about a super successful business in my neighborhood that does exactly what you did. I called five people

when our furnace went out in our 100-year-old house. And I don't care. They're all the same. Let them all come and give me a bid. I'll just pick the cheap one. Wouldn't you, if they're all the same? and the first person came and he put booties on. And I'm like, the stairs are right to the basement or two steps away. Just go ahead. He said, no, no. We want to treat your house like our house. He said, I'm going to go downstairs and check it out. But while I'm downstairs, would you take a look at this? And he hands me a two-page, single-spaced, typewritten sheet. And on it are names and phone numbers.

And he says to me, these are your neighbors. You might recognize some of them. they've all volunteered to add their name and phone number to our list of references. We're hoping you will too when we're done. I'll go downstairs and look at the furnace now. And after I got to the fifth name I recognized, when he got to the top of the stairs, I said, you're hired. I called the other four people and I canceled their appointments. Wouldn't you?

Who's going to say to themselves and their spouse? Oh, well, we had the best person here, but I shopped around and saved, 50 bucks. And now I have to live with everything that goes wrong forever. So my question, David, is what would it take for your organization to have a sheet of paper like that one? Or let's just think about how the Internet of Things and technology changes because you didn't sign up to understand TCPIP and the rest of it. But guess what? One of your competitors is going to show up and say, with 24 hour a day monitoring, I'm going to be able to cut the cost of this and this and this. and I'm going to build a network effect and then. Well, that's scary because no one in Kansas has ever done that before.

But the first person in Kansas who does it is going to clean the deck because that person is going to have every single business, the ones who have the most money at stake, hiring them to set up that sort of network effect monitoring because it's too expensive to be left out. Again, we're seeing technical change, emotional change, marketing change, all show up forcing you to lead instead of waiting to. to be picked. So I'm curious, that moment when your friend, the HVAC guy, comes upstairs and you say, you're hired, what was the magic? You didn't know in that moment whether he was qualified to do the

job or not at a technical level, but there was something that you felt that was very significant that he intentionally created. How would you summarize the art in that moment? What is it that we're creating as leaders? Okay, so the first thing is, I will never be technically qualified. to know if an HVAC person is competent, particularly since he's not going to do the work. His technician is. So I have to start by saying your customers aren't as smart as you. But then the second thing is that many customers still want the cheapest one. And you know what?

They shouldn't be your customers. Send them the phone number of your competitor. Send your competitor every single person who thinks price is the most important thing. and you will be left with the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people who value something other than price. Because there are two ways to look at the world when you're buying something. And you don't need want or deserve every single customer. You just need your customers.

You know, Dave has, Dave Ramsey has one of the most popular radio shows in America. And yet, 90% of the people in America don't listen to it. I write bestselling books, and yet 99% of the people in America have never read one of them. Fine. It's enough. Focus on your people. Ignore the rest. What's the drawback on competing on price? It sounds like you're saying it's a race to the bottom. You're never going to win that race, first of all. You commoditize kind of what you do, and it just becomes a transaction. But as leaders who really want to build a lasting legacy, impact, build a great team, do something remarkable. Why should price be a non-issue?

Well, every once in a while, someone can actually systemically, structurally win on price. Walmart pulled it off for 20 years. That's really rare. Instead, what you end up doing is apologizing all the time and using price as your excuse. Well, what did you expect? It was cheap. And I think it's better for our peace of mind and our career to apologize once for the price then over and over and over again for everything else.

And the second thing is that in order to win on price, you have to cut more corners than anybody else. That's how you do it. And some corners are easier to cut than others, but there's always going to be someone who's going to cut one more corner than you. And that means you don't get to work with the people you want to work with. It means you don't get to treat people the way you want to be treated,

that maybe you believe you should, shouldn't be dumping your used gas without putting it in the proper storage container. Yeah, but you have a competitor who's doing that. And if you don't do it too, you're going to lose. Well, all of a sudden, we end up with, you know, a doping scandal. We end up with somebody who says, well, everyone did it so I had to cheat. Yeah, you don't have to cheat because you don't have to race against those people. Well, Seth, for 10, 12 years now, as I've been helping build and grow entree leadership,

I've been taking your prescriptions and applying them best I can in my own leadership. And today I'm just, I'm so honored and humbled. I get to lead a team of 100 or so incredible coaches, creative people, live event production people. I get to work with Dave Ramsey and serve on our operating board at Ramsey Solutions here. And I just go, I literally get out of bed every day. And I'm like, when are they going to figure out? And I don't qualify. I don't deserve to be here.

I'm a college dropout, two generations off the cotton farm in West Texas. And yet every time you tell me, okay, you've got to lean in to the vision, you've got to create things, you've got to ship, you've got to execute, go for it, go for it, go for it. Somehow magically, this stuff works. And being artist and being creative and seeing ourselves as leaders, this is what we do. We follow our hearts and we jump in before we have it all figured out. I've just been such a, such an advocate for this type of thinking. And yet I know that there's so many people who, you know, they got their business. and they're trying to get it dialed in and they're going, okay, that sounds great. Tardy and Seth are talking about this and it must be nice to be where those guys are at that they have the luxury of that because I don't see the utility. I don't see the utility. I've got a bottom line that I've got to grow. What do you mean being an artist or being creative or shipping or practicing? What do you mean that causes my business to actually perform at a higher level? Okay, so first I need to put a pin in something you said earlier, you're very kind to me. But the things we're talking about aren't

guaranteed to work. And reassurance is futile. If you need someone to tell you everything is going to be okay, I am not that person because everything is, everything is not going to be okay. And everything is not going to be okay whether or not you lean into this kind of work. My point is we do it despite the fact that reassurance is futile. Here's some examples of art. You, have a customer of your bottom line focused business and things between you have been a little strained. They're one of your biggest customers, but they weren't nice to your people last time. Or they're one of your biggest customers and they haven't been paying on time or whatever it is. And you've been avoiding it because it's easier to just get back to your bottom line focus.

