Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Seth Godin on How You Create the Song of Significance EP 299

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on PassionStruck. Important businesses, profitable businesses, growing businesses, we make choices. We make a change happen. But you cannot make a change happen and always be perfect. That mistakes are the way forward, that communication, taking responsibility, sharing what didn't work, not hoarding information,

Starting point is 00:00:21 doing the reading, these are all choices. We need to shift completely the way we think about what we do around here. Because if we don't, we're going to be trapped by a system that has outlived its usefulness. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armeils. And on the show, we decipher the secrets,

Starting point is 00:00:39 tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 299 of PassionStruck.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Recently ranked by Apple is one of the top 10 health podcasts and thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly. Listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. In case you didn't know it, passion struck is now unsindicated radio on the AMFM 247 National Broadcast, tune in every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 PM. Links will be in the show notes. In case you missed it, last week I had on three amazing guests. The first was Peter Singer, who is one of the most famous living philosophers in the world, and a professor of bioethics at Princeton. And we discuss his renewed version of animal liberation, which originally launched in 1975 and established both the animal rights movement and the vegan movement.

Starting point is 00:02:03 I also had on Ronnie Pyrrneck, who joined me to discuss her new book, Seven Letters to My Daughter, Light Lessons on Love, Leadership and Legacy. And lastly, I had on TikTok sensation Tynx, a multi-faceted personality, lifestyle creator, advice expert, and podcast host, who has become a resounding voice for women through her unique blend of wit and sincerity. And we discussed her new book which launched last week, The Shift. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continued support of the show.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Your ratings and reviews go such a long way in bringing more people into the passion start community where we can provide them weekly doses of hope, inspiration, meaning, and connection. And I also know our guests love to see your comments. Now, let's talk about today's episode. The modern workplace has experienced significant transformation due to remote work and economic instability, resulting in a lack of innovation and disconnection among employees. Loyalty, happiness, and effort can no longer be bought with a paycheck,

Starting point is 00:03:05 bleeding to a rise of quite quitting as well as disengagement. Despite this, some managers have responded by doubling down on productivity tracking and back to the office mandates, rather than providing employees the dignity that they need to inject purpose and motivation into their work. In today's interview, I speak with renowned author and thinker, Seth Goden, about his latest masterpiece, The Song of Significance, where he advocates for a new approach to leadership. To unlock your employees full potential, you must treat them with the respect and autonomy that they deserve as human beings.

Starting point is 00:03:41 You can either continue treating your employees as disposable resources and join the AI field race to the bottom, or you can build a significant organization that enrolls, empowers, and trust employees to deliver their best work regardless of location. It is so essential to understand that humans are not merely a resource to be purchased, exploited, and then discarded. They are the essence of the workplace, the driving force behind innovation, growth, and success. Seth Goden is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and keynote speaker. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he has written 20 bestselling books, including The Dip, Blinchpin, Purple Cow, Tribes, and What to Do when it's Your Turn. His book, This Is Marketing, was an instant bestseller in countries throughout

Starting point is 00:04:30 the world by focusing on everything from effective marketing and leadership to the spread of ideas and changing everything. Seth has been a motivation and an inspiration, account-less people around the world. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. Seth, I am just so ecstatic and completely humbled to have you back on PassionStruck. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thanks for showing up on the regular. It's not easy to do a podcast like this and

Starting point is 00:05:07 to do it for as long as you have Bravo. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, the last time you appeared on PassionStruck, we were discussing an extremely important book, the Carbon Almanac. And I thought that was a great place to pick back up because since that time, this book has become a best seller and it has started a movement. And I was hoping that you could tell the audience a little bit about it and the impact that has come from that book. Well, thank you for that. I'm not sure it started a movement, but it's certainly given a movement that was already gathering steam, a foundational piece of truth, and that's why we built it. The idea was that 300 and now 1900 people came together, all of the volunteers, including me, to produce a foundational document that you could share, that you could leave on a table. Every single page is footnoted.

Starting point is 00:06:06 It's easy to read, it's easy to understand, but what it does is it gets us past the arguing part of what is, and instead opens the door for people to have conversations about what should we do. Right, the weather is gonna change every day, but the climate is the sum total of the weather, and we can do something about the climate, and we're gonna have to change every day, but the climate is the sum total of the weather and we can do something about the climate.

