Good Life Project - Seth Godin: On Books, Trust, Creativity and Making [Best Of]

Episode Date: August 18, 2015

When people talk about Seth Godin, they often attach a variety of labels.Entrepreneur, marketer, mega-bestselling author, acclaimed speaker, trusted-advisor, provocateur, raconteur extraordinaire and ruckus-maker.He is all those.But, when I think of Seth, the first word that comes to me is generous. Seth is a stunningly insightful thinker and doer. But beyond that, he is kind, compassionate and fiercely curious. And, I'm fortunate to also call him a friend.So, when I had a chance to sit down with Seth to record a conversation about everything from his love of books and technology, creativity and making, fear and experimentation and what it really means to live a good life, it was one of those conversations I didn't want to end.We first aired this conversation as a GLP TV episode. I'm so excited to share this "Best Of" episode with you now as a podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, Charge time and actual results will vary. I want to scale trust. I'm not measuring revenue. I'm not measuring profit. I'm measuring trust. If I can continue to do projects that over time people are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and let me make the next project then I view that as a good day. Over the last three years I've had an incredible opportunity to sit down with just a stunning array of human beings and I wanted to take this week and next week to go back into our archives and share two moments with you that

I thought were really powerful, two conversations I thought were really powerful. It doesn't mean that they're better or worse than, but these were things where if you're newer to the project, or if you've been listening the whole time, I think they're conversations that it makes sense to dip back into on a periodic basis. So I want to bubble them back up to the top. So for this week and next week, we'll be featuring these two best of episodes. The first one this week is Seth Godin. I had a chance to sit down with Seth. I've known Seth for a number of years now. He's a friend and he lives locally, so it makes it easier. And we talked about some things that he doesn't always talk about. And the conversation was received incredibly well.

I always learn so much from his genuineness and his generosity. It was always, it was a pleasure, a real pleasure to record this conversation. And I hope you enjoy listening to it as well. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. This week's episode is brought to you by Camp GLP, which is short for Good Life Project. We have got an incredible group, more than 300 people coming from all around the world,

from the US, Asia, Australia, Europe, South Africa. Really just a gorgeous collection, gathering of humanity to learn, to grow, to laugh, to play, have fun, amazing workshops, events, activities. And most importantly, we've got this incredible tribe where you can literally show up and nobody cares who you are, what you've done, how much you're making, what your title is. It's not about posturing and positioning. It's about just being you, being human and interacting around a shared set of fantastic values. So if that sounds amazing to you, if you'd love to be there, we do have a small number of spots left. This all goes down August 27th to August 30th, just about 90 minutes outside of New York City. You can check out all the details at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just take a look at the show notes in whatever app you're listening to,

and you'll see that you can just click right through to get all the information there in the show notes. Thanks so much, and I hope to see you at camp. We're hanging out right now. It's almost hard to not make a quick comment. And behind us is this stunning wall of books, some of them yours, many in different languages. You've read all of these, I'm assuming. Most of them. I wrote some, but the ones I wrote, I definitely read. I gave away 3,000 books when I moved to this smaller office and I miss them every day. No kidding. It's because a book is a souvenir of an idea. And you come in here and you see something and you go, oh yeah. And then you can go do something. Whereas who knows where it is on my hard drive. I find that they're like old friends. So what is it about a book? Obviously, how many books have you written total now?

Well, it's tricky because I sort of draw this line when I wrote Permission Marketing and I became a real author in quotation marks. That was 15 books ago. But before that, I was a book packager. So I did book, the People magazine celebrity, I had a partner of mine who's still in the book business. So I don't really count those. So yeah, I usually say 15. So what is it?. But clearly you've got an obsession with books. I mean, it's something that is just so close to you. What is it about it that lights you up? You know, I think that the magic, it's sort of when people used to talk about radio.