The alternative is you could pick up the phone and you could actually have a conversation where you listen to them, where you understood their fear, where you found out what was going on in their life, where you exposed yourself to the humanity of somebody else, because that's what you signed up for when you started a business in the first place. And I would view that conversation as a form of art. It is not a form of art when the big credit card company calls, and there's someone reading a script at me, right? And if you've ever had that call, you know that if you say something nonsensical,

they don't know what to say because they're just reading a script. Reading a script is not art. but talking to another person or sitting down with an employee who used to be a high performer and isn't anymore is a form of art of engaging in a practice, shipping the work, not putting it off, and doing it on the regular. Because the thing is, if you're a boss, it's not really clear to me what you do for a living because you don't do the thing. You hire people to do the thing.

So what is it exactly you do? Well, some people who have dialed in their business, just go to Florida and play golf. And they're not even pretending to be the boss. They're just the person who built the institution. And that's a fine way to make money. It's passive income, which is sort of a weird juxtaposition of terms. But most of us didn't sign up for that. We signed up to be in the game.

And if you are, let's just say, Dave, the HVAC guy, and you're not crawling through crawl spaces, what is it that you are doing? what is a good day? And I would like to believe that a good day is when you bring more humanity to work, not less. So there are two things from the e-myth that I like to highlight. One I agree with and one I don't. The one I agree with is we need to spend more time working on the business and less time working in it. That if you are employing yourself to be a cog in your own system,

who is running the thinking of the system itself. But the part I disagree with really strong. is the part that says the best business is one where every single job can be done by the dumbest, most easily available person. Right. Because if you dumb down all the jobs, you end up working in a company filled with dumb people

or people who have been trained to act like they're dumb. And I would rather spend my days in the other kind of institution where I am counting on each person to act like a linchpin each person to do their own practice, their own form of art. Not all day long. I don't want your HVAC guy inventing a new way to replace the gas in my air conditioner. No, please do not invent a new way. But I would really like it if you would invent a new way to treat me with respect.

If you would come up with a new way of organizing the route, I'll give you one other example on this. So I did not know this. Concrete, once it's mixed up in those truble. that spin it around goes bad in less than 90 minutes. Even if it's spinning around in that truck, in less than 90 minutes, they got to dump the concrete. And after 9-11, it was a real problem because there weren't any concrete plants within 90 minutes of downtown Manhattan. They had to build one just to deal with that problem. And so the question is, what's the best

way, particularly in a city like Mexico City that has a lot of traffic, to get concrete from the mixing plant to the person who needs it. And what they used to do was, at CEMEX, the biggest concrete company in Mexico, what they used to do is a very complicated linear program, making a long list of who needed what, when, and giving drivers specific instructions. But over time, they discovered traffic did not cooperate.

So someone at CEMX, not the CEO, came up with this other model. and the other model is all day long, as the trucks are driving, they are making real-time allocations as to which truck is going to go where, based on calling people on the phone at first, and now it's probably on the internet, to say, oh, I'm on this corner, who needs this now? And that flexible system has probably totaled up a billion dollars in savings for that company.

Amazing. So is that what they do for a living, or do they mix concrete for a living? Right. I think they come up with answers. interesting questions for a living. You're hitting on something I teach our business owners a lot, is that this progression of in business you start out, you do get paid for what you do. You have to be the chief everything officer and ship the stuff, make the stuff, order the inventory, count it. But if you're doing it right, you start getting paid less for what you do, and then you start

getting paid for what you know, and eventually you start getting paid for who you grow. You're mentoring, your guide, and you're bringing energy. You and I have talked to the guy who built a business, replaced himself and then went to Florida and just played golf. That guy's miserable. And yet at the same time, when we're calling that guy to come back and say, look, you have an opportunity here to not just spend the rest of your days, you know, getting leather skin down in Florida and actually doing meaningful work and creating art and shipping.

And, you know, oftentimes that person is going, yeah, but what do I do? Like what, like what is it concrete? This sounds inspiring, but also sounds a little bit mushy. What is my job description at this point? Exactly. Well, so let's be honest, the industrial system we live in created the world that we enjoy. All the stuff around us that wasn't here 100 years ago was invented by the industrial system, was produced by the industrial system. You open a bottle of Tylenol, and the Tylenol is the same every single time. We're glad for that. The industrial system realized in 1910 it needed more workers. So we invented public school, and we began to indoctrinate people into a mindset of get the right,

answer, only do what's on the test, don't take any blame or responsibility, show up and do what you're told, listen to the boss, I can come up with 20 other rules, right? And that's what successful people did often to become successful. And then all of a sudden, one day, you get to the top of the hierarchy and you say, now what do I do, boss? And you realize you are the boss. And there is no rule book. You're writing the rule book. And then the technology starts to change. And we discover that people can work from home. And we discover that a big idea is worth more than 500 day laborers picking up 500 boxes and moving them. So where is that all going to come from?

