Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Where most people give up after a handful of rejections, Seth Godin got rejected 800 times by editors before finally making a big break. For him, every “no” was a clue. He adapted and mastered the system, and soon, the same editors who dismissed him were calling him first. His success wasn’t luck or passion. It was built by showing up, iterating, and playing the long game. In this episode, Seth joins Ilana to reveal why most people quit before they succeed, how to market ideas people want, and why smart strategy, not passion, drives real success. Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and marketing expert widely recognized for his groundbreaking ideas on marketing, leadership, and business innovation. He inspires individuals and businesses to make a difference by being creative, authentic, and impactful. In this episode, Ilana and Seth will discuss: (00:00) Introduction  (01:34) Startup Failures and Early Struggles (02:48) From 800 Rejections to Breakthrough (04:34) Turning Rejections into Strategic Insights (06:25) How to Lead Change Amid Resistance (09:23) Why Commitment Beats Passion (11:12) The Dip: Knowing When to Stay or Quit (14:31) How to Create Value in Niche Spaces (19:32) Building Success with Constant Iteration (23:33) Strategies for Earning Your Worth (27:06) Building Brand Reputation Through Consistency (31:55) The Chocolate Bar Marketing Strategy (34:34) Embracing Failure as Part of the Journey Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and marketing expert widely recognized for his groundbreaking ideas on marketing, leadership, and business innovation. He is the author of over 20 best-selling books, including Purple Cow, and This Is Marketing. Seth inspires individuals and businesses to make a difference by being creative, authentic, and impactful. Connect with Seth: Seth’s Website: https://www.sethgodin.com/  Seth’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sethgodin/ Resources Mentioned: Seth’s Blog: https://seths.blog/  Seth’s Book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) https://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591841666 Seth’s Book, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans: https://www.amazon.com/This-Strategy-Better-Elevate-Community/dp/B0D47T8S7N  Seth’s Book, This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See: https://www.amazon.com/This-Marketing-Cant-Until-Learn/dp/0525540830/  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training

Wow, this is going to be such an incredible show today. But before we start the show, I want to ask you for a favor. See, I'm on a mission to help millions leap their careers, land their dream roles, fast track to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or create portfolio careers. Now this podcast is about giving you a blueprint of how some of the biggest leaders of our time resuccess. So subscribe, download, so you never miss it. Plus, it really, really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. So let's

dive in. I have had more failures and lost more money doing this than most people, and I wouldn't trade it. Seth Godin is the author of 22 worldwide bestseller that has been translated into 40 languages. You are an incredible entrepreneur at heart, plus one of the most prolific bloggers on the internet. I started my first business in 74, sold ice cream sandwiches and posters.

I started a book packaging company, got rejected 800 times. It was a slog of inventing things that people didn't want to buy. The key learning from the 800 rejections is, I totally understand that there's a desire to leap. But if you are picking a path that is crowded, that is easy to get on, and only has one or a few winners,

you have made a bad strategic decision. What are the strategies that will help you rise above the noise? The first one is... Seth Godin is the author of 22 worldwide bestseller that has been translated into 40 languages. Seth, you love teaching. You are an incredible entrepreneur at heart, plus one of the most prolific bloggers on the internet. I even bought your chocolate.

And I know you almost never talk about yourself because you want to give so much to others. But I do want to take you for a second to starting your first company, YoYo Dine, which was acquired by Yahoo. Can you share a little bit about that story? Sure. It's great to be here. I would say that YoYo Dine was my seventh company, not my first company. And one of the challenges that we have when we seek to lead and to show up is this sensation that we have to get it all right and have the big launch and everything's got to be smooth sailing after that. But that's almost never what actually happens.

What usually happens is first we look in the mirror and see somebody who wants to build something. That thing we build might be solo, that thing we build might be freelance, and it might be entrepreneurial, something bigger than ourselves. I think I started my first business in 74. I built businesses that sold ice cream sandwiches and posters. When I was in college, Steve Dennis and I co-founded one of the largest student-run businesses in the world. Each one of them had value being created for people, and none of them was a household name. And in 86, I started a book packaging company, got rejected 800 times in a row after selling my first book.