Radio is theater of the mind. You would hear things, but you'd have to put the pictures on in your head. Books are even more than that because you don't even hear it. You have to add to put the pictures on in your head. Books are even more than that because you don't even hear it. You have to add the voice, the noise in your head. And what is magic about books, and I've written about this a little bit, is it's the only form of media that can be reliably produced by mostly one person,

but that stands the test of time. So a tweet goes away and a Facebook update goes away. A movie you need 100 people. So this is like that sweet spot in between where I can say every word in this book I wrote, I thought about it for a year, it's what I was thinking about at the time here. And 20 years from now and 50 years from now, you can still read it. And I'm very lucky that I get to do that. When I was starting out, I got 900 rejection letters in a row my first year. I sold a book the first day and then 900 no's. And I pushed and I pushed and I should have quit and I should have quit and I didn't. And then once I made it over the hump, I'm like, wow, how can I blow this opportunity

to do just one more? Right. And originally, I I mean you came in a world of you know for you went to Stanford you know like you studying business and you came out of that and sort of went into more of like a business side of things although actually you wrote a book with Chip Connolly like right out of the very first book we did yes so and he was a Stanford classmate of yours. So even from then... So the Chip story is probably worth a minute to talk about.

When I got to Stanford, I was the second youngest person in the class. Chip was one of the youngest people, and there were a couple other people, and I didn't know anybody. And I got this note in my mailbox the second day from Chip, who I didn't know, saying, we're putting together a brainstorming group.

Would you like to join? So he took this initiative, and five of us met every Tuesday from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the anthropology department. It was a room we went into just for this purpose. And we sat there for three or four hours a week coming up with business ideas. We came up with thousands of business ideas. And it was one of the very best parts of business school for me. And one of the ideas we came up with was you could enter the book market without taking a lot of financial risk. Let's make a and it was one of the very best parts of business school for me and one of the ideas we came up with was you could enter the book market without taking a lot of financial risk let's make a book that's the best of all these other books and we shipped it out and it got bought the first day

and i said wow this is great if i could just do that every week i could make a living right that was my first mistake i guess right so that so that was the first book then yes Exactly, and that was and then after that was the 900 rejection rejection letters I mean It's interesting right I recently was reading about Jackie Collins And she said you know she had really early success And then her next book she couldn't sell her next book she couldn't sell and her next until like the fifth or sixth one Finally got sold again.

So many people after the second or the third would say like, don't have it. It's just, you know, I love writing, but clearly this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. What is it that lets you get past that and keep, especially doing books because it's a big investment of your time and energy. Well, you know, I think the key thing you're bringing up here is this notion of i don't have it yeah and at the heart of art is learning to see that the person who's a really bad painter not an edgy painter not a new kind of painter but just bad at it, is bad at it because they can't see. They can't see the difference between the arc of a hundred paintings in a row and their painting. It's in a totally different league. They don't get it. The person who sings in the shower and thinks they

should be on American Idol can't hear. But if you can see and you see that there is an arc and your work belongs in that arc, you're going to make a different decision. And the decision is, how long is it feasible for me emotionally and economically for me to stick this out until other people get the joke? And so that's where the notion of Van Gogh comes in. That's where the notion of Jackie Collins comes in. They got the fact that once they got through this hoop, it would be worth it. And it's very difficult for someone who

doesn't hear it and doesn't see it to be honest with themselves. But the most important thing to understand is that the agents and the editors and the people in Hollywood and all those other folks who are turning you down, they're not actually turning you down. They're not actually even looking at what you're sending them. They're not taking a thoughtful look because they have so many choices that what we have to understand is it's basically random. It's random that I was able to break through and someone else wasn't. It's random that one of my books became a bestseller just when I needed it to. It could just as easily have not. I had many, many, many great books in a row not sell, right? And if they had, things would have been different for me,

but they still would have been fine because this is a journey for me. I'm not saying this is my one and only great thing, and if it doesn't work, I'm dead. Yeah. No, it's interesting. It ties in with I recently started doing a deep dive in some of the real thought leaders in the world of positive psychology. So Angela Duckworth is doing this fascinating research on grit. And she's looking at what are all the different factors that allow people to get to this place where they break through, where they survive. The number one factor is what she calls grit, which essentially is just you don't quit. But I think what you're saying is it's bigger than that.