Well, we have to uninductrinate ourselves, unbrainwash ourselves and believe for a little while, wait a minute, maybe my job is not to do my job, but to figure out what my job is. And to be comfortable with that. or if not comfortable, at least be a professional and say, this is hard, and that's why I'm getting paid to do it. Practically, when you're doing that, is it go read some more books, meet some people you haven't met with, what are some actions I can take as a business owner who's trying to figure out what is my new job? And it's this total, it's foreign.

There is no job description. You can't Google, what is my job now and get the template for this. So some of that is, it's a wrestling, I imagine. But what are some ways that you can shake up your environment or get new impact? puts that might help you inform what that could look like for you. So the first word of the subtitle of my book is shipping, as in shipping creative work. And that's the only way forward is to ship the work. And it will be very good at first. You know, there's this thing some creative people do called morning pages, where every morning, the first thing you do when you wake up is

write three pages of anything, not practical. And Julia's point is overlooked by so many people, which is it doesn't have to be practical. You never need to use it. It doesn't even have to be about your work, but you have to write three pages. And people hate it. They hate starting this process because they say,

but it's not very good. What if someone sees what I wrote? People write in their will. No one is to read my morning pages. No one wants to read your morning pages. Don't worry, buddy. But the thing is, that's an act of shipping creative work

before it's ready. Here it is. So, yeah, I love it when people buy my books and other books. I think it's great to take workshops, the Alt MBA and the other ones we run, change people's lives. But don't start there. Start by shipping creative work. Start by finding one person who needs to be talked to, one idea that needs to be challenged, one problem that needs to be solved that no one's solved before and solve it poorly.

Because that's how you started your business, right? When you started, you weren't the best inventory counter or the best HVAC guy. you just started and that is where we need to get back to which is all around us there's work to be done and waiting for perfect is going to be meaning you're going to be waiting for way too long I've done the morning pages exercise for a while now and just like you said when you start out it feels extremely weird and not only is nobody else going to read it but I found that I never went back and read it and the value then isn't why I write words on the screen and then somehow that's going to get shipped out to somebody. So what's the value? Why am I doing this? It's something about

the practice, I imagine. That's right. So at Harvard University, there's a really important building called Croft Hall. Cruff Hall is where the radar was invented in lots of other really cool physics devices. It's the physics building. And the fifth hall of Cruff Hall was where the professors and inventors just left obsolete stuff. And it got to the point where you couldn't even walk up there. It was so crowded. And computer programmers took that as a term. And the word croft is all the leftover stuff that we've got hanging out there that's getting in the way of forward motion. And we've got croft in our office. We work with some croft, people who probably should move on to a job where they are better suited. We have croft in our customer base,

and we have croft in our head. And one of the reasons we write stuff down in morning pages is because it gets us out of our head and onto the page. And then subconsciously we say, well, I don't have to keep working on that because at least I wrote it down. And what I am arguing for, not the specifics of morning pages, but the practice says sunk costs and cruffed are a problem.

And the way we get rid of them is by sweeping things away so we can make new things. Guys, for many years, I've been friends with the leaders of belay solutions. the founders, Brian and Shannon Miles, are entree leaders themselves. They came to an entree leadership event many, many years ago when they were a very small company. And today, they have a thriving enterprise.

They're a peak performing business. And, well, I'm honored to be on the phone today with their CEO, Trisha Shortino. Trisha, thanks for being with us. Good to see you, Daniel. So many leaders, you know, they realize they should be delegating more and spending more time working on the business, not just in the business. We believe that the biggest asset of business owner has is their time and how They spend that time matters a lot to the success of the business.

So talk about this idea of delegating to an assistant and how that can really free up a leader to work on the business and do what they need to do. And then how you guys provide solutions for this with Belay. Yes. So we see so many leaders really think that they need to be able to do it all. And the truth is, just like you said, Daniel, you can't do it all, nor should you. You're really limiting your capacity by trying to do all the things. So we really do promote the concept of delegation. And the first great place to start is by finding yourself an amazing executive assistant, which is what Belay Solutions does.

So we provide virtual staffing solutions for leaders in small businesses. We provide executive assistance. So leaders can be freed up to do the things that only they can do. I love it. Well, guys, we've had hundreds of entree leaders, just like you guys listening to this, who have used Belay solutions and worked with their assistance and had incredible results of freeing up their time, things they didn't even imagine that somebody else can do now as being done with excellence being done than they ever could have done it to begin with to schedule a free 20-minute consultation to help you

identify how to save more time and get back to what only you can do. Just text the word belay to 3196. Again, schedule this free 20-minute consultation. You got nothing to lose. Text the word belay, B-E-L-L-A-Y, to 3-1-9-96. We've been talking to a lot about how leaders, small business owners specifically can be more creative, do things that are more meaningful, more fulfilling, and develop as they're becoming an artist and just kind of taking that to a new level. And we also know that part of our job is to influence the team. Our friend John Maxwell says that leadership is influence. How do we get all this stuff into the team? Is there such thing as a culture of practice? Can we build that in our organizations?

A great question. So what's culture, right? Like if you open up a container of kimchi or some yogurt, you know what culture is, right? Because one little thing, touched another little thing, touched another little thing. Culture is the way we do things around here. Culture is people like us do things like this. Culture is what happens when all of your people are watching you all the time. And if you are celebrating the person who got a big sale, even though he or she cut some corners, that becomes part of your culture.