Starting point is 00:06:27 And we're going to have to change our systems. So we're in Italy, we're in Czech, we're in Japanese and Korean and Chinese and Dutch and a few other languages. The Spanish tradition is about to come out. And millions of people around the world have touched our PDFs and our samples and our podcasts. It just goes to show what happens if you create the condition for people to do work they want to do. It's possible to get an enormous amount done and have a big impact when you're doing it. Well, that last part that you just talked about is exactly what we're going to talk about today in your brand new book, which I'll put up right here, called the Song of Significance. Congratulations on its release. Thank you. In preparing for today's interview, I listened

Starting point is 00:07:20 to just an incredible discussion that you had with your friends Simon Sennick. And I highly encourage the audience to listen to that episode on Simon's podcast where it's just two long-term friends having a heartfelt conversation. But from that discussion, I learned that you might have never written another book had it not been for the fact that you almost drowned, and I wanted to ask, how did that life-threatening event lead you to writing this book? Well, John, I think it's fair to say that if I had drowned, I wouldn't have written another book either.

Starting point is 00:07:58 So, there you go. The details of the story, I'm not sure, are as relevant as the reminder we all need often, which is we don't get tomorrow over again. And if you're not careful, you might not even get tomorrow. And when we think about our body of work, when we think about the impact we want to make, when we think about the people we want to work with and how we want to be worked with, these are all choices. And we didn't have

Starting point is 00:08:25 a lot of choices when we were in the Savannah wondering around picking berries and hunting and gathering. But now we have an enormous number of choices. And we're squandering them. We're squandering them having fist fights on Twitter when we could be building something instead. And what happened for me last year was just a real insight about the fact that I had something left to say, something personal, something urgent. And that's why I wrote the song of significance. Because I believe we are at a crossroads and people need to hear it. Well, before I go into the book, I have one other question I wanted to ask, and that is

Starting point is 00:09:05 at the end of March, he wrote a blog post about the importance of high school sports. And you ended up hearing from a lot of people that they felt that it was pandering to kids. However, you don't believe that is what's happening. Can you tell me about the American dream and why it has become a myth for so many? Oh, we could talk about this all day. I'm not sure I would use the word pandering for kids. I definitely heard from people who said that give every kid a trophy is what is ruining our culture. And there is a mindset among some people, particularly people who really like organized school sports,

Starting point is 00:09:45 that we need to teach kids early and often about winning, about scarcity, about the brutality of you're going to get cut about our additions. Because if we don't teach them that, then when will they learn? But those are all artifacts of the industrial age, The boss who needs to create a hierarchy. The idea that the school has a trophy shortage, and what we ought to do is go out and beat the other team. Because if we don't beat the other team, we're losers, but if we do beat the other team, we're winners.

Starting point is 00:10:15 Well, that's just factually incorrect for a whole bunch of reasons. One of which is, just because you've got some kids in your grade that are older than the kids in the other schools grade, doesn't mean you're winners. It just means you're competing against people who are younger than you. That doesn't teach us anything. If you're on a team and you're playing third-line defense

Starting point is 00:10:35 on the hockey team and you win the state championship, that doesn't mean you did anything. It just means you're on a team that won a lot of prizes. I would much rather teach kids to be resilient, to be confident, to make decisions, to be part of a team, to sacrifice for what needs to be done. We don't reward those things by giving them a prize for winning the game. We reward those things by rewarding those things. And so the purpose of my post was to say, don't let ESPN and the industrialists persuade you that the purpose of high school or middle school is to produce better baseball or soccer players. That's not what it's for. We don't have a shortage of people who are

Starting point is 00:11:21 good at baseball. And in fact, if we look at the last 20 years of the sports industrial complex, the high school level, the quality of sports hasn't gotten any better. So what are we doing with all this time and money? Why do small colleges have a private jet or their football team? That doesn't make any sense to me. So I know I'm ranting, but it plugs into

Starting point is 00:11:44 what the rest of our conversation is about. And I think if people thought deeply about what school is for and what sports in school are for, we can have a really useful conversation about it. Yes, well, when you and I could go on and on about what we should be teaching in school, because I just had my youngest graduate from high school. And I think they are missing so much on the most important life skills

Starting point is 00:12:11 that we need to be teaching kids, which in some cases nothing to do with the core elements that we're teaching on, but it's really life skills of how you create human connection, how you create and solve novel problems and give yourself towards serving the world, which is a lot about what we're going to talk about today. And you start off the book by saying, and I love this work, isn't working, which is clearer worldwide when studies are showing that 70 to 85% of all full-time workers over a billion of