You see the arc. You see where you are at it and where you want to be. I think it's very dangerous to say to people, don't quit. That's why I wrote The Dip, which is about quitting. My new book has a whole section about grit. And I'm a little annoyed that people are talking about grit before January, because I wrote it a year ago, this part of it. But when we think about grit, we think about sand in the spinach. I don't want to eat this.

It's gritty. And so there's pluses and minuses to grit. And the industrial system hates grit, because it can't be easily smoothed out. It can't be easily run over. But at the same time, we have to remember there's a lot of people in the world who we identify as dreamers

who are stuck on saying, I am not going to give up. Well, actually what they're doing is hiding. What they're hiding from is what they would have to do if they did give up. Right. And so those people who carry around that one great idea, my parents had a friend when I was growing up carry around that one great idea, my parents had a friend

when I was growing up, who carried around one great idea his whole life and never accomplished anything. Because it actually wasn't a great idea. He just thought having grit was important. Right. So it makes total sense. And you mentioned this is something from your new book. So let's talk about it a little bit. This is The Eucharist Reception? Yes. So very recently, we're filming this now, and a couple weeks ago or about a month ago, you did something incredible in the publishing world.

I don't know whether you view it as incredible, but the world certainly did, which is that you decided the next book you're going to crowdfund. And you went to Kickstarter, which is a crowdfunding platform, and put up a project. What was it, about three hours before you hit the funding threshold of $40,000? Yes, but I didn't crowdfund it. So I want to be really precise here because it's important. So let's get more descriptive. So Kickstarter is a great art project that has become a real business. And the idea was

the struggling dance troupe down the street needs $3,000 to rent a theater. And once they rent the theater, they'll be able to make plenty of money because they'll have the theater and they can put on their show. How do they get the first $3,000? Let them crowdfund it from their true fans. And those fans are going to crowdfund it because they want to, because of the emotional connection they get, not because they get a prize. Right. But Kickstarter would have failed if that's all it was. It turns out that people are selfish and that people like prizes.

And so the idea, if you look at Kickstarter campaigns, is that after the threshold is met, huge amounts of people show up to do it. So if we look at the Pebble watch, they've raised more than $10 million. Their threshold was, I think, $100,000. So all those people after $100,000, they weren't doing it as donors or crowd funders. They were doing it because they wanted to buy a watch at a good price. It's like the front-loading inventory, basically. So I looked at what was going on with Kickstarter.

I looked at what my friend Amanda F. Palmer did with her record album. She spent a year recording it. She needed money to bring it to the world. She said, I need $100,000. It hit $1.2 million. So the question is, what are those other $1.1 million for? It didn't make her rich. It's going to cost her a fortune to give people all those prizes.

What it's for is this powerful public way to let your fans find each other, raise their hand, and lock them in before you go to market. So I went to my readers and I said, look, if I can't get 10,000 copies of this thing pre-signed up, I shouldn't write it. And if I can, then I will be able to walk with a big stick to the bookstores and say, you know, you've never supported my work because they really haven't. I shouldn't write it. And if I can, then I will be able to walk with a big stick to the bookstores and say, you know, you've never supported my work, because they really haven't. You see big stacks of books in a lot of stores.

But when my books come out, there's never big stacks in them, because they don't get the genre that you or I are in. And I can say, I already have more than 10,000 people or 10,000 copies pre-spoken for. So in fact, I'm going to break even on the Kickstarter because the prizes I put up were pretty good, right? And I have to go make all this stuff, which I love to do. So I didn't crowdfund it.