And it was a slog of inventing things that people didn't want to buy, or inventing things that they bought them, but it was tricky. And what I saw was a company called Prodigy coming along. And Prodigy and then AOL and CompuServe were the thing before the internet. And I'm a game designer from way back and I designed a game that we ran on Prodigy and it was extremely successful. The thing that I discovered though is that building software in the 80s or 90s, the 90s by then, was very expensive and difficult to do over and over again. And nobody knew who was going to win prodigy, compuserve, AOL, whatever.

But what they all had in common was email. And so we invented email marketing and YoYoDine, which I ran out of my pocket from the book business, incrementally built up by finding clients who wanted to pay us for the next project and the next project until eventually the web showed up. And I thought the web made absolutely no sense. I thought the worldwide web was a scam and it wasn't going to work.

That cost me, I don't know, $50 billion. But eventually we grew to be the largest email marketer in the world. And then I sold the company to Yahoo in 1998. When you get 800 rejections, that's usually where people stop, right? I mean, they stop by the fifth one. They usually stop at 20. Okay.

So what makes you, and you talk also about the fact that you're never going to be ready, and you talk a lot about the perseverance of these things, but what made you continue when you get no's? What makes you continue even now? In my book, This is Strategy, I talk about the key questions we need to ask ourselves. And they are, who's it for, what's it for?

What is the change we're here to make? And if you're hassling people to change their mind to like what you do, you're never going to get to where you want to go. And so the key learning from the 800 rejections is they weren't all the same. The rejections at the beginning were, you're a stranger around here. You don't know how we do things. That was it. We're not even going to look at the rest of it because you're not speaking the right language. And over time, over the months that followed, the rejections got more insightful.

They were no longer was someone saying, who the hell are you? They were saying, oh, I see what you were doing here, but we need something more like that. And so I had to develop the empathy to sell book publishers what they wanted, not what I wanted. Once we got over the hump, we ended up doing 120 books, a book a month for 10 years. And we were a trusted partner. Who changed?

We changed. The editors didn't change. The editors were the same. But we changed because we now had their voice in our heads. And so if you're busy hassling and hustling people and you keep getting nos and they're always no, then the world is telling you something. It's telling you you're being selfish. But if you are engaging with people and getting better at solving their problem

and they're encouraging you, then those rejections aren't no, they're no for now. They are, let me tell you where I'm hoping to go, will you come with me, letters. And those are the things we're looking for. Then you also talk in, this is tragedy in your book, you talk about time and games and systems and empathy and you touched part of it.

And I love that you call it dance together versus combat each other. Can you explain this a little bit? If you're seeking to make something, you're trying to make a change happen because before your project got here, it wasn't here. And you want your project to succeed, which means you're gonna have an impact on the world.

A change is going to happen. Change is always gonna be opposed by systems. Systems like things the way they are. That's why they are systems. That's why they stick around. So we need to see systems. We need to realize that all the moves we make and that the system makes in return look a lot like a game. And if something doesn't work, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you made the wrong move. And empathy we just talked about, and the fourth one is time,

which is that forest out the window where you're sitting right now, didn't used to be a forest. It used to be a little tiny sapling next to another sapling, and it grew over time. And so try to imagine if you had to write yourself a five years ago letter and that letter was to thank the you of five years ago for something hard that you did

that we're grateful for today, right? I'm really glad you decided to speak up to your parents and not go to dental school because five years later, my life is better. I'm glad we didn't have to go to dental school. That's a thank you note. All right, well, the you of five years from now is going to send the you of today a thank you note as well.

What are they going to say? What are you going to plant today that they're going to be glad five years from now that you put the effort into planting? That's beautiful, because you also talk a lot about making change happen and creating impact and creating things that you care about. And a lot of it is also driven by the strategy that you put together, the marketing you put

together. Why is making change so important? Change isn't important if you're happy with the way things are, right? That if the snow at the top of the mountain where you teach cross-country skiing is exactly perfect for the right number of days a year, don't change it. That's fine. You should dance with that. That's fantastic.

