Motivation Daily by Motiversity - Seth Godin's Advice Will Change You - One of the Greatest Interviews Ever | Seth Godin Motivation

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Seth Godin's Life Advice Will Change Your Future! (MUST LISTEN!)Speaker:Seth GodinSeth Godin is an Author, Entrepreneur and Most of All, a teacher. Seth is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he has written 19 best-selling books, including The Dip, Linchpin, Purple Cow, Tribes, and What To Do When It's Your Turn (And It's Always Your Turn). His most recent book, This is Marketing (https://amzn.to/2Pnvb8q), was an instant bestseller in countries around the world.Music:Really Slow MotionAudiojungleDisclaimer: Some of the links above may be affiliate links. When used to make a purchase, we receive a small commission. Thank you for your continued support! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners, Motivirity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcasts. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. But I think this idea of what we normalize in our culture is so important. If you think back just a hundred years ago,

when women didn't even have the right to vote yet, when it wasn't exceptional at all to be overtly racist, that there were just expectations in our culture that we have moved past. And the fact is that the world is changing faster than ever, and today is the slowest it's ever going to change again. And that cycle keeps accelerating. The question is in which direction.

And I think that each of us, if you've got a keyboard, if you've got a device that's connected to a billion people, has a chance to speak up in a certain way. So I've blogged every day for a lot of days in a row because it's a privilege. The idea that you can share an idea and say, what do you think of this? Or I assert that and see how that contributes to the next thing?

Why wouldn't you? Everyone should blog every day, even if you do it under another name. Like, I get that some people don't want to reveal their own self in this way. I don't blog every day because I have a new blog ready. I blog every day because it's tomorrow. And that idea that there's going to be something from me tomorrow on the blog challenges me today to think about what's the smartest, biggest, most generous contribution I can make tomorrow. And that pattern continues.

And part of what we get stuck on is we say, I don't feel like doing X, Y, or Z, so I don't do it. But the opposite is the way that habits are created. If you do something every day, then you will come to feel like doing it. So don't wait until you feel inspired or creative. That never works. I've never seen that that works. from anybody. It's all about discipline. Yeah. If there's only three people

in the world you're making this for and they don't like it, you're toast. Got it. Right? That this whole idea of con bond, making the supply chain really thin, making sure that the quality of each piece is just right for those three people makes it a much bigger

obligation on your part. Whereas if it's a million people, you're like, whatever. Fine, you didn't like it, go ahead, I got others, plenty of them. And that shift. that's where it becomes magical. And if you name any artist who has stood the test of time in whatever field, that is what they did.

What they did is worried about a few and ignored the non-believers. We're scared of intent because if you announce your intent, even to yourself, makes it way more likely you're going to fail. So we go into the store and someone says, can I help you say, I'm just looking? I'm just looking is a statement of no intent. And that's the way many people have been trained to go through life. Because the system wants you to have no intent.

It wants you to do your job, get paid, buy stuff, put it in a storage unit, watch TV, repeat. No intent. And as soon as we start having intent, we hesitate. Who are we to do it? We feel like an imposter when we have intent. But if you can announce your intent, then you can get to who exactly are you seeking to change? What change exactly are you seeking to make? So you know who has intent?

surgeons. If you go to a surgeon, she doesn't just accidentally cut you open. She says, you have a blocked vein or whatever. I'm going to go in there and fix it. Intent. It either works or it doesn't work. And that action, whether we work for a company or on our own, can fuel us doing ever better work because we can say, I set out to do this and it either worked and I'm sorry it did or it worked and I'm glad it did or I could have done it better and here's And how do you set intentions? Is it goals? Is it values? Is it a mission? For me personally? Yeah. And for anyone out there who wants to do it. Well, I think that all of us have no place to begin but with ourselves. What turns us on? What gives us a smile?

What would make our late parents happy? What would happen to our status with our neighbors and our role in the community of X, Y, or Z happen? So we always begin there. Even the most self-servant. Even the most self-saping, what would happen. What would happen? What would happen to happen? What would happen to happen? What? We would happen. So we always begin there, even the most selfless person on earth. You know, you're diving in to a shark-infested waters to save someone's life. Well, yes, saving their life is important, but part of the reason it's important is you want to be the kind of person that would have done that act and saved that person's life. Being that kind of person is better than walking away and watching them drown. So that's where we begin, which is getting clear in our head about what are the shifts we seek to make to become the person we want to be. And then there's a series of choices we have to make, but I think they're