What I did was I, we don't have a word for it, I crowd-attentioned it. I said, if I can get the whole crowd to pay attention, locked in, then yeah, it's worth me going to do this. So when it comes out in January, people who've got the eight pack are all going to get eight copies of my new book. What are they going to do with it? They're going to have to give seven away. That's what every author wants. So I did it to set a standard. And the reason I'm correcting you here is I want

other authors to do the same sort of thing on Kickstarter or not to say, you know what, the model of a publisher giving you cash and then saying go away for a year and then we're going to go yell at the audience as fast as we can for a week doesn't make any sense that the author can take control the author can take authority and say i have true fans i'm lining them up i maybe i don't need a publisher for the money i probably need a publisher for the distribution but if you've lined them up the publishers are going to get in a row waving whatever enthusiasm

they need to to get you to say yes you can distribute my book because the power now shifts to the person with the fans and it's a great clarification and it helps me really understand what you really did and I think it's really helpful because other people can now helps me really understand what you really did um and i think

it's really helpful because other people can now i think really understand what the psychology of what you're really trying to accomplish there um so you just brought up also like the idea of other publishers so is this something where you now take this and you go to a publisher and you say let's work together and you print and you go through your distribution channel so what i said in the Kickstarter is, my publisher and I aren't going to publish this if I don't make it. That was part of my understanding. And so now I've signed a contract with Penguin,

who's published some of my work in the past. But if they didn't want to, I could have had five other people do it. Not because I'm Seth, but because I have all these people who are ready to go. And so they're going to do all this stuff I hate to do. They're going to worry about returns, and they're going to worry about getting it in the stores and they're going to worry about forms and all this other stuff. What I learned from the Amazon project where I did 12 books with the Domino project is all of them became bestsellers on Amazon, every one. But if you're not in the bookstore, if you're not where people go when they're looking for their next idea, you're leaving a lot of attention on the table.

So I wanted my new thing, wherever I did it, to be a place, because I think I owe the words that, where it could reach the audience of people who are comfortable buying it in whatever setting they're sitting in. Right. And it makes total sense. So let's talk a little bit about Dominant Project also, since you sort of brought this into the conversation. Incredible project. It was rolling for about a year. Is that about right? And the word project was built into it. Exactly. So what were you trying to explore with that? What was the question that you went into this asking, and what did you learn? So I've been thinking about book publishing since I've gotten into it in 1986.

And I was there when Amazon started the very first day and was aware of it. They were selling stuff my mom was publishing in Buffalo, where I grew up. So I knew that they would sell a book, then call the art gallery in Buffalo and say, we need one right away. And they'd end up paying like $60

for a book they sold for $15. So I met Jeff Bezos early on, and I went out to Seattle probably in 1997 and said, you guys should become book publishers, because you have a connection to the reader, the publisher doesn't. And if you know what readers want, all your risk goes away. And I went back in 2002, they said, we risk goes away. And I went back in 2002. They said, we're not ready. And I went back in 2005. They said, we're not ready. And then after I published Linchpin, I published a post that said, you know, I think I'm done with traditional publishing.

There's just too much waste, too much risk. Three days later, the phone rang. It was Amazon. They said, we think we're ready. Well, at that point, they called my bluff because I'd been saying, do it. So I viewed it as a challenge. I spent a lot of time teaching people at Amazon how book publishing actually works. It's not printing.

Printing is easy. Publishing is hard. So I view this as a test lab, and I invented a whole bunch of stuff that's going to be in the Kindle one day and ways that it could show up on the site. And how do you deal with an audience, and what can you change? So, for example, I don't know if you can see up there, but the books don't have any up on the site and how do you deal with an audience and what can you change? So for example, I don't know if you can see up there, but the books don't have any words on the cover. Why is that? Well, the reason is that on the Amazon page, you've got the cover and then you have the words right next to it. You don't need words on the cover. You need a thumbnail.

We played with pricing. We played with a 50-pack. So no bookstore would ever sell a 50-pack of books. But we sold a ton of books, 50 at a time, so that people would distribute them. So for me, it was an experiment, a project. I talked about everything we learned. There were no secrets. And I got to work with authors that I've always liked and respected. After a year, I said, you know what? We did a lot of experiments.