But if you want to create value, if you want to make a profit, if you want to make a difference, you have to make change happen. And the thing about change, as we said, systems fight it and it always creates tension. The tension of this might not work, the tension of I'm not sure, the tension of this is new, the tension is who are you to do this? And so what it means to make change is to unwillingly inflict tension on the system to help make it better. So you talk a lot about that and you're actually saying and I love this quote, what you're doing today

that creates the condition for tomorrow to be better, right? But I think you also talk a lot about bringing your passion, bringing your all in, right? And if you're all in, you'll be able to do so much more in your life. If you talk to professional poker players, they will explain to you that going all in is mostly for amateurs. That professional poker players win over time. They don't win all in. And the thing about passion, like authenticity, is for amateurs.

In the sense that your friends are owed your authentic passionate self. But if you're a professional, you make a promise and you keep it and you don't keep it today. You keep it every day going forward. So you need to be able to operate doing work you are proud of, but you cannot possibly be on the hook to be passionate every single day. That's not something that's going to happen. So instead what we seek is an arc we can be proud of that we will be passionate about now and then,

but mostly we can be professional about. That we can say, this is gonna be open from nine o'clock to five o'clock, whether I feel like it or not. I'm gonna do a heart surgery on you at three in the afternoon, the best it can be done, even if I just had a fight with my brother-in-law. That you're not looking for the red hot fire

of somebody who's doing their hobby. We're looking for the reliable, branded promise of showing up the way you said you would. Interesting. So many times I talk about that I don't know if I believe in motivation, I believe in habits. And when you form these habits, you can create it again, again, again, right?

But I think you, and we talked about it a little bit before the show, you in the dip actually, I think, opened my eyes a little bit to say, yes, but what's on the other side of this habit that you're creating? Is there, you know, a trajectory to something beautiful, or are you full gas neutral going into this cool, the sack, dead end that is just getting you nowhere, which I found myself in my career as well. So how do you put all of these together

as far as you're concerned? Oh, so let's just talk through the dip. Now, far more than when I wrote it, there's a huge premium to go to the entity that wins. That if you type in best pizza in Cleveland, you're not gonna go to the fourth best pizza in Yelp, you're gonna go to the best pizza in Yelp. The idea that you can do very well coming in seventh place

keeps fading away. So what does it mean to be the best in the world? The best in the world that whatever world you define, for whatever customer you define, right? If there are three gyms within driving distance of my house, the best in the world just means you're the best of those three gyms. Fine.

What would it mean to be the best at that? And it turns out that if we're trying to make change happen, to get from here to best, there's a dip. And the dip is the hard part. The dip is the part where all your competitors are going to quit because it's too hard. The dip is the thing that feels overwhelming, unreasonable to get through. And when the dip shows up, most people quit. That's why it's called the dip. You should not be surprised if there is a dip because if it's worth doing, there's a dip. What you should do is when it shows up, welcome it and say, this is what I plan for. I plan for this extremely difficult slog, because that's what's

going to create value when I get to the other side. And if we see a platform like TikTok, where anyone can be on it, because there's no dip really, there's this huge long tail and no one is particularly happy unless they win the lottery. What you'd prefer is to find something that's actually difficult, so that when you get to the other side, you're glad you did.

But as you pointed out, sometimes there isn't a dip. Sometimes it's just a dead end. You cannot smoke enough cigarettes to get through lung cancer. It's a dead end. There's no dip there. And lots of us have signed up for projects or entrepreneurial things or freelance careers that are dead ends. They were pedaling faster and faster and faster and faster, but it is impossible to pedal our way out of it. And so you need to be smart about whether you're in a dip or a cul-de-sac, a dead end. I think that was a really, really interesting awakening, but what's beautiful then you create these books

about this is marketing and this is strategy. So assuming that you know where you're heading and assuming that you're not going into a dead end now, how do you actually rise above the noise? Because there is a lot of noise right now. There's a huge people pile on every single opportunity that you're going to go after. So talk to us a little bit because we want to go back to this strategy. What are the strategies that will help you rise above the noise

that is just so hard these days? Well, if you are picking a path that is crowded, that is easy to get on, and only has one or a few winners, you have made a bad strategic decision. You have picked a shiny path, but not a good one. So there's this whole concept in our culture of a certain kind of Instagram influencer

with their hat and their hair and their van, and they're promoting this skin cream or that skin cream. You know who I'm talking about. That is not a good project. That's a lottery. Someone's gonna be a Kardashian, but it's not gonna be you. Don't do that.