Starting point is 00:12:47 them are disengaged. You then go on to say that the problem lies with us. What were the decisions that were made unknowingly many years ago that are at the root of this issue? First, congratulations on your youngest graduating. They are lucky to have you and that's quite a milestone. I don't know what your life is gonna be like starting in September but it's gonna be different for sure. So with that said, it's important to understand that for 10,000 years human beings did not work in factories.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Factory was invented about 120 years ago at scale and the word jerking people around came from Henry Ford's assembly line that humans have been treated like a resource for a hundred years, like machines to be optimized to be surveilled to be held back if they're defective to be replaced. And we bought into it because it made so many people rich. It produced so much stuff. It fed the world. There are eight billion jobs in the world. We invented two billion of them in the last 20 years. We keep inventing things for people to do. And for a long time, we base those inventions on productivity.

Starting point is 00:14:05 But now, number one, it's hard to make most of the stuff we buy much cheaper or more efficiently than we already do. And number two is that the people who have won the race to the bottom aren't gonna give up their slot easily. So if we're gonna spend our days working in a system, we should figure out what does that system need and how do we make it better? Because that system's purpose should not be how do we make money for the stock market. The purpose of the system should be what is it contributing to our lives, to our culture, to our days. And we can change it. We can change it,

Starting point is 00:14:45 but we have to talk about it first. Well, this book is really a manifesto. And one of the things that I have always appreciated about your writing and that of many of the great authors, whom I follow, people like Dan Pink and Susan Cain, Gretchen Rubin, and others like yourself, you all do extremely extensive research when you're writing your books. And I was hoping, because I think it's important that you talk about the research you did for this book and what it found. I'm honored to be on that list. My peers do extensive research. I do not. I will not pretend I do extensive research. I will tell you that I survey 10,000 people in 90 countries and I asked them, what's the best job you ever had? And everyone knows the answer to that question because we cherish it. And then I said,

Starting point is 00:15:42 which of these 14 things contributed to that being the best job you ever had? And this is the fascinating takeaway, because bosses think the two most important things are, I got paid a lot and I didn't get fired, because those are the two levers that bosses turn all the time. Do what I say, I'll fire you. Oh, you did a good job. Here's a raise. But in fact, those two came in last.

Starting point is 00:16:07 And the ones that came at the top were accomplished more than I thought I could. I worked with people who treated me with respect. And I was part of something that mattered. And we can deliver that to people. We can create the best job you ever had and also make a bigger profit by paying attention to humanity, not by treating people like a machine. My follow-up to that would be did the results surprise you? I certainly hoped that people saw the world the way that I did, because that's been my narrative. I've walked away from an enormous amount of money for various projects through the years,

Starting point is 00:16:50 because life's too short. What am I gonna do with another $100? I have $100. And so the thing that thrilled me was that I was not alone, that I was in fact for once normal. Well, I'm glad it turned out the way that it did because it would have been a sad state of affairs had it been the opposite. Well, I say this jokingly because just before this interview started, I received a package from Amazon. I always learn something from you every time that I hear you talk.

Starting point is 00:17:23 And your interview with Simon and in the book, you highlight that Amazon. I always learn something from you every time that I hear you talk. And your interview with Simon and in the book, you highlight that Amazon. And I found this incredible. Lost a quarter of its annual profits to turn over in 2021. This is a staggering figure. We're talking billions and billions. And then you go on to say that one out of every three new hires stayed only for three months. And it reminds me of when I joined Dell a decade or so ago, and I was told that the average vice president who comes into the company lasts less than three months. What are the consequences to companies like Amazon, where they're trying to build the most managed company in America? Okay, so management and leadership are different.

Starting point is 00:18:17 Management is using power and authority to tell people what to do. Get them to do what they did yesterday, faster and cheaper, using a stopwatch, measuring output. Leadership is voluntary. Leadership says, I'm going over there, we've never been over there. There's a liminal space between here and there who wants to come. So some managers are leaders, and Jeff, for the first 10 years of Amazon, was nothing but a leader describing a future that wasn't here yet. And some leaders are managers, but they're not the same thing. And in the case of an institution that is seeking to make big change happen, turnover is actually

Starting point is 00:18:57 not a bad thing because you need emotional enrollment. You need people who want to go where you are going. But in a managed institution like Amazon or Dell, turnover is incredibly expensive because onboarding, communication, offboarding, these add up. And if someone only lasts three months, you've probably got three days worth of useful productivity out of that person.