I don't like being a publisher. I don't like making promises to authors that I might not be able to keep. All of those elements of it that are fun to do for a little while, I didn't want to do for my whole life. That's why I called it a project. So we declared victory, and now it's on to the next art project. So that, I mean, which is great, because from the outside looking in, you're looking at this thing, and it seems like it's humming along, and you're doing great work,

and you're bringing great books and great ideas to a lot of people. And then it was almost like one moment, it's like poof. It stops. But I guess what you're saying is from the inside, this was always an experiment. Yeah, I'm very into poof. I think if you're not doing poof on a regular basis, you're going to fill your life with all this stuff You have to keep supporting. I mean you look around my office

There are no employees in this whole place because it's way easier to shift gears If you build up teams of people who you know thrive on the work you're doing with them But you don't owe them a lifetime of how do we make this as big as we can? Mm-hmm, right that I think more and more of our economy is based on small teams of people or individuals who are willing to do a project and then want to go do the next project. So what do you think of this then? Because there seems to be this almost maniacal desire to build and scale,

especially what we see in the tech world these days. It's like startup, scale, and the goal is not do something great, the goal is exit. What are your thoughts around this? Well, you know, I don't think anyone's saying Tom Hanks should be making Big Seven. Tom built the movie Big. He should do more Big. No one says that.

It's okay for an actor to go do the next project. The thing in the startup world is if you're raising money, you have no choice but to scale because the amount of money you raised was so big. And if you raise money, you have no choice but to exit because that's the only way to give the money back. The question is after you exit,

then what happens to your life? And if you're okay with projects, it's super because then you go do the next thing. But if you've fallen in love with the job, then it's traumatic. You know, lots of people who I've seen build things and exit. It's the worst thing that ever happened to them. Because that thing you leaned against for so long that was your lifeblood goes away.

Right? So the guys at 37 Signals aren't doing that. They didn't raise very much money, almost none, and they have no desire to exit. They get offered to exit all the time. Their mindset is, no, we are a team and this is our work. Well, that's fine. It's not an art project anymore, though, because they have to keep taking care of their customers, et cetera.

For me, I want to scale trust. I'm not measuring revenue. I'm not measuring profit. I'm measuring trust. If I can continue to do projects that over time people are willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and let me make the next project, then I view that as a good day.

And that's why there's no ads on my blog. That's why I haven't figured out how to sell 18 different things on my blog. I could scale my blog, but that wouldn't scale trust. So that's sort of your fundamental metric. Yeah, exactly. And you brought up also that the guys at 38signals have built something, but it's not art, or it's not art anymore. Well, I think that as an art project, it gets harder and harder for 37 Signals to say,

how do we change everything? Now, they wrote Ruby on Rails so they could write Basecamp. Well, Ruby on Rails was a massive art project that was disruptive. Basecamp was disruptive. Campfire was disruptive. Their whole business model is disruptive. But you can't then say to all those customers, okay, now we're going to blow that up and do the next thing because those customers didn't buy into it. I'm not diminishing what they do. I'm just saying for me, the clean sheet of paper is worth a lot. And other people don't want a clean sheet of paper. The guys who work at Apple Computer don't have a clean sheet of paper is worth a lot. And other people don't want a clean sheet of paper. The guys who work at Apple Computer don't have a clean sheet of paper. Even when they make a new

product, it's still got to have the DNA of Apple or it's not going to work. And so when we think of the work part project, what we generally think is that Steven Spielberg can go from making a Jaws-like movie to making a Holocaust-type movie though it's a clean sheet of paper. He's still using film. He's still using a camera. But it looks and feels different. So I'm not diminishing any of these things. What I'm trying to draw the line between

is this notion of industrial labor where you do the same thing over and over and over again and the scary notion of going out on a limb to do something that might not work. Which is interesting. So you use the word clean sheet of paper and going out on a limb to do something that might not work. That process terrifies the vast majority of people.