What you can do instead is find an audience and a spot that isn't noisy. So for example, a year and a half ago when AI started showing up in conversation, there actually wasn't a newsletter that came out every few days that described in detail what was going on in AI. So there were all these people crowded wanting to have an argument about this or an argument about this, but when Dan started every this

newsletter, he only had a 10 subscribers the first day and then a hundred subscribers and now it's a profitable powerful narrator for this space that is almost impossible to defeat because he went in when there wasn't anybody. If we choose to connect people or people and ideas that need and want to be connected that are currently disconnected, we can create lots of value.

So no, you're probably not gonna get 20 million followers on Instagram, but you know what you might be able to do? You might be able to organize the 20 patent lawyers in Cincinnati, because if you were the organizer of the 20 patent lawyers in Cincinnati, you'll do fine because they need to be organized. They need to be connected. They are disconnected now and they have money to spend to stay connected. So the hard work of strategy is to see

where there is an actual problem, and not just try to find a job without a boss, but to actually create value. Right, and I think you talk a lot about creating value for a small group of people and then grow from there. So knowing that they're coming back to you again and again, they're coming not because you're soliciting them or because you're begging them,

but because they actually have value in what you're showing or giving or creating. So how do you find that group for people who are listening to us? And how do you make sure that they're really coming back to you because that's the key to get started. Well, the first thing I would say is that group is probably not a group you are a part of.

That one of the challenges of do what you know is the things you know tend to be popular consumer things, and those things are crowded. What you want to start with is people who have a problem, who know they have a problem, and who have money to solve that problem. So in my case, when I started the book packaging company, editors only job is to acquire books. So it's not like I was hassling them, they were doing their job. They have a problem. They need a book tomorrow. They have money to spend to get one. Here I am. This is not true anymore. There aren't as many editors, they don't have as much money

and there are more people pitching them in than ever before. So that problem is solved, but it wasn't solved when I started. On the other hand, if you can find this group of people, you can try it out by having lunch with them, by being in the world that they are in. Before you open a bakery, work in a bakery

and figure out what happens when a customer walks into the store and how do they behave and what do they ask for and what are they looking at? Because that's really practical empathy. Not saying, I dreamed of everything you want and now I'm gonna make sure that you like what I did. No, look to see what people like, look to see where they have a problem.

Where are they waiting in line? What are they dreaming of, talking about? They're happy to tell you. And you can then say, well, the way they're trying to solve it might not be the best way. If I can solve their dreams in a different way, I can do that in my own unique way. And that's what Richard Saul Worman did when he started TED and Chris Anderson multiplied it by a thousand. And it also works in the nonprofit space to be able to say, I see the kind of donor that is looking for an effective way to make a donation.

I see the kind of person that needs help. I can connect those people. Hey, I'm pausing here for a second. I hope you're enjoying this amazing conversation. Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to our channel. Now if you're looking yourself to catapult your own career, figure out what's next for you. Get that clarity, fast track your own growth.

