The Jordan Harbinger Show - 234: Seth Godin | Shining in the Light of One-Star Reviews

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

Seth Godin (@thisissethsblog) is an entrepreneur, a teacher, a Marketing Hall of Fame inductee, a daily blogger, the host of the Akimbo podcast, and the author of 19 international bestsellers. His latest is This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See. What We Discuss with Seth Godin: Why it's possible to suffer from imposter syndrome simultaneously with entitlement. Why the market for media is so fragmented today, and what it means for content creators, advertisers, and consumers. Why you can trade for attention, but you can't trade for trust. The simple sentence you can use to remind yourself that you're not going to do better work by heeding your one-star reviewers. Why Seth considers the idea of hustling selfish and akin to bullying. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/234 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn is the podcast where it's all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. Give it a listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that we can use to impact our own lives and those around us. Today, one of the most prolific authors of our time, 18 international bestsellers. He blogs every single day on one of the most popular blogs anywhere in the internet. I've known Seth Godin for years now, and if you've ever had or overheard a conversation about marketing, you can't go more than a few minutes without someone quoting Seth Godin. If you dig deep enough into Seth's work, you can see his influence all over corporate and startup culture, as well as publishing and even education. You all requested Seth so many times that I flew out to his office in New York to do this interview.

Of course, talking with an old friend is always a good time, and it was a lot of fun to hear his thoughts on how to stand out in the crowd, do something that lights you up and is profitable and valuable to others at the same time. Seth's thinking is really on another level, and if you're not familiar with his work, then this episode will really shake up the way you think about your work life and what you bring to the world. If you want to know how we've got such great guests here on the show, yeah, the numbers speak for themselves. I wish that were true. It's about the network. It's about systems and tiny habits. It's about outreach and maintaining those connections. I'm teaching you how to do that for free over at 6.

Six-minute networking, Jordanharbinger.com slash course is where you can find that. And by the way, most of the guests here on the show, actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in some pretty smart company. All right. Here's Seth Godin. So you're viewed as a successful person as far as your work is concerned. I don't know much about your personal life.

But rather than starting with your successes, which I'll include, of course, in the introduction, I would love to start with some failures because I think people look at, successful people like you and they go, this is a guy never had to worry about much. You know, he's successful and he's been successful. And as far as Google's concerned, he's always been that way. Okay. I mean, I am averse to the failure Olympics because I think sometimes it gives us a place to hide, but there are two kinds of failures.

I have failed more times than anyone who's watching this in terms of projects brought forward that didn't resume. When I was a book packager, I got 800 rejections in a row. and for more than 10 years, I was on the edge of bankruptcy four weeks away from being completely out of money. When we were building Yoyerdine, the company that ended up going to Yahoo, our biggest client was AOL, and at one point the VP of AOL said to be on the phone, if you set foot on our campus, I will have you arrested. Oh, wow. Right. So it was high stakes, and there are things that I brought, books I worked on for a year that sold 1,000 copies.

There were projects. Another thing we did for AOL was one of the best ideas I ever had. We worked on it for a year. We built the whole thing out. And a week before it launched, AOL switched its business model from royalty to flat rate, which meant the project got canceled. And so there's a lot of bumper cars when you decide to do a life of projects. and I wouldn't have it any other way.

The real failure that I think is worth talking about, it's way more interesting now that I've survived the other kind of is the failure of inaction. And like everyone, I have a really long list of that. What are the things I could have done and didn't? Who are the people I could have helped but didn't? And that's the kind of thing I try to pay attention to. Because I know a lot of people who have succeeded and the reason they succeeded is because they persisted, but also because they protected against the

downside. So they still protect against the downside. But what could they have accomplished if they protected a little bit less against the downside and instead said, it doesn't matter that this might fail. What matters is that this is worth trying, and that's something I try to motivate myself to do all the time. When you see people protecting against the downside, what are you primarily referring to? Is there kind of a common example of people being overly risk-averse? Well, the most important good way to protect against the downside is you never want to get thrown out of the game. And so the reason I can confidently say I've failed more than most people is because I haven't gotten thrown out of the game. I got deep trying. I did thousands of book ideas