Right. To the point where it either paralyzes, two ends of the spectrum, you either become paralyzed or you back away. Where you rush so fast to just get it done with that you miss all the good stuff along the way. Talk to me about that. I work with the Acumen Fund,

which is a charity that invests in companies that work with entrepreneurs in the developing world, underprivileged countries like India and Kenya and Pakistan, places like that. And I've been fortunate enough to go there and work with some of these companies. And when you hang out with people who make $3 or $5 a day, which is less money than any of us could ever imagine, you really understand the difference between want and need.

That people at that level don't want as much as we do, because they are children and grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of people who have always had an expectation that what they have is all they're going to get. So people at that income level, for example, have never in their life gone to a store to go shopping. They go to replenish things they already have, but they don't walk and say, hmm, I wonder what's for sale today. Ever once, right? Probably have never bought something they have never bought before, if you think about that. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about the world, when you understand the

wants and needs. So every single person who is watching this basically has every good that they need. So then the question is, what do you want? And if you want what TV tells you to want, then you're on this carousel that never ends, that fulfills a lot of the industrial economy. The question is, if you look deep down when you're done with that 70 years from now, 100 years from now, will you be glad that you were on that carousel the whole time? Or is there something else you might want to want? And if you talk to artists, if you talk to people who love making a ruckus in design

and the clean sheet of paper and the risk and the dance, if you talk to Philippe Petit, who walked down a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, he didn't do it for the endorsement money, right? He did it because he could and because the planning of it was magnificent. The exit at the end was heartbreaking. He lost a relationship and his whole life spun again because he didn't have the thing to plan anymore.

And at least for me, and at least for a lot of people, when I'm able to talk to them quietly, that's at the heart of what it is to be a person, is not to want more stuff, but to want that feeling. And I'm lucky enough that I get to do it in public. But if I couldn't do it in public, I would do it in private, right? The person who carves a canoe paddle out of a piece of cherry wood isn't doing it because they need a canoe paddle. They're doing it because the act of dreaming it and creating it and then saying, yes, I'm done, I think is an inherently human behavior.

And I agree, but the flip side is, then why don't so many more people do it? Why do you think? I think they're terrified. But why are they terrified? Well, so, I mean, when I was working on my last book, you know, the fascinating research around what happens in your brain, it's all the same stuff you talk about when we go to this place where we have to make decisions and take actions in the face of imperfect information right but what what blew me away was that i dug deeper into

the research and i found people replicating a study where people had to you know the classic ellsberg paradox make a decision but they were told that nobody would ever know what their decision was so they eliminated the expectation of judgment. The bias essentially was gone. So I think there's, to me, my thought is there's a huge social context to it. It's 99% social context. Once we eliminated the need problem, once you know you're not going to starve to death, right? Like that Swami in Bareilly, India, he has a different calculus than me. He's saying, if I am wrong, my kids might not eat. If I am wrong, someone might die. Totally different game, right?

For our game, it's about being brainwashed. And someone brainwashed you on purpose. You were brainwashed from the time you started going to school, maybe even before that. That we live in a system that thrives precisely because people are terrified to step outside the line. So I guess the question is why? Why is the system designed that way? Is it because compliance is easier to manage on a societal level? Sure. I mean, if you think about pre-revolutionary France, the king very much wants people to comply. The difference is the king has millions and millions of people to worry about and not a lot of levers, not a lot of leverage to force compliance other than guillotine-like devices. Now we don't have one king. We have the

Fortune 500. We have tens of thousands of kings, each one of which has a benefit from compliance. And the depth of what society has done to us in just 100 years is bigger than most of us imagine. 100 years ago, almost no one on earth had a job. Almost every single person who lived in 1900 lived off the work of their hands or a farm. And this idea that you would go to a building where a stranger would tell you what to do all day was pretty alien. Now everyone has a job.

That's only in four generations, five generations. That's a massive shift. And so now that we're coming out on this other side where the Internet is changing so much of what people do and the industrial economy is in a different space, it's a whole different ballgame. And this is a revolution, and revolutions destroy the perfect and they enable the impossible.