If you are publicly denigrating somebody who tried something creative that didn't work, that becomes part of your culture. The person who gets the employer-in-month parking space has made an announcement through their actions about what it's like around here. and at the International House of Pancakes, my favorite foreign restaurant, if you go there, you'll see near the men's room there's a plaque of Employee of the Month. The way you end up Employer the Month at IHOP is you do exactly what the boss says. So if that's your culture, then don't be surprised that there isn't a practice of creativity and generosity and connection and leadership and art. On the other hand, if employee of the month, whether it's literal or figurative, goes to the person who did something that didn't fail, that didn't work, takes responsibility and gives away credit, then tells everyone what they learned, that will happen more.

And it will happen more at the very same time your bottom line does just as well, if not better. They're not related. Perfectionism and perfect are different. and good enough is a very precise term. It means it's good enough. You don't need anything to be better than good enough because we already defined what you did as good enough. And now we have resources to make things better,

but better doesn't feel like perfect. Better is simply better. I'm thinking about a lady on our team, and she's newer in her career. And I love this lady. She's a fireball. She's also a bit of a bull in a china shop. and I was in a meeting with her recently.

And as the leader of this area, and we've got the strategy, and we've got our objectives, and she came in to report on something. And the way that she articulated what she wanted to do was a bit reckless. Yet the ingenuity, the risk that she took, the art that she was trying to ship here, there was part of me that thought, I love this, because I see me and you 15 years ago when I was being reckless. And then people would slap my hand and say, you can't do it that way here. You got to do it this way. kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And I found this tension in my spirit, Seth, of not wanting to

squelch this thing that I knew was over time the key to her becoming successful. And yet as a leader, I saw something that needed to be refined, to be polished a bit. As leaders, how do we steward this responsibility of helping mature and groom our people and also not force them to be cogs in the machine. Exactly. So reckless is an important word. So it's fearless. We don't need someone who's going to be reckless because that means they don't care about the outcomes and they don't care about what they break along the way. But we also don't need someone to be fearful because that's too much fear. Fearless sits next to reckless, not good either. What we need is someone who understands the genre of what it's like around here, who understands how to talk about their ideas.

And then, number two, someone who doesn't need us to take responsibility for their actions. They need to take responsibility. And what that means is we can create a culture where people do experiments, they do art on the small, where if they are wrong, the cost is pretty low. You shouldn't say to a new employee, oh yeah, you take over our email database, and try whatever you want. Because within a week, you're going to be out of business. But it's totally fine to say,

here's 100 email addresses of customers we know are resilient and like us. Go test some things on these 100 people. And if it doesn't work, it's your fault. If it does work, it's your fault. Go. Get back to me later. And it's the experiments and the mistakes in the small that permit us to gain confidence

to do it at a different scale because we've learned the genre. and often big organizations fail, not because they have reckless people, but because they're so afraid of big mistakes that they refuse to have little mistakes. And then out of nowhere comes an organization like Slack, right, that completely took Microsoft and others by surprise. Microsoft could have launched Slack in a weekend with three engineers, but they didn't because they didn't want to make a small mistake. And as a result, it costing them billions of dollars to catch up. I want to talk about this idea of experimenting. Our friend Jim Collins wrote the book, iconic book, Good to Great,

talks about this illustration of musket balls and cannonballs. And if you picture the old naval warships, the idea with a musket ball is they would shoot the musket ball to their enemy ship with just a little bit of the black powder because black powder is limited. And we can't use it all on a cannonball that misses because then we're screwed. And so you calibrate and calibrate with these musket balls. And finally, you hit the edge of the ship and you go, okay, we got the calibration dialed in.

Now, load a cannonball and go big. And you're almost guaranteed the cannibal is going to hit at that point because you've experimented your way to that conclusion. So many businesses have heard about this idea of we should be experimenting, we should be testing, especially when it comes to web and analytics and marketing. But there's something bigger than that, and that's this broader culture of experimenting, this mindset of testing things and taking risks. all the time. And at the same time, we're trying to do this in a way that's not fatal. We don't want fatal failures, but we want lots and lots of little failures all the time because that's how we learn. Practically, how do we teach our teams to take on this mindset of experimenting? You know, you gave one option of, you know, here's 100 email list you can experiment with, but with our customers in the

store, out in the field, we want to be experiencing incredible customer service that's consistent all the time. And simultaneously, we're trying to encourage experimenting, which could be a little bit in competition with that short term. Oh, it's totally in competition. And I think the only reason you want to be consistent all the time is because you're afraid. It's not the same customer. It's different customers. The overworn story of Zappos, he wants people to be on the phone for three, four, five hours a call, right? Why? Because his people are experimenting as they do that, to discover interesting ways to engage. So practical tip.

When I was building Yoyodine, one of the first internet companies, I had 17 salespeople. And they were all inside salespeople, and I bought them all a $29-dollar radio shack tape recorder. And I said, all week, I would like you to record all your calls. And then on Friday, please bring your best two minutes, the best two minutes you set on the phone, and play it for the other 16 sales reps.

So over that half hour, we had a greatest hits sharing that went on. Now you know they stole from each other a lot next week. And the week after that, and the week after that, why wouldn't you? That wouldn't have been possible if I had said to them, I wrote the script, you read the script. So you got to do one or the other. Well, you talk about experimenting with customers, and I understand you're saying they're not all the same customers. So what's it if you fail with one customer?