Starting point is 00:19:21 And then all the learning goes out the door. And in Amazon's case, we then all the learning goes out the door. And in Amazon's case, we know why the turnover is so high, because they are asking human beings to do inhuman jobs. This isn't even counting all the outsourced delivery that they do that doesn't get bolded up into their figures. But the Amazon drivers, like an Uber driver, are living by their own stopwatch, hustling from corner to corner, cutting corners, more than half of the warehouse injuries in the United

Starting point is 00:19:49 States happened at Amazon in 2022. And so you're living that life in a job that was easy to get, but it's easy to walk away from two. And the question as we invent the next cycle of our future, the one with robots and AI and drones and all the outsourcing is which jobs do we want to create for humans and where are they going to create value. And we can't automate ourselves into success. We have to fear how to go to the top, not the bottom, to give humans the agency to be significant. I can't wait to explore that in a little bit, but before we get there, and I'll leave that dangling out there for the audience, I wanted to go through some of the core concepts of the book. For the listener who's not able to see it, the cover of this book has a very prominent

Starting point is 00:20:47 bee on it. This cover is not like one that I've seen before. It's a blue cover with an orange bee in the metal. It was really striking, like Jonah Berger's book Contagious. I always love these covers where the message just hits you right when you see it. In the book, you utilize the B to illustrate three songs that you lay out. And I wanted to break down each one

Starting point is 00:21:11 because I think each tells us an important lesson. What is the song of increase? The song of increase was named by my friend, Jack and Freeman. And what it describes is what happens in a feral bee hive after a long winter, when the bees may have the capability of restoring the hive to where it was at its peak. And in a three-week period of time, they collect enough pollen to replace all the missing honey. The queen lays a new egg,

Starting point is 00:21:42 which is very unusual to have a new queen egg. And then on a signal from the maidens, more than 12,000 bees will leave the hive in less than 10 minutes and swarm to a tree a hundred feet away. That is the song of increasing. When people hear it, they never forget it. It's just leap into the void. But when they get to the tree, they only have 72 hours to find a new place to live. If it rains before then or something disturbs them, they're all going to die.

Starting point is 00:22:15 And they huddle into a very tight ball because they have to maintain a body temperature of 98 degrees. And that is the song of safety. Too many humans have been singing that song for too long. body temperature of 98 degrees. And that is the song of safety. Too many humans have been singing that song for too long, hunkering down, avoiding all inputs, just trying to get through it. But we're not bees,

Starting point is 00:22:36 and that's why I came up with the song of significance, because what people want is that feeling, not only of being part of a colony or a hive or a community, but also that feeling of mattering, of meaning, of choosing to do something that they want to put their name on. And I am surrounded by people and so are you who are stuck singing the song of safety, which is amplified by industrialists billionaires who Gleefully bully people and fire them online in public just for kicks just to create more obedience And it breaks my heart to see it

Starting point is 00:23:16 Well, it's interesting that Seth and I'm happy to tell you I have my first book coming out in early 2024 And it's fantastic. Yeah, thank you. And it's really a book about how do you build a life of significance? And I couldn't believe as I was reading your book, how much mine and yours aligned in so many important areas. But as I was doing my research for the book, I stumbled upon a couple graphs that I have in it. And one of them is a graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And it's this graph of a 25-year period that shows a steady decline over those 25 years in companies that are made up of 250 or less employees and an equal increase in firms of more than 250 employees. And then I looked at a similar graph from the Coffman organization, the index of startup

Starting point is 00:24:16 density that shows over that same 25 year period, this steep decline of startups. And the issue that I found when I examine these is that it's stuck out like a sore thumb to me that startups are where people usually go to solve a novel problem. And I remember interviewing my friend Jim McElvy, who told me, and all the things that he's done, including Square, at the core of everything he was doing

Starting point is 00:24:53 was trying to solve a novel problem for humanity. And yet, this is not what we're doing. Instead, what these graphs show is a steady rise of industrial capitalism. and exactly what you're saying. People are purposely choosing safety and certainty of industrial processes over the possibility of change, growth, and personal agency. And I believe in our surgeon general has just been talking about this.