And that perfect world of the 60s and 70s that we grew up with, with endless industrial growth, it's going away. And it's being replaced by something completely impossible, which is one guy by himself in a room here can press one button and thousands of people around the world support a project that lets me go build it for a year. And I didn't have to get anyone's permission I just said here that's revolutionary so is is this also I mean clearly this is something you're so passionate about and one of the things that when you look at your body of work and what you've written the topics that you've covered have evolved especially in the last

three four or five years dramatically, more around these ideas. Is this sort of like the evolution that's the bigger thing that you're seeing that's now driving a lot of what you write about? Well, I guess what drove it was this. When you put your ideas in the world, you intersect with the marketplace of ideas and it comes back to you. So I would put out permission marketing or unleashing the idea virus or purple cow, and people would respond to me. And the questions were never, what's the detail of this word versus this word,

or how do I technically do this or technically do that? It was always, well, I'm afraid, or I don't feel like it, or I don't have any good ideas. And it became clear to me that all the tactics in the world aren't going to help if people aren't willing to go down the road. And that the richest, juiciest conversations I was having with people weren't, change this from red to blue because I could care less. They were always about, well, is this work worth doing? Is it something you're proud of? What are you afraid of? Why can't you pick yourself?

I mean, some of the people who are watching this are looking at you and me and saying, well, that's easy for them to say, right? Well, hello, the 900 rejection letters, the window shopping at restaurants, and then eating macaroni and cheese. This isn't about now I get to do something because something special happened to me. What I'm describing is that people like Amanda Palmer, people like Philippe Petit, people who care now get to do something.

And they don't have to ask first. So you can say you don't care. And you can say you don't care, and you can say you're afraid, but if you're not afraid and you care, then you can do it. And that's magical that now you can do it, and it doesn't matter where you live. If you can watch what we're saying right now,

you have the same tool that I have, which is the connection machine, and the connection machine changes everything. Absolutely, and so it's kind of fascinating too, which is the connection machine. And the connection machine changes everything. Absolutely. So it's kind of fascinating, too, because if we have this ability to do it, and not if, we do, and it's becoming easier and easier and easier, and the barriers to entry and the costs and the risk are rounding to zero with every passing second.

And then we wake up in the morning and we say, I could do this, this, this, or this. How do we decide where to invest our energies? Exactly. So, you know, I got to do a series of lucky, weird introductions, asked to produce a play that ended up winning Tony Awards and making a lot of money. And people have said, when I was writing for Fast Company,

why don't you show up on ABC television and host this show? And I was gonna be one of the judges. I mean, people just show up and you can do this, you can do this. They're all over, right? It doesn't matter what you pick. It just matters that you pick. The reason people don't wanna pick

is because then they have to claim it. You pick that, you didn't pick this, better to pick nothing, right? And you know when I was a book packager we had a database and had 245 book ideas in it. And so every Monday we would come in that we weren't actively making an almanac or whatever it is we were building, say, all right which one should we develop now? And it would be so easy to wait till Wednesday to pick. was like it doesn't matter we got rid of the bad ones just pick one I don't care it's that's not the point the point is to do it so we get to this place where um it's up to us to just take action and and I think one of the things that

stops people from picking is fear of picking wrong. And what you're essentially saying is it doesn't matter. This may bomb, it may do phenomenally, but you're never gonna know unless you stop the conversation in your head and just do it, get it out into the world, and then you'll see. And if it succeeds, great, build on it, morph off of it, take up. But if it doesn't, like what you said earlier,

don't be afraid of the poof. Yeah. And the thing about business plans, I've read business plans from very big companies. And I was talking to the guys at Google when they were first getting started and things like that. They're always wrong. Every business plan is dramatically wrong. You don't know what the questions are until you're deep into it. Squidoo, the internet company I started,

I was wrong about our revenue per user by a factor of 100. A hundred, right? That changes a lot of things when you're off by two zeros. A lot. But we're still doing fine. And if I had known I was wrong by a factor of 100, I never would have started it, right? And so when you get started, you say,

oh, well, that was wrong, but now I'm here, so what can I learn? And all these people who are walking around with the perfect plan, but that they're afraid to intersect with the market, they haven't done anything then. It's the intersection that matters. Yeah, and I guess it circles back

to our earlier conversation about the dreamers. You know, like, the plan is perfect only in your head. Right. You know, once it's in reality, then you've got to deal with the fact that most of your assumptions... Right, and that's the best part for me. Yeah. Right, the best part.