And I'm going, but Seth, our net promoter score may drop. If we mess it up with one customer and they don't fill out the survey that we were amazing, that we were a 10 out of 10. We've got a net promoter score and a quarterly objective around that. That's how we're bonusing our team. And you're messing with my system, man. Well, I could answer it conceptually, but let me answer it tactically. I can make your net promoter score go up.

I can make every company's net promoter score go up. It's super simple. It's only two words. Be human. That is what makes your NPS go up. not systemically read them the same script and then do that stupid survey afterwards where you're not listening to the results. We've all seen big companies pretend they're doing all those things. Every time they ask me one of those, I put my phone number in and I say, if you're really

serious about learning, call me. And never once has anyone ever called me. Never once because you're not reading it, right? And so on the other hand, if you think about Any interaction you've had with a company, big or small, where the person helped you by being human, that turns you into a promoter. When we're hiring people, I think so many of our culture issues, if we let the wrong people in the building to begin with, they bring their baggage with them. If we bring people who are transactional, who aren't human, who are coming at this just with their head and not their heart, there's a responsibility we have as gatekeepers to attract

and bring the time. You said it before, people like us do things like this. In the hiring process, it's really difficult because you only have so many interactions with people to figure out, are they like us? So how do we hire for people that are going to be artists? They're going to ship. They're going to be creative, that are going to be human because I'm looking at a resume and I may have a few interviews, and then we've got to take a risk and drop them in. But those consequences can be lasting. Those consequences can be haunting us for months and months if we get the wrong person. Yeah, I think that American corporations have way underestimated how important it is to hire the right people. They dramatically underinvest in it. And they think they're doing better by interviewing more.

Interviewing just tells you if the person's good at interviewing. So if you need a workforce filled with people who are good at interviewing, you have the right screening process in place. And for everybody else, it doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. And my approach is, been only hire people you've worked with before, which feels like a paradox. However, I think the way through it, particularly in our current world, is screen people with whatever screening method you want and then give them a freelance gig and get them to do the work. And only when you see them do the work do you get to see how they do the work and pay them for it. And creating a bench of people who are regularly creating value for you and getting paid for it, and then only hiring people from that bench,

it feels to me like it takes you way closer to hiring the right kind of people. Yeah, I love that. Well, we agree on principle. We have a little different take on that here at Ramsey. Not as much do we do the freelance thing, but we ask people who work here, who are like us, who are your friends that are like us? And we incentivize, we actually give out bounties for,

hey, if you bring somebody on, that's your friend, and they've got to be a thoroughbred, they can't be a donkey just because you're going to get a bounty out of the deal. But they make it through 90 days, and it turns out, hey, they're like us too. You know, we're trying to get our team to get people who are quality thoroughbred type mindset that are like them to be the biggest part of our recruiting program, not an HR function. Yeah, no, it's hard to do, and I'm in favor of it. I used to run a summer camp up in Canada with my friend Joanne, and it was really hard to get kids

to bring other kids, even though it was a life-changing experience. And we discovered why, because they had their city life and they had their camp life. And if they invited city kids to see them at camp, then they'd be busted. And it was only after, you know, the camp drew from like seven cities. But as Toronto got bigger, their cover was already blown. And then Toronto became a hotbed of referrals. Because, all right, well, they already know me here. So I might as well tell my friends.

But in cities where there's only two or three kids who come, they don't tell anybody because they want to have a different life. And I've found that that often happens at work. But my guess is like everything at Ramsey, if you guys put your minds to it, you have no doubt succeeded. Well, one of the big things that helps us overcome that is we're hiring people who are 360-degree all in. Their whole life is integrated, who they are, what they do, what their values are. So people that have a separate life, they have their work life, and then I've got my identity over here where I go crazy on the weekends and do stupid stuff, they don't fit in here. You can't fake that because we just, we're on such a crusade and we need people who, when they show up at work, who they are as an individual and what their values are fully come alive here because it's not something they have to turn on.

It's just consistent. It's Friday night and Monday morning. It's the same person all the time, and that's who we're looking for. You know, business owners this year have been facing many new challenges. The marketplace is crazy right now. You're just such an encourager, especially to small business. And you and I know small business is the backbone of our economy. What I love about small business is so many of them are so much more able to do what you're talking about. The manager of the local IHOP, well, he's a part of a system that's this big machine. And I guess if that CEO got on board with Seth's stuff, maybe he can influence and shift IHOP over time. But small business, They're nimble. They can float like a butterfly. They can sting like a bee. They can hear this podcast.

And Monday morning, they can do something different with their team as a result of it. And by Friday, they're getting new fruit from that action. So what would you say to encourage business owners right now who they've had a challenging year. Many of them are having to let people go. Many of them are tighter margins than they've ever had or even taken on extra jobs on this. I've been meeting with business owners taking on jobs, delivering pizza, just to keep their business alive because they don't want to let their team go and they love what

they do and they believe in it. And yet they're tired, Seth. Many of them are exhausted. Many of them are wondering if they need to throw in the towel even. And to me, that's a tragedy. Because these are the salt of the earth kind of people that you and I both love and are inspired by every day. What would you tell them to encourage their hearts right now? Well, the first thing I'd say is there's no shame here. If you need to take a break for your mental health, take a break. If you aren't able to go to work tomorrow, no one's going to criticize you for this.