Starting point is 00:25:23 There are many things that are leading to this chronic and epidemic state of loneliness and hopelessness that people are feeling, but I've got to believe that this is a portion of it. And we are facing this challenge as you lay out in the book of trying to have it both ways. And that was a lengthy explanation, but I was hoping that you could maybe through that lens explain this dilemma and why we can't have it both ways. Well, there's one category that's missing

Starting point is 00:25:57 from your charts, which is freelancers. And freelancers are not entrepreneurs. freelancers are not running a startup. freelancers have a job without a boss. Some of these freelancers are exploring the edges. They are doing distinctive work that only they could do. And some of these freelancers are victims of industrial capitalism where they are actually employees with none of the benefits. So those two categories, the gig workers who have been abused, as well as the solo preneurs call them that, who are never going to build a thing bigger than themselves, but are definitely doing work that thrills them. What you've highlighted though is if you take the way out where you

Starting point is 00:26:48 have no responsibility, where you get to ask, will this be on the test, where you get to remodel over and over again, what high school was like, then it's rare that they will just show up, pick you and give you significance and offer you the respect and dignity you deserve. What we have instead is the opportunity to demand that standards go up to put ourselves on the hook, as I suppose we're trying to get off the hook, to make big promises and keep them. Because what we know about the best job you ever had is it probably involved making big promises.

Starting point is 00:27:25 It did not involve sitting in the back in the corner with no one noticing you and you didn't get fired. And that's thrilling. People like you and me who have been lucky enough to have those sorts of gigs, we want it to happen again. And too many people have been brainwashed and indoctrinated into thinking that it's not possible. Well, I'm gonna go back to the carbon almond ac here for a sec, because this just

Starting point is 00:27:49 triggered a thought in my mind. And really that book and this book that you're laying out are both about systems change. But one of the things that we talked about in our last interview was that at the heart of many of the changes that need to occur or climate change and they need to occur, I think for what you're talking about in this latest book, all center around what is the output that these companies are producing? Because what I got disillusioned about was that I was spending so much of my life and time working on things that were all about shareholder value, which was all about reducing expenses and increasing stakeholder value and driving greater profitability.

Starting point is 00:28:38 But it wasn't really about producing a product that had any meaning in it at all. And you have this simple graph in the book that plats out stakes and trust. And I was hoping you could discuss it because and you've got it up right there on the screen. So if someone's watching this, they get to see it. But I found this graph to be very simple, but these four by four graphs are so significant. And I was hoping you could discuss it and why the top hand right quadrant relates so much to the song of significance.

Starting point is 00:29:16 Okay, so always hard to do this on the radio, but we'll do our best. I love 4x4 grids. They can shift the way you think about things. There's two kinds of transactions we have in our lives. High stakes and low stakes. Low stakes might be I'm going to get a cup of coffee. High stakes might be I'm getting on an airplane and flying across the world. If the plane is no good, that is the end of that. But if the coffee is no good, you can just get another cup of coffee. High stakes and low stakes.

Starting point is 00:29:44 And there's two kinds of interactions we can have with the people who are delivering things. We're working on things, either high trust or low trust. In a low trust situation, we surveil them. We put them into a box where they don't have a lot of choices. So an airline is a low trust high-stakes situation and if you love working for the airlines terrific. Someone needs to, but we want it to be managed. We want it to be measured. We don't want the pilot to be making new decisions in the middle of the air because she feels like it. She has to follow the checklist, right? And there's also, though, high stakes high trust. So when the Dave Boobak quartet is performing at Carnegie So when Dave Boobak-Kortet is performing at Carnegie Hall,

Starting point is 00:30:28 Dave Boobak is insane. This is a big night everyone played the music exactly is written. He's saying, we trust each other. This could be the album that changes our career, but even though the stakes are high, the trust is high as well. And it's in that corner where significance really lies.

Starting point is 00:30:46 The way we get to that corner is by doing low stakes high trust work. Then when we say to the barista, yes, you have to make the coffee exactly this way. But no, we're not going to tell you how to talk to the customer. And we're going to give you the freedom and the agency to make that customer's day better. because your job is not to make coffee. Your job is to get someone to care enough about this place if they will pass two Starbucks and come here for a cup of coffee. If that doesn't happen, we're out of business. So that agency comes from trust and the person who shops at this independent coffee shop

Starting point is 00:31:24 is coming here precisely because they trust us. And so when we think about where do we want to spend our days, I think we need to begin with low stakes high-trust work and then make bigger and bigger promises and keep them on our way up to doing high stakes high-trust work. and keep them on our way up to doing high stakes high-trust work. Well, I love that concept because in the book I've got coming out, I lay out this new leadership paradigm that I think we need to start adopting and I call it gardener leadership because the leadership that we're doing today is not working. And the gardener leader model is really all about just as a gardener does. they can't stand there and look