and published 120 books as a book packageer. And only three of them became big bestsellers. That means I had 117 that disappointed the publisher. Stay in the game. Make it so that you're not thrown out. But the thing that people avoid is the one-star review on Yelp, the person in the audience who doesn't laugh at your talk, the engagement with a customer who's furious at you. Well, maybe it's not for them. And if you have a way to make promises that aren't disingenuous,

they don't undermine your reputation, and then you can make people whole when it doesn't match, well, then fine, it's not for you. And so if somebody goes to a horror movie and it's too scary, just give the guy his $9 back. Don't feel like you shouldn't have made it. I have a podcast coming out about, for whatever reason, I talk about Stanley Kubrick a lot. 2001 was trashed by the critics when it came out, that it was boring, that it was poorly made. So what should Kubrick have done?

Pulled it from the theater? Of course not. Gone to work at Blockbuster. Yeah, right? But you make the movie knowing some people aren't going to like it. If you want everyone to like what you do, you can't even, you can't even open like an ice cream stand because people are allergic to ice cream. Yeah. What did you do to almost have the threat of being arrested at AOL?

I mean. Okay. So the AOL story works like this. I invented with my team at Yoyo 9 commercial email. If you've ever gotten an email you wanted to get, that's because we invented it. It was 1990 long before the web. and we ran games of skill and sweepstakes using email because there was no World Wide Web. So one of our big clients was AOL.

One of our big clients was Carter Wallace, the people who make AID extra dry deodorant. And so if you were playing the Arid Extra Dry Deodorant game, you got an email every week. And if you got the questions right, you moved up in the standings and at the end you would win. I don't know if cars. If you were playing the AOL game, you were getting emails every week about parts of AOL that you could go research on AOL and have fun and winter pride. Well, Monday, the emails went out, and for whatever reason, the AOL players, there were 400,000 of them, got the AID Extra Dry email by mistake. Oh, oops. Yeah. And this was when AOL stock was going up every day. So, like, not good. Not good.

And so I had this long, long, distraught meeting with my tech people and they built all the stuff. And a week later, I get to the office and they've done it again. Oh, yeah. And so I called down to Virginia, which is where I well was. And I said, Audrey, that was the vice president, I can't tell you how sorry I am. I'm going to fly down there just to express my concern. I'm really sorry. And that's when she threatened to have me arrested if I should not by campus.

So we then hired a great expense. This guy, we got him to quit his job, 50-year-old, who was a grown-up, who would build a whole system. And then third week, I get to the office at 4 a.m., because no email at home. home, right? Four a.m., check it, and it's mixed up again. Oh, no. And I called Dan, my head of engineering in our Boston office. And if it hadn't been a basement office, he would have jumped out the window. It turns out what this guy had built was a system that showed just four of us what was

about to happen. So only four people got the email the third week, and it was fixed after that. But, yeah. I'm getting anxiety hearing it. So I can imagine. Yeah. Well, okay, so you've had a bunch of failures. And the failure Olympics, I'm with you on that.

I feel like there are people now who are just like, here's this even bigger. Oh, well, let me tell you, let me one up your story about that. And this thing I almost did to myself on purpose so that I had a story for your podcast. I get that. Do you ever have imposter syndrome these days or is that kind of a thing that you've put behind you? Yeah. So for those people who haven't heard the term, imposter. syndrome applies to both sexes, genders, but women in particular feel it, which is, I'm a fraud.

What right do I have to be on the stage? What right do I have to be publishing this idea or running this podcast? And I have really strong feelings about this, and some people are made uncomfortable by it, but here we go. Of course you're an imposter. Of course you feel that way. What right do you have to be sure that you can define the future? You can't. If you don't feel insecure, you're a psychopath. Yeah. Right? The fact is when you feel like an imposter, it means you're onto something.

It means you're leaning out of the boat doing generous work. If you're not feeling that way, you're not working hard enough. What does it mean when I simultaneously think, why isn't my work bigger? And also, maybe I shouldn't be leaning out of the boat. I have imposter syndrome and entitlement or something, whatever that's called. Yeah, I think they go together because you believe that you were doing something generous. and what we see in our culture is who's number one on YouTube, who's number one on Billboard, who's number one on TV.