This is a calling, this idea of being in small business and making something out of nothing without the wind at your back, competing against systems that seem stacked against you, it's really hard. But if you're on this journey

and you're able to sustain it, don't race to the bottom. You can't out-compli your competition. You can't outwork the old version of you. burning the candle at both ends means you end up with no ends. When we think about people who have done important creative work, who have built anything that matters, unlike what you read in the media,

it didn't take a weekend and it didn't take a month. It took seven years. It took 12 years. It took five years. It's a practice. So I can't tell you anything you should do that's going to work by Friday. What I can tell you to do is if you care about this work, work, create a practice because the practice insulates you from your exhaustion, insulates you

from making a new decision. I've written 7,500 blog posts in a row, and tomorrow there will be a new post on my blog. It will not be a new post because it's perfect. It will be a new post because it's tomorrow. And I made this decision once 20 years ago, and I don't have to make it again. And I made the decision to brush my teeth twice a day 55 years ago, and I don't have to make it again. And so figure out what decision you can make now that you don't have to reconsider. And I think that decision is about a practice of shipping creative work, of becoming resilient, so much so that your competitors hate change and you think it's fine because you, know there's going to be wind. And the thing about sailboats is the person on a sailboat doesn't

care which way the wind is blowing. They just need there to be wind. There's always going to be changed. So if we have a practice, we will be able to figure out how to dance with it. I think one of the most misguided publications out there is Fast Company magazine, this idea that you can microwave the success. And I love what you're saying because you're talking about not microwaves. you're a man who sells crockpots. There you go. At least someone says I've got a crock of it. I'm not sure what they mean, though.

Well, I want you to plug your book because it's great. You were generous to send us a galley copy, and I want people to get this. All of your books have had such a profound on Dave, myself, our audience. You just have such a way of getting us to think differently, be inspired, think out of the box a little bit. What do you want people to know about the practice? Well, it's a little book. It's a quick book, and you won't win any prize. for finishing it. But what it, I hope it is, is the thing you can come back to and that you can

share with your team. That the reason it's worth writing a book and not just a blog post is if a whole bunch of people read it together, they have a shared vocabulary. They know how to talk to each other about where to go next. So it's not a roadmap, but it's a compass. And I think it's a compass that points toward possibility that gets us out of our indoctrination and into service. which is what we set out to do in the first place. And it's pretty easy to find if you just look for the practice. I've written up a summary of it. It's Seth stop blog slash the practice.

But even if you don't buy my book, I hope that this conversation helped you realize that working on your business and the relationships that you have with the people who work with you and who you serve pays off in many, many ways. And we all have this opportunity. You know, you and Dave have been leading

this charge for a long time, and it's easy to say I need to get back to work, but as I'm writing on my blog, now maybe what we need to do is get back to magic, because plenty of people can do the work, but you might be the only one who can do the magic. I love that. We've got a little bit of time here, and so many people, if they YouTube, Seth Godin, or Google Seth Godin, or jump on on your blog, I mean, you're everywhere. Yeah, you can find Seth talking about these great ideas all over the place. Let's get personal for a second. Things you don't always talk about, when you're plugging your books and talking about these great ideas. What is Seth Godin up to? What does your next few years look like? Where's this guy going with this blog? Are we going for

15,000 blog posts and then 30,000 and just to infinity and beyond? Yeah. What's your, what are you excited about these days? I think that the pandemic gave us all a chance to pause and think really hard about the race and what the purpose of the race is and what we're keeping score of. So, I don't keep score of how many books I sold, and I don't wake up in the morning thinking about what when can I get toward next. I'm really focused on where's that small circle of people who are either physically around me or a click away?

What are they doing to make things better? So when I hear from my friend Michelle, who built a school with no support whatsoever in Nepal, or my friend Jody. who before she went to medical school, went to Haiti on her own and set up a school for nurses. No one said, do that because it'll get you into medical school. That's not why she did it. No one said, here's a permit. You can go start this.

She just did. And when I wonder about my next thing and I wonder about the impact of the work, what I'm looking for are stories of people who figured out how to use generalizing. as an engine. Because the thing that makes humans distinct is the way we live in community. Because it's community that forms all of our memories and that nobody goes to bed thinking about how much money they made that day. Deep down, what we understand is there are people around us. And maybe we made a difference for them. There's a lot of pain and trauma in the United States right now. and part of it is a failure of community.

How do we overcome the indoctrination that wants us to be cogs in the industrial system and instead lean in to what we could do? So that's not an answer of did Seth Godin make a banana milkshake for breakfast today, but it is what is guiding my work every day. You talked about not keeping score. I think that's admirable and I get it and I've worked to grow in that direct. I'm such a performer and goal setter that I just, I think I have this engine that says, you have to keep score, you have to keep score.

You start thinking about legacy and the impact we make as leaders. If we're not keeping score, how do we know? Is it a feeling? Is it a, you get a letter from a customer? Let's talk. If you got a minute, let's talk about keeping score because all the metrics are false. Right? Roger Bannister would lose every race.

he was in if it was being held today. So if he went to bed thinking he was great, well, no, he was just great against those people that day, right? We're creating these magnification of small differences as a way of fitting into an industrial narrative that's all about scarcity. And scarcity has a place. But what we're learning is scarcity is being replaced by something else. So there used to be one billboard top 40 chart, and now there are dozens and dozens because

genres don't compete against each other. It's not like I had a choice between Pat Boone and Metallica, so they don't belong on the same list. And if I wanted to, I could look at how many more books Dave Ramsey has sold in Seth Godin, so many more books. Would that change the way I write? Would it change the way my day goes? I don't think so. What would happen if instead of scarcity, we kept track of something else. So what's my legacy? My legacy is the people I taught, what did they teach other people?