Starting point is 00:32:06 at the plants all day long, they can't make them grow, but they can give them the parameters on the success they want to have, but then they need to be hands off and allowing the people who work for them to perform in the way that is unique to them, brings them meaning, and allows them to interact and create human connection. I love the way your graph laid it out. And speaking of this podcast is all about the power of intentional choices that we make every single day of our lives. I believe we each face a fork in our lives every single day. We have the choice to stay in the

Starting point is 00:32:46 status quo of our life. Or we have a choice to step into the unknown towards a more fulfilled existence. And in the book, you also say that significance is a choice. And I thought that was extremely important. And I was hoping you could explain why. Well, as we've rift about, the promises we make, the places we choose to work, what we tolerate from our boss. These are all choices. When we decide to hire people, that's a choice. So I have lots to say about false proxies and the way we hire people poorly, but we have to begin by saying, why are we even here? Are we here to make a change happen? Now, there are lots of businesses that are not here to make a change happen. They grew kale yesterday. They're going to grow kale tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:33:37 Your job is to grow the kale, right? But important businesses, profitable businesses, growing businesses, But important businesses, profitable businesses, growing businesses, we make choices. We make a change happen. But you cannot make a change happen and always be perfect. That mistakes are the way forward. That communication, taking responsibility, sharing what didn't work, not hoarding information, doing the reading. These are all choices. So I really enjoy talking

Starting point is 00:34:06 about this book on podcasts, but I know that's not going to change anybody. It's not going to change anybody because if we don't talk about it with each other, we don't go to work and hand a copy of the book to three other people and say, let's talk about this. It's not going to happen because this isn't a checkbox or a thing, oh, yeah, I get that concept, they get that concept, they get the concept, it's, we need to shift completely the way we think about what we do around here. Because if we don't, we're going to be trapped by a system that has outlived its usefulness. Well, that leads me to a great quote that you have on the back of your book.

Starting point is 00:34:47 And I always do something I think that's different than most people. I read a book back to front in many ways, but I read the back of the book and I read the main blurb that you had for it. And that is, humans aren't a resources to be bought, used, and discarded. They are the point of the workplace. The life essence of innovation, growth, and success, which I think was just so profound. And I was hoping you could spend a few minutes discussing why it is so essential for humanity to have work that matters graded by people who care. Well, if you look at the very back cover of the book, was you haven't seen the printed one yet,

Starting point is 00:35:31 because I haven't seen it either, it says the point of a behind is not honey. Honey is the byproduct of a healthy hive. The bees aren't doing what they do all day to make the beekeeper happy. They're doing what they do all day because they're bees. And if you can create the conditions for people to do what they seek to do, there will be plenty of honey, but honey isn't the point. And what we have to think about is, who is this company even for? And yeah, maybe we can make Michael Della a whole bunch more money, but that's not why Della was founded. That's not what Della was for. And getting back

Starting point is 00:36:12 to meaning becomes really important because if we're living a life without meaning, then what do we have? You have a life that's going to be very empty because your meaning is what carries your actions forward towards the aspirations that you have for in life. And without that sense of meaning, there is no passion and purpose or perseverance or intentionality. So one of the core points that you raise in the book is that you feel people need a combination of agency which is control over our time and you've brought it up several times today and dignity which is being treated as a human and not as a cog.

Starting point is 00:37:01 I wanted to ask how has this industrial regime stripped both agency and dignity away from most of us, but then also why is this chasing industrial capitalism a race to the bottom? Well, they're the same thing, right? If you buy a automated CNC machine, you don't give it any agency, you program it, and get it to do what you need it to do. And you don't give it any dignity.