And they don't mention that there are, you know, 142 TV shows and only one can be number one. They don't mention the average podcast in this country has 145 listeners. Yeah. Average. Yeah. Your podcast could be great. It is not related to the fact that someone else has more listeners to you. Those are separate thing.

and there are tactics and strategies that you can use to get more people to see what you do. But the number of people who see what you do is not related to the goodness of what you do. I think that's important because I know that people, I don't know if it's just an American thing. We're obsessed with charts. We're obsessed with rankings. Everything is competitive. And that's good because it makes the free market a little better. But it's also, there's some part of us that goes, well, if I'm not number one, that I'm garbage or my work is garbage.

and that's inherently unhealthy because nobody can start at number one. I mean, not really. Unless you realize that the whole thing is about categories, the taxonomy of what category. So I will never have a number one Billboard single because I don't make music. Oh, yeah. Right? Well, if you can invent a category, you get to be number one in it.

And I've been doing that my whole career. I was the number one creator of CD-ROMs for parents when I did my Fisher-Price CD-ROM title because it was the only one. Right. And when I was the first person to do books with Amazon, I was number one in my category. You have to be a pioneer, but the benefit of being a pioneer is you get to invent a category that's very small and you can be number one in it. Right, right. And then you just spend hopefully not too much time looking over your shoulder going out and what else figured or actually you want everyone else to figure it out. And that's the other thing is that I was at a

trade show this weekend in the fancy food industry. And the people, the people, you know, who at the trade show aren't competing with each other, right? There isn't the problem of this chocolate versus that chocolate. The problem is that 99% of people don't buy any expensive chocolate. That's the competition. The competition is always none of the above. The competition is didn't show up. So right now with the ALF MBA and with the Akimbo workshops, we're trying to reinvent the way people learn. Who is my competition? My competition is cat videos. Which are pretty compelling depending on who you're asking. But yeah, maybe not the same level of value as somebody who flies here from South Africa to learn from you. I love the idea that school is failing,

idea generators, mold breakers, and there's this old model of school. Because I'm learning more now as an adult than I ever felt like I did as a kid. It makes me a little nervous because now I feel like, oh, I got to make up for lost time. Because if this is what learning was supposed to be like, what the hell was I doing for 30, 27 years in school and then grad school? What should younger people or people in general be doing to maybe improve the way that they educate themselves or improve the way that they learn? Well, so I use the word education and learning differently. Education is a management system to get you to comply.

There's a prize at the end. There's a certificate. Whereas learning requires enrollment voluntarily saying, I want to move forward. The most important thing we can teach is thirst, the desire to learn. That once you want to learn, the amount of things you can learn goes to infinity, because everyone has every course they'd ever need to take right in front of them. The problem is when we try to do it to people against their will. Sure, yeah.

I don't remember willingly going this well. After a while, it was just beaten a dissimission, basically. But now I don't have enough time to read all the books that I want. There's none of that time for me to take all the courses that I want online or in person, for that matter. I can't get to school fast enough. But from the time you're six or seven, what coaches and teachers and parents say is, why didn't you get an A?

Well, no wonder no one wants to play that game. It's stacked against you. That if we could figure out how to create a cycle of wasn't that fun. No one learns how to walk or ride a bike from a course. Right? We learn how to do it by trying it, failing, and trying again. And so we are born wanting to know that skill. We learn a skill, but then we are brainwashed into stopping.

I think there's also an element of us being brainwashed into thinking we can't do it on our own. I don't remember a whole lot of people even when I was younger encouraging me, my parents, of course. But school, it kind of wasn't, hey, research this on your own, figure it out on your own. And I remember the one or two times teachers actually went, well, you're learning how to read on your own. I'm just going to let you do that. It was kind of like, stop reading the first graders book when you're in kindergarten and read this dumb book. It's compliant. Yeah.

Right? And, you know, the same thing happens to the adults that I put on the spot all the time. And, you know, I told the story last week. When I used to, when we were building yoga, and I was hiring a person a week. And for a small company, that's a lot. Yeah. And we would do, I ran a full page ad in the New York Times. 500 people responded.