I started the Alt MBA five years ago. It's now run by people who aren't me. What are they teaching? And now we've got 5,000 graduates. What are they teaching? These numbers aren't gigantic, but when five gets you five, gets you five, get you five,

now you're starting to change the culture. And so when I think about the false dichotomy between either you're keeping a score or you're not, maybe it's, what am I contributing to an abundant world of possibility versus how am I seeking to seek out false measures of scarcity that are just to fulfill my short-term need to feel like I'm winning something? You said all the metrics are false. And, you know, Peter Drucker, many would esteem Peter Drucker as the father of modern management. And he said, said, you got to track everything. What gets measured, gets managed, and we've got to manage

things. And I know we're talking about earlier about how managers count things and leaders are completely different than that. But is there any context where it makes sense to track and to score and as leaders get that feedback loop of some sort of a dashboard that says this is how we're doing? Oh, in the industrial age, you must do that. You have no choice. In the industrial age, a machine is better than a different machine if it is more productive. In the industrial age, Peter Drucker, who was the guru of industry, for sure, you know, scientific management came first, but for that 50-year run, what gets measured gets done. Edwards Deming, pioneer of quality. It's 100% about measurement. Effort is irrelevant. But do you work in a factory? Are you a cog in a factory? Is that measurement

appropriate. So when I think about like social media, does it really mean that someone likes you? Are they really your friend or are those false metrics? Or if I, let's say I want to sponsor a podcast. Here's one podcast with a million listeners and here's one podcast with 10,000 listeners. Which one should I list? Which one should I sponsor? Well, that's a false metric because the one with a million listeners has an undifferentiated mass of people who are sort of paying attention. and the only with 10,000 listeners are exactly the right people in the exact right state of mind who are eager to solve their problem. False metrics, right?

Just because it's easy to measure doesn't mean it's important. And that was a hard-earned lesson for me, is coming to the realization that I was measuring things that were easy to measure instead of thinking about things that were important to measure. He said that was a hard-earned lesson. And what happened that got you to kind of had that breakthrough or see it differently? Well, there were a few examples. You know, I sold my company a long time ago, and I was lucky enough to sell to Yahoo on the right day.

And then I got a call from Bill Gross, who's a world-famous entrepreneur, and he asked me to be the head of marketing for a startup that he had that was going to go public in a few months. And Stephen Spielberg was on the board. It was a big deal. And he offered me $1 billion in stock options. And in return, I was going to have to leave my family for months at a time because a company that's about to go public doesn't say, well, sorry, I have to go tuck my kids into bed. And I said, no, thank you. And it was one of the best things I ever did.

Because once you've turned down a billion dollars, pretty easy to turn down just about anything. Well, it seems to do that. You had to understand the price you would be paying. And I find many people say yes to the big opportunity, not intending to pay. the price they end up paying because they haven't taken account of what will this cost me. Exactly. And so that was a metric. Like I already had enough money that my family wasn't going to go hungry.

More money was simply a measure, right? Just like what difference does a rating point mean for a podcast? Well, it's a measure if you want it, but that's not why you made it. You made the podcast to change your listeners. That's hard to measure, right? So what I'm getting at is every time I'm presented with something, you and I both know that most bestseller lists right now are gamed. You can buy your way on to the podcast bestseller list.

You can buy your way on. Well, and you can sell more books than everybody else, and they can politicize your way off the list as we figured out around Rams. I'm not bitter about this, but it happens. Right, but the fact that you even have to say you're not bitter about it shows that you guys are measuring something that's easy, not important. Because it used to be that being on the list actually helps. you sell more books. Not true anymore. Now being on the list simply means you get to say you

are on the list. And I know people who have spent $100,000 to be on the list. Not $100,000 to help some village get out of poverty forever, but $100,000 to be on some list for one day. That's a bad metric. You should ignore the metric. And I published a bog post, super proud of it, haven't changed it seven years ago, in which I accused in New York Times of being corrupt and writing a list that they know not to be true. And basically, I fired the New York Times. After you write a post like that, you don't often find yourself on the New York Times per cellarist, which is great, because now I'd have a great excuse. I don't have to worry about it. It's good to be clear on who your enemies are. I mean, if you're confused about that, you might accidentally go on a trip

with them and find out you don't really want to be around these people. Seth, as we wrap up, just any final thoughts of encouragement? What else do men and women out there running their businesses and leading and loving their teams and also trying to balance with loving their families. We've talked about work-life balance and making sure that we know the price we're paying. What have men and women who really are the backbone of this nation's economy?

What do they need to know right now? Well, maybe I'll try a quote from Chong Young Trump-Trump on Rippeche who said, the bad news is we are falling, falling, falling. And the good news is there's nothing to hold on to. And the thing is, we are in the middle of something that is a form of

creative destruction. We didn't ask for it and it is here. And it is reshuffling priorities. It is reshuffling the narrative a lot of people have. It is never going to be back to the way it was. There is going to be a now normal. There's going to be a new normal and that one's going to be replaced by

the next one. And every minute of every day that you spend wishing and hoping the world will go back to the way it was is wasted. Instead, you could approach life the way a surfer does or a powder skier does. They don't say, I hope the waves will be just like they were yesterday. They don't say, I hope every wave is just like the wave that came before. The variation is the point.