Check out our free 30 minute training at leapacademy.com slash training that's leapacademy.com slash training, that's leapacademy.com slash training. Now let's get back to the show. You've been very strategic and intentional about it. And I think you're also looking at the history of what you've created as kind of the muscle that keeps on bringing you to where you wanna be next, right? So this helps you reinvent yourself and leap and create even more value

and more content. Can we talk for a second about your own entrepreneurship endeavor, if you will, Seth, because you reinvented yourself again and again and again. It sounds like it's even a lot earlier than anything that I knew. How do you see yourself when you're trying to start something new? How do you go through this in your head and reinvent yourself as well? Well, I think the words here matter. I think I leaped pretty much once,

which is deciding that I'm at my best when I don't have a boss. And I don't reinvent myself very often at all. Instead, what we get is the chance to show up for different people doing the kind of craft that we are proud to do. And outsiders could see that as a reinvention, but it's really stressful to completely reinvent

how we see ourselves creating value. So I've had employees, I don't like having employees, so I tend to revert back to being a freelancer. I've worked in lots of different fields but they all tend to involve media and fairly low expenditures on behalf of people who have enough money to spend. So I'm not alternating between running a payroll cashing service and a restaurant because that would be reinvention We only need to leap once and then we need to iterate and iterate and iterate and the iteration Comes down to well who needs to hear from me. So Billy Joel

Played a certain kind of piano But then he had enough resources to make classical music records. And when he made classical music, he discovered that people in the classical music world didn't want to buy the story he wanted to tell. So he went back to doing something else. The cost of finding out is pretty low. If you approach it with generosity, if you don't go all in, if you go in enough. And that is the secret to this longevity, which is to be able to say, how can I be of service?

Who can I be of service to? What do they need? And how can I bring assets to those people that they'll be glad I did? And I love the word iteration. I love how you look at this, because I think a lot of it is painting the art of possible to people with the knowledge that you have and with the information that you have.

How do you see though the maybe discrepancy between what used to be a career, which is one thing, this is what you do, 40 years, retire, awesome, versus creating this portfolio that creates massive impact and a lot more interesting, and you can do all these things, which I'm a big believer, and it sounds like you do that too. How do you see the difference? Well, you know, it would have been very hard

to build your company if you called it The Iteration Academy, so I totally understand that have been very hard to build your company if you called it the iteration academy. So I totally understand that there's a desire to leap. But if you think about people who had 40 year careers, a lot of them start in the stock room. They start as the receptionist, they start as the messenger. And maybe 40 years later, they're the senior vice president of international operations. So they've iterated to the only difference is they got to keep the same parking space at work for a

very long time. And what I believe is happening now is we need to shake off the indoctrination of you need a particular boss who's going to give you tasks and switch it to you are your boss. And if your boss isn't doing a good job You need to make your boss do a better job Because most of us have a lousy boss who wakes us up in the middle of the night telling us We're not doing a good job who isn't kind to us who gives this bad assignments who has a stick with lousy clients

Get a better boss and that boss will help you build the portfolio you're talking about. That's true. I love that you said that. I think it is the whole world of work is changing as well that we're seeing. And that's why we're seeing people are doing different things in a different way. And I think it's also there's a lot of different passions that are coming now. I think people want not just a paycheck, but the life that comes with the paycheck. And what does that life look like? What can I create with that? I mean, you're seeing many millions of people going through.

You have huge keynotes, by the way, which are amazing. How do you see that, the shifts in the difference today? Well, if the world were fair, people would get fairly for the effort and risk they take. People wouldn't be judged by their appearance or their background, and we'd have this generative resilient economy. None of those things are true.

So given that none of those things are true, what will help you be seen, treated with the dignity and respect you deserve and earn the freedom that you're looking for? So this is back to the ideas in this strategy. The first one is what do you own? What are the assets in your reputation, in your productivity, in your machinery, in your network that are worth paying for? Because someone's not going to pay you

because you want them to, they're going to pay you because they want to. So we get to build these assets. And if you are the most successful patent lawyer in the United States, you can charge $6,000 an hour. And it's not because you worked hard to do it, it's because someone who needs the best patent lawyer in the United States is happy to pay $6,000 for it.