We had two sessions of 100 people each came to hear me give my pitch once. So I wouldn't have to repeat it to every single person. Then we put them into groups of five. And my employees went and sat at each group interview of five to find out if they're people like us. Then they went to a smaller group. So I would sit at a group of people with five. And I would say, all right, here's the deal. And I had to make it more and more specifically.

because people can't misunderstand the question. I don't really care about the answer. But if I wanted to know how many gas stations there were in the United States, without you using any outside information, how would you figure it out? And I would say this to the group of five. And every single time, they fell into three categories. One person would take out a pad. Two people would say no to whatever anybody else said.

and one or two people would lead. Well, we could do this. What do you think about this? Oh, let's see. There are this many companies that they'll get. How many cars? How many people? That's that person.

Then there's the other person writing down whatever they say. And then, nah, that's a bet. What else you got? Well, who do you think I hired? Well, you need a mix, don't you? You don't just want all leaders, do you? It wasn't really about leaders. It was about curiosity.

Oh, okay. Because all we were doing as an organization was solving problems that hadn't been solved before. I didn't need people to do repeated tasks. I needed people to solve problems that hadn't been solved before. They could be big or small. And if you're afraid of solving a problem without a textbook, without a manual, I can't fight that. And you probably don't want the person who's nays saying, and you probably don't need to scribe as much.

You can find them anywhere. We had a few of those people. But in general, every time I hired the curious person, I got a curious person. And curious people in fast changing times and the people you want by your side. Especially somebody who's not afraid to voice an idea in a group where they think that person might also take their job. Yeah. That's somebody who's not afraid of a little bit of risk and also doesn't have a scarcity mindset that's going to cut them back. Exactly.

Unplug someone else's computer or whatever. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Seth Godin. We'll be right back back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visitjordanharbinger.com slash deals. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode. so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Seth Godin. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means you get all the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing from the show. Now back to our show with Seth Godin. You bring this idea up in Akimbo. there's an example of these kids getting laptops, and is it Africa or South America?

Yeah, Nicholas Negroponte. And this is fascinating because I'm thinking, oh, well, you know, I always try to guess where the story is going. I don't know if that's just from watching too many movies or if that's human nature. And I was wrong. I thought, oh, they're going to get these and they're going to find Candy Crush and then nothing ever happened and the tablets ran out of batteries and that was the end. Somebody played Candy Crush until they ran out. But that's not what happened.

Right. So this, the self-learning process is much different than the bash people into compliance factory workers process. No one had ever spent time pushing these kids to obey. There was no school. They had never been to school. They were functionally illiterate. They were born to grow up to work in the field. And Nicholas is the founder at MIT Media Lab.

So he does things that are on the edge and with rigor. and they tracked every single behavior on every one of these tablets. The kids taught themselves to read. They taught themselves to hack the system so they could use the camera and other tools in it. And mostly they taught each other how to use it. Because no one had ever told them not to do those things. And instead of just sitting around doing nothing, they had something to do. The idea of Candy Crush is, Candy Crush is an opiate.

It's designed to take your mind of the noise around you. But if you're not surrounded by, this ever competitive noise, Candy Crush is boring. Right, yeah. It's supposed to be boring. It is not boring to learn how to edit Wikipedia, and that's what these kids did.

I'm very impressed that they learned how to do. It took me a while to figure out how to edit Wikipedia, right? They certainly don't make it as user-friendly as it probably could be these days. And I think that's a little bit by design, because it makes vandalism a little more difficult. For sure. So here's the interesting statistic that I just looked up on Wikipedia. 32 million people have a registered account on Wikipedia.

3,900 people are authorized to start a new article in Wikipedia without oversight. That's the size of the funnel, one in 10,000, meaning that most people who edit Wikipedia simply fix typos, a few thousand people really get deep into it, and 3,800 of them are the actual, quote, staff, Wikipedia. That funnel is fascinating because it applies to most forms of everything. When you think about out of every 30 million people who say I paint, how many of them are cutting-edge artists that belong in the metropolitan art. It's not a talent thing. Right.

It's a skill and commitment thing. That's an important point. I think that's more important than I originally had given it credit for it because a lot of us will say, I can't really do that. I don't have the natural skill or, man, it's going to take me 20 years to build that level of skill. but since that's not the metric we're really required to have to do anything important. Exactly. It becomes not irrelevant, but certainly less important and less relevant than we might have thought. Right, because most of the things we celebrate in the media and the culture are talents.

How tall are you? Can you dunk a basketball? How fast do you on the