Starting point is 00:37:33 You don't treat it with respect. You just follow these steps to keep it running. And if something is going to break it, you don't do that. So once we had automated CNC machine tools, then we look at the person who's operating it, or the person who's at the call center dealing with customer service calls, or the person who's using that toxic leaf floor to clear the leaves from our yard. We want to measure everything they do, so it will be cheaper and faster. That's inevitable. It's the race to the bottom. That if your competitor is going to do that and you don't, you think I'm going to lose the work. The alternative is to race

Starting point is 00:38:11 to the top. And when you race to the top, what you're saying is this cost more and it's worth more than it costs. What you're saying is I am on the hook to keep inventing something at the frontier that people will seek out and try to embrace. As opposed to saying, I don't care who made it, just give me the cheap one. So if we look at the structure of online shopping, sort by price, that's how people pick. Because if it's all the same, you might as well pick the cheap one. And my argument is it doesn't have to be all the same. One of the other things that you have in the book, and I love Japanese terms, and you use one called Kakuro, and I was hoping you could tell the audience about it because it

Starting point is 00:38:56 really is what I think most people are searching for. So, the Japanese language is largely made up of Chinese idiograms, or Chinese inspired idiograms. This one came from China. And it is a symbol for a heart inside a home. And what it means is the essence, the feeling of meaning, that what does it feel like to be alive, to put your heart into it. And all of us have felt that feeling. Maybe you felt that feeling in an ultimate Fis that feeling. Maybe you felt that feeling in an ultimate

Starting point is 00:39:25 Fisbee game. Maybe you felt that feeling when you were cooking for your family. But when we have that feeling, we're not going to go check our email. We're not going to figure out how to stall. We are present because we are doing the thing we want to do. And right now we live on a planet where we have somehow miraculously figured out how to create enough value to feed everyone to close everyone to give everyone the medicine they need. We need to do a better job of making sure that is distributed, but we also need to take a deep breath and say, all right, now that we did that, what is it that we're here to do? And I think what we're here to do is make meaning happen. And I'm calling that significance. That when we can sing that song, we can say to our kids, yeah, we left the planet of mess,

Starting point is 00:40:14 but now at least going forward, we're figuring out how to help people be alive. So Seth, we likely have people nodding their heads to what you and I are saying, but we might have some who are leading companies in this industrial paradigm that we've talked about or think that what we're saying could never be true. I was hoping you could paint a picture of what a significant organization looks like and why they can make such a profound difference. So let me argue that the people you just described are managers, not leaders. And that what I would say to those people is your competition is already fixed up, that it's 19 people who can build an app that's worth

Starting point is 00:41:06 billions and billions of dollars, that it is an agile team of committed people who can change a policy or build a nonprofit to change this thing because the leverage that we now have, because the computers and networks and the network effect in AI is so huge that they will never again, never be a new company that ends up with a hundred thousand employees who are sitting there being told what to do by this stopwatch. If your goal is to succeed by doubling the size of your workforce who all obey you, I'm here to tell you that's extremely unlikely. So if you are that pragmatic business person, it is powerful indeed. If you can create the conditions to engage with people

Starting point is 00:41:54 who are enrolled in the journey and help them get to where they want to go. Deep down you know that's what the people around you want and we have indoctrinated them into being passive, but they don't want to be passive. They want to be active. So I have an important question to ask you and this one actually came from my kids and they told me to lay it out like this. We are seeing and this is them talking a major shift in work, a shift that works extremely worried about.

Starting point is 00:42:31 The workforce is changing before us, and we are trying to plot our place in the world going forward. And like millions of others, we're worried that jobs will be displaced by industrial capitalism that are made up of machines and big tech. And we've listened to many podcasts, guests that you've had, dad, that have offered their advice, that if they had a son or daughter in the same spot and the answer has been focus on what machines cannot bring to the workplace, which is human connection,

Starting point is 00:43:12 curiosity and creativity. And what they wanted to ask you, Seth, is this something that you also found and what would be the real skills that you would recommend to someone who's in this Gen Z age group to pave a new way of work? I think if you said to any boss who had good jobs to offer. I have somebody here who is innovative, creative, hardworking, empathic, charismatic, honest, and connected. Would you like to hire them? The honest answer is yes. You can learn how to type fast, you can learn mechanical engineering, but those other things are skills you have to teach yourself. And school didn't teach you any of them. So the opportunity that we have

Starting point is 00:44:08 you can find the smallest possible unit of meaning, the smallest possible place that you can bring humanity and responsibility to and do that and then do it again and do it again until you work your way up to bigger things. The boss is going to say, come on in, do whatever you need to, you're John's kid. We'd love to have you here. What they are going to say is the kinds of attitudes that you are willing to bring to work are exactly what will solve this problem

Starting point is 00:44:38 and I'm having trouble getting to go away. But the minute the boss tries to write down every step of your job, you need to refuse. You need to either be able to articulate why you need to do work that cannot be written down or you need to go somewhere where you can do work that cannot be written down. Because if we can write down every step of your job, we're going to find a computer to do it for free. I think that's an extremely important point that people really need to listen to, because things that are scripted out, processed, can be replicated.