easier if we have habits. Habits get us results. Goals are results. But you can't, having the goal of I'm going to make a number one bestseller, what do you, that didn't tell me anything. Whereas having the goal of I'm going to write every single day and I'm going to learn this and this. And maybe the byproduct is that there's a bestseller at the end. Those are you. are different things. So I'm way more focused on habits than I am on specific goals that are out of your control. Well, we need to clarify something right from the stuff. Okay. My definition of marketing doesn't match what some people's definition of marketing is. I do not define marketing as hype, advertising, promotion, scamming, selfish, narcissistic, short-term thinking, which is what a lot

of people think of when they do marketing or when they are a marketer. I define marketing as anything we do that changes the culture for the better. If you're willing to take responsibility for the work you're doing and you're bringing something to the world, then you're a marketer. Because if you do it better, it's going to work better than if you don't. And so, yeah, I've written those bestsellers, but almost none of them belong in the quote, marketing section because they're about things like culture or technology or how we organize to move forward. So have I been in marketer my whole life? I think everyone has, but I think that I've been more intentional about it from a really young age. Not because I was born with it.

None of us were born able to walk or talk, but because I decided it was important and I practiced it. Okay. Were you always looking for ways to make yourself better or make the world better when you were a kid? Or did that come later through university and after that, when you started starting your own businesses and started writing? Yeah, I was really lucky with where I grew up and how I grew up. I won the birthday lottery and certainly with, you know, the privilege that comes from being born in 1960 and where I was born, but also my parents. My dad was the volunteer head of the United Way.

My mom was the first woman on the board of the art museum in town. So Buffalo, New York is a little tiny place, not that big a community of people who are leading. And so my parents certainly weren't wealthy, but we grew up acting like we were leaders in the community. And so there were always people trapping through my house. And I grew up thinking it was normal to decide to contribute in some way. Through example, through direct contribution, whatever it was. That's what normalized in my house.

And part of the work I'm trying to do in the culture is now that we are not just in our house but online, the more we see that, the more we learn that what's expected of you is that you will be part of something and make that thing better, the more likely people will act that way. The idea of the media ecosystem and all the noise that's out there, what happens when you give everyone a microphone? Steve Martin famously said that half the people are below average, and it doesn't matter what you're measuring, they are.

And the idea that we used to have a gatekeeper for who got a microphone was good and bad. It was bad because it silenced voices we needed to hear. But it was good because it also kept microphone away from people who wanted to tear things down. When I think about what is on offer from the social media networks, it's really important to decode this. You are not their customer.

You are their product. You did not pay them to use Twitter or Facebook. They are selling you to someone else. So they've created a regime where they make us feel bad all day long. And the only way to feel less bad is to click something. That's the cycle that they've built. And the problem with that cycle and the easily measured number of how many followers you have is it pushes people to be prurient, pushes people to be angry, it pushes people to tear folks

because that's what sells. If it leads, it leads, right? But it doesn't build a culture that we're proud of. The alternative is to say, I don't care how many people are following me. And I'm never going to hit the boost button because my job is not to make Facebook happy, nor is it to make Twitter happy. My job is to create a body of work that I'm proud of. And if we can embrace the idea of a smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.

But what's the audience that could sustain you? 10 people, 100 people, 1,000 people, it would be enough. And once you can get comfortable with enough in a world of infinity, it doesn't really matter how noisy it is. I'm notorious for saying there's absolutely no such thing as writer's block. When I talk to people who say, I don't have anything to say, when I talk to people who say they have writers' block, I say, show me your bad writing. Show me the stuff you've written that's no good. They don't have any.

I said, if you show me enough bad writing, I guarantee you some good writing will slip through. You can't help it. It will slip through. My friend Isaac Asimov wrote 400 books. Published them in the old days when it was hard to publish that many books. And I said to him, how do you do this?

And he said, every morning I get up and I go to the typewriter, and from 6.30 to noon, I type. It doesn't matter what I type. And what happened was his brain realized, he was going to type anyway, you might as well type something good. I've been told the writer's block is when you put too much emphasis on what you're about to create, as if it matters more than it does, and that stops you from doing it because you're worried about the judgment or how it's going to be.

And you should just stop that and just write. Yeah, I think it's an interesting way to get a similar idea, which is that no one gets talkers block. No one gets walkers block. That if you are physically fit, you can do those things. but when it comes time to put it in print, you're saying, oh, no, something big is about to happen here. And I guess what we're both saying is this discipline of going through the work of doing it. And when I say writing, I don't mean writing. I mean leading, connecting, inspiring, whatever it is you think is important, begins with the word.

It begins with what are you going to say next? How are you going to bring this digital idea? Even if you're speaking it, it's still digital, it's letters. to the next person so that it makes a difference to them.