So then the second part is find customers who have a problem they wanna solve and money to solve it. And this seems trivially obvious, but people miss this all the time, right? So if you wanna make money selling bean to bar chocolate, don't sell it to seven-year-olds because seven-year-olds just don't have a lot of disposable income. And they also have lousy taste, so they just want to buy something that's big and sweet. They don't want to buy the thing you made. On the other hand, people spend $100, $200 for a bottle of wine. Not everybody, not somebody who's drunk on the corner,

but some people. So if you wanna make money selling wine, probably you should find those people and sell them wine because it costs just as much to make a $200 bottle of wine as a $10 bottle of wine. If you're not gonna make those choices at the beginning, you're probably gonna be frustrated at the end, complaining that people are treating you like a cog. be frustrated at the end, complaining that people

are treating you like a cog. Here's what I would say to those people. How come you didn't hire a $10,000 wedding photographer for your wedding and instead just gave everyone an Instamatic or told them to use their phones? There are photographers who worked really hard, but you didn't hire one because when you're the customer, you're saying, well, it wasn't worth the money. Well, the same thing is going to be true on the other side. What I love about what you just said, which I think is just so, so important, I want to

make sure our listeners understand this. I think from a certain age specifically or a certain stage in life, et cetera, people don't pay you per hour or for your time or even not for your expertise. They pay you for the Outcome or the value of the outcome that you deliver right and the more you can emphasize that outcome But again, it's not just what you say. It's everything about you. It's the reputation. It's the brand It's everything needs to be aligned in order to justify the ten thousand dollars, right? So you understood personal $10,000, right? So you understood personal reputation and personal branding very early on, I think way before we even understood what a blog is.

And right now, I think it's more important than ever. What would you say to our listeners that want to build that reputation, want to start creating those assets for themselves? The most important expression I can share is famous to the family. That if you and I are gonna play 20 questions back and forth, you're gonna think of Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin or Marie Curie.

The rules are you gotta pick famous people. And if you can be a famous person who's respected, you're never gonna have trouble making a living. But the number of famous people is really small. I am not a famous person and I'm glad of it. What you can be is famous to the family. And famous to the family means that if I'm with my real life family and we mention Ziggy Spock,

we all know who he is. He's famous to us. You have no idea who Ziggy is, but we do. So the family needs to be the people you are hoping to be your customers. Because when they think about who to hire or work with or feel good about, that's you. So before Michael Ovech tried to be a famous, famous person, Michael Ovech was famous in Hollywood and just in Hollywood. So an actor or a director who heard that Michael Ovitz was on the phone would take the call, famous to the family.

And what social media has done is confused us a lot. Because we figure if we're obnoxious on some social media platform and people pay attention to us, that's a good thing. No, it's not. Because you're trying to be a celebrity and you're not going to succeed. And you've burned the trust that you were looking to gain with the people you need to be with. So in the case of my blog, I haven't tried to grow my blog traffic in 10 years. And it goes down every year because Google doesn't like blogs anymore. And that's okay. Fine. Because I'm not trying to talk to strangers.

I'm trying to narrate for the people who already give me the benefit of the doubt. So what it means to earn this brand as you're talking about it is do people think that when you make a promise, you're going to keep it? And if the answer is yes, then you have a brand. That's strong. I love that you talk about it as a family and we call it hidden market, which is basically the same thing as who thinks about you when you're not in the room. We'll bring those opportunities to you. We'll think about you like, and I think this is all aligned with what you're saying.

And then do you want to be known for being a Hyatt or a Motel 6? They're both fine, but you need to define which one are you. And you somehow control the narrative very, very well and help others control the narrative through your books and through your content. For you, you love to be teach, right? You love to bring that value. How should people control the narrative?

And I think it's that authentic with the people, right? With the family, I guess. These are really tricky words. So let's be clear. Control implies you're controlling somebody else. And you can't. Control yourself, your narrative, yeah. Right, all you can do is do what you're going to do

the way you do it. Which clients are you going to take? do what you're going to do the way you do it. Which clients are you going to take? Which words are you going to use? What are you going to be associated with? When you show up, what do we expect from you? And this thing is not authentic. It's consistent. It's not what do you feel like. It's what did you already agree to be like? I don't think it's what did you already agreed to be like. I don't think it's true anymore but years ago if you went to a McDonald's and ordered a milkshake and a Big Mac and ate half the Big Mac and drank half the milkshake and then put the Big Mac in the milkshake and brought it to the front counter and said I need a refund. There's a Big Mac in my milkshake.