Starting point is 00:45:15 A human mind cannot. The way you interact with other people cannot. The connections we form and how we can work together to solve problems cannot be replicated. I have had the privilege of having on a couple of experts on a topic called white space one of those was Juliet font the other was story Clark you might know both of them I do. And they told me in both my interviews that I had with them that. They are seeing that meetings are becoming a problem and a symptom. And we're not leaving ourselves enough time for white space. And you also brought this up in your book. And I was hoping you could go into it because during my career,

Starting point is 00:46:00 I found meetings to be a huge problem. Exactly. As we start to wrap this up, I will be happy to rant about meetings. I spend a bunch of pages in the book because of the symptomatic nature of them. Meetings are not conversations. I'm in favor of conversations. We need more conversations. And the miracle of tech means that you and I can have a conversation. I have no idea what planet you're even on. We don't have to be in the same room to have a conversation. But a meeting is often when a manager

Starting point is 00:46:31 exerts their authority to take attendance, that they're worried that people are getting their dry cleaning done or something so they make everyone sit in the room while they scream of consciousness, say what's on their mind. This is selfish. It is innovating. It's one of the things people hate the most about their white color work. And it's so easily replaced. The boss needs to send a memo. The boss needs to make a well-edited five minute video.

Starting point is 00:46:58 Send it to everyone. Give them a quiz if you want. Let people have a conversation about it. It's asynchronous. it's powerful, it's leads to conversation, but meetings as a form of group control are way past their pride. And then, the last question I have for you is, what would happen if we were able to produce a different sort of day, a different sort of day, a different sort of month, a different sort of life, where we're able to show up at work and make a difference?

Starting point is 00:47:32 Well, I can tell you from experience that it's worth getting out of bed for. I have struggled and worked hard to be able to do that for a long time, and it breaks my heart when I see people who not only don't have that, but have been indoctrinated to believe they can't have it, but they can. I wasn't born with something they weren't born with. The struggle is to find the others, to connect with others who will amplify and support you and vice versa on our quest to create significance. And then my last thing for you, Seth, is you are extremely easy to find. You have tons of books

Starting point is 00:48:16 people can read. I saw on your website that you have a new course coming out and I was wondering if you would like to tell the audience about it. So people who have followed my work know that I started the Althambia and the Kimball workshops, I don't run them anymore. They're an independent B Corp. I'm not as affiliated because I wanted that team of people to be able to find their platform and their significance. I've been really enjoying the work I'm doing in LinkedIn. This is not as much of a course as a series of lectures that you can do, it's only half an hour long. It is launching at the NMA on LinkedIn and it's not that hard to find. If you go to Seth's.blog slash song, you can find the book and the course and plenty of other

Starting point is 00:49:02 juicy videos. Well, Seth, it is always an honor to have you on this podcast. What an incredible book and vision you have for the future. Thank you so much for spending your time with us. Thanks, John. Keep making this rocket, it matters. I absolutely love that interview with Seth Godin. I was so humbled to have him come on the show a second time. And I wanted to thank Seth and Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having him come back on the show. Links to all things Seth will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature

Starting point is 00:49:36 on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at both John Armyles and PassionStruck Clips. As I mentioned at the beginning, you can now catch us on the AMFM247 National broadcast every Monday and Friday from five to six PM. Links are in the show notes. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one community place at passionstruck.com slash deals.

Starting point is 00:49:57 I'm on LinkedIn where you can subscribe to my newsletter or you can also find me at John Armeyles on both Instagram and Twitter. And if you wanna know how I book amazing guests like Seth, it's because of my network, go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Start podcast that I did with Scott Simon,

Starting point is 00:50:13 who is an acclaimed author, speaker, and the visionary behind this scarier soul movement, and also the author of the new book, scarier soul. So many people who are probably listening to this right now think that courage means jumping out of airplanes or quitting jobs and moving to other countries and making these massive shifts. When really, sometimes it's the might row challenges, the might row aspects of courage, that first of all are sometimes the hardest, but they can also move the needle

Starting point is 00:50:42 even the most. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or inspirational. If you know someone who's interested in the song of significance, and definitely share this episode with them, the greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, go out there and be PassionStruck.

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Seth Godin on How You Create the Song of Significance EP 299

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