I love, I mean, I have 20 business plans on my computer that I could show you, and that's fun daydreaming, but for me, the juicy stuff is, okay, now I'm in it. How do I do this in real time? You know, one of the things I do every summer is teach canoeing up in Canada. And so you've got a whole bunch of 10-year-olds out on this lake. I don't have a motorboat. I'm going to canoe by myself. And the wind blows up. So now what are you going to do? You're in the middle of the lake. The wind's blowing 15 miles an hour. That 12-year-old is never going to be seen again

unless you figure out what to do now. Right? I can plan all I want the day before. It is what it is. But until you're there, it's nothing. So one of the interesting things about you also, I think, is that people are fascinated by you and the shifts that you've made and your willingness to just dive in and dive in and dive in.

There's something that, so I went out, you know, I've talked to other people before this. Hey, you know, what do you think we should ask Seth? And there's a very clear line that seems like you're a family man, you're married, you have kids, but it's something you never talk about. So there seems to be a pretty bright line. Is that true? And if so, why is it there? What's the... Well, there are two reasons there is a bright line. The two reasons are, one, I've tried very hard not to say to people, do this because I said so, and this is who I am.

I'm trying to be a teacher not a guru and there's a big difference. And so I don't want to, I don't often tell detailed personal stories to teach a lesson because I would rather have it be more universal so that even if you haven't lived exactly the life I've lived you can see the lesson I'm talking about. So you don't have to step into Seth's being to experience the benefit of what you're saying. And the second reason is that there is clearly a path online of intimacy and transparency with your fan base.

And some people have done a great job with that. It's just not for me. And it makes me uncomfortable when I run into somebody and they know something about me that I didn't know they knew. Right. Because like, maybe it's just because I'm 50. Because I, how do you know when my birthday is? It's like weird. Other people love that. Right. And I just made the decision long ago that my family should have their lives and I'm going to have mine and I'm going to be a teacher as much as I can. And if that's not enough for people, then they should go find a guru, but it's not me. Yeah, that makes

total sense. So let's bring this full circle. You know, the name of this project is a good life project or good life project. When you hear the phrase good life, live a good life, what does that mean to you? The most important thing is it means you get to decide what good is. And if you were living somebody else's good life, you were making a huge mistake. Because if someone else tells you that your life would be better if you were on a reality TV show, or if you were richer, or if you were taller, or whatever, then you're in for a world of hurt. But if you can decide what a good life is and you can decide what sort of art projects make you feel fulfilled,

then I think it's your choice and only your choice and that you should say to people who would have you live a different life that they should go live that life and you should pick yours.

Love it. It's a great place to end. Thank you so much for your kindness, your energy, your thoughts. It's been a wonderful conversation. This is a very generous

thing you're doing. I can't wait to see all of them. Thank you. And so Jonathan Fields here with Seth Godin and hope you've enjoyed the show. Signing off. Thanks so much for joining in this week's conversation. You know, I'm just thinking if you've actually stayed till this point in the conversation, I'm guessing there's a pretty good bet that you've gotten something out of this episode, some nugget, some idea.

If that is right and you feel like sharing, then by all means, go ahead. We love when you share these conversations and get the word out. And if you wouldn't mind, I would so appreciate if you would just take a few seconds, jump onto iTunes or use your app, and just give us a quick rating or review. When you do that, it helps get the word out, helps let more people know about the conversations we're hosting here, and it gives us all the ability to spread the word and make a bigger difference in more people's lives. As always, thank you so much for your kindness, your wisdom, and your attention. Wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Field, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even

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