They would give you your money back. And the reason is. It wasn't worth it to them to train 17 year olds to discern between someone who was being a clown and someone who had an actual problem. It was simpler to just say, we're not going to be authentic here, we're just going to be consistent. If someone asked for their money back, give them their money back. Done. Because the few times that we would have kicked someone out for a bad reason wouldn't have been worth it.

So what we have to do is announce to ourselves who are we willing to consistently be like, even when we don't feel like it. Ooh, that's a strong one. So now when you're, this is strategy is out and I probably one of the first ones to buy it. Ooh, that's a strong one. So now when you're, this strategy is out and I probably one of the first ones to buy it, I think, and you have this awesome promotion together with a dark chocolate, it's not promotion, but it's like a little marketing thing. Can you talk about it?

Because I found it fascinating when I was kind of binge watching the videos. And can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think, again, this is why you're so good in marketing and why a lot of people want to learn from you. So there's strategy everywhere we look. And my friend, Sean Eskenoze, he started the second bean to bar chocolate company in the United States.

Bean to bar means you take a cacao pod, which is about the size of a, I don't know, big softball, and you do stuff to it, and you make it into a chocolate bar. It tastes completely different than a Hershey bar, and also has important socioeconomic implications. The people who grow chocolate around the world are some of the poorest people.

There are a lot of child laborers involved. It's a terrible situation. Sean visits Tanzania, Ecuador, the Philippines every year. He pays his farmers five times the going rate and on and on and on. So I was going to start a chocolate company years ago and I would probably market it better than Sean markets his with his daughter Lauren, but I wouldn't be a better person than Sean. So I was going to be stealing business from this guy who strategically is building something important. So I decided to invest a lot of my time to build an art project working with them.

They made the chocolate to make a collectible chocolate bar with a trading card inside and all sorts of cool writing on it that started to help explain to people what I even meant by strategy. But now I've got this piece of swag. And what I've found is many people would rather have a chocolate bar than a book. Because I've tested it. I said, you want a chocolate bar or a book? And almost everyone says, I'll take the chocolate bar. So the chocolate bar is a way for me to engage with people. And maybe as they're sitting there eating this special thing and reading this wrapper, they're like, oh, I'd like the book too, please. And I've started a conversation and books exists, not so that we can chop down trees, but so we can have conversations. So I'm actually in the business of making conversations happen, not in the business

selling books. And the chocolate bar was a great way to do that. Oof. I absolutely love that. I knew I had to ask you about this chocolate. I love it. So, Seth, now that you've seen so much in your life and you talk to so many people, you've been on, I don't know how many you've said, hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of podcasts. And again, all of it is your advice to your younger self. That's what you talk about all the time in your books.

But what would be one thing that you wish somebody caught you earlier on in your career and told you? So, Alana, I have had more failures and lost more money doing this than most people. And I wouldn't trade any of it. I don't want someone to say, oh no, you should stop doing that and start a web company instead. I have a lot of regrets about, particularly the mistakes of omission,

the things I didn't do, the people I could have found and seen and helped, but all of it adds up to where we are now. So the only thing I would say to myself at 20 or to the people who are listening to this is, it's gonna be okay. And we can define okay as whatever happens. Whatever happens is exactly what happened.

So now what are you gonna do about it? I love it. And also see it as a muscle that will help you get to the next thing anyway. Because I think you poured everything that you learned into teaching others and making sure everybody becomes the best version that they can be based on all the content that you can share with them. So, Seth, thank you so much for coming to the show.

Thank you for the ruckus you make. Well, a lot of people learned a lot about you, so I appreciate your sharing all the knowledge, Seth, and thank you for creating this amazing content, as always. Thank you, Alana. Wow, what an incredible conversation. I am so inspired. I hope you are too. And if you enjoyed it as much as I did, please share it with friends. It really, really helps us bring more amazing guests. And if you at some point want to take yourself and your career to the next level, watch our free training at sleepacademy.com slash training.

It's sleepacademy.com slash training and I will see you in the next show of Leap Academy with Ilana Golan.