The wind is going to change. And people pay extra to go someplace that's unpredictable. Well, you didn't have to go anywhere to get somewhere that's unpredictable. That's where you are now. Our desire for control is not going to make it more predictable. So given that the world is shifting faster than ever before, at the very same time that this is as calm as it's ever going to be again, we get a chance to say, okay, now what? Now how do I surf this? Now how do I sail this? Now, how do I show up and lead? Because that's what they asked me to do. Not manage. If you want to be a manager, go work for Krispy Kreme. We need you to be a leader. And to be a leader means it might not work, but we need you to do. do it anyway. I love it. I love the word picture. The surfing idea, this language has been thrown around today. This is the new normal. And the truth is if you're a surfer, what's normal is there's

never been the same wave. Every single day, it's new. And this is just our new wave that we've got to figure out how we're going to write it together. Seth Godin, incredible. Thank you so much. Always an honor to have you back. Longtime friend of Dave Ramsey himself, Entree Leadership, the brand and the Entree Leadership Tribe. Many-time visitor to the Entree Leadership podcast, it's always a pleasure. You're such a gem. Thank you so much for your kind of and for the value that you add to all these leaders out here listening to this today. You're great. Go make a ruckus. It matters. I've got to tell you, I have been a fan of Seth Godin for almost two decades.

Everything the guy writes. You should be reading his blog. He emails it to your inbox every day. Subscribe to that if you're not. Read everything he writes. Everything on YouTube, he's saying, the guy's brilliant. Now, he would tell you, no, I'm not brilliant. I just show up every day. And I ship. And I decide, in this day, what can I do that's going to help people out? and I ship it out there. And if you will do that every day, day in and day out, and you're diligent the way that Seth has been for almost two decades now, oh, that's how you get to be Seth Coden.

It's consistency. It's diligence. It's shipping the work and being an artist every single day. What's that look like for you and your company? Whether you're a dentist, photographer, you run an HVAC company, maybe you run an ad agency, maybe you've got a software company. what does it look like to be an artist and to create and to ship every day? Because that's your job. If you're a leader, that's what we do. That's what makes great companies and great teams.

Of course, Seth reminds us that if we're not doing that, we're just a boss. And a boss says, people are units of production. They're here to crank out widgets. I'm here to micromanage them and tell them what to do. And nobody likes that. especially as leaders. Guys, it's miserable. Don't spend your career being a boss. Be a freaking leader. Serve your team.

Show up. Love on your team. Ask them how they're doing. Ask them how their days going. Check in with, you know what? They have families. You know they have dreams. You know your team members have hopes and fears.

They're human. And when we show up as leaders and we bring the human to the human equation, that's the sauce. That's what builds culture. That's what promotes unity and rallies people together around a purpose that's bigger than all of us. So we can say, hey, let's get out of bed every morning and be excited about this. That's what it's about. That's what Seth's about.

That's what we learned about in this conversation. So what's the takeaway for you? How are you going to be a little more human, a little bit more of an artist and a little bit less of a boss? and show up. Hey, I got to tell you, if you feel like you're in a rut, if you feel like it's hard to show up, you're going, I'm not motivated, or I'm kind of in a funky spot,

I can't get my head in the game. Most of the time in my life, when I've been in that spot, I look up and I go, you know what, I hadn't read a book in a while. And in today's world, where everything's a tweet and digital and pull out your phone

and next thing you know, an hour's gone by, and you hadn't learned anything. You know why? Because you hadn't learned anything. because you hadn't read a book. Guys, you've got to be reading. If you're a leader, you've got to be a reader.

That's how it works. Make this a habit. You guys know this. You've probably read some books, but if you're like the rest of us, we get away from the habit and we get in that rut and we go, oh, what's going on? Well, we stopped the input of fresh ideas and oxygen into our minds

that make us inspired to give us practical information to go, oh, and we're going to try a new approach and shake it up a little bit. So we know that, and because we know that, we put together an incredible resource for you guys, free resource from the Entree leadership team. A hundred books every leader needs to read. 100 books. These are all books that have been vetted by our team.

They're incredible resources, specifically designed for small business owners just like you. I'm going to help you win. You're going to help you grow your business. Seth's book, This Is Marketing, is on the list, and we'd also recommend anything that Seth wrote, and there's 99 others that we think are amazing. So to get this reading guide, text the phrase 100 books to 33444.

That's 100 books. no spaces to 3344. Or you can just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entry Leadership podcast. Hey, do you know somebody that would enjoy this episode? We'd love it if you would send them a link. We're so thankful that you guys share this to other business owners and leaders and your friends and family. That's how this thing grows and that's how we're able to help more business owners win

by getting the word out. You guys are the way that happens. So thank you. Also, you can follow us on social media at Andre Leadership. You can hang out with me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. Would love to see you there. And for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link in the show notes.

This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty. And on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network,

like Borrowed Future. Not so fun fact. America has a $1.6 trillion student loan crisis and it's out of control. I'm George Camel, host of the Borrowed Future podcast where we uncover the underbelly of the student loan industry and show you what you can do about it. It'll inspire you to see that it is possible to avoid student loans and graduate college debt-free. Listen to Borrowed Future wherever you listen to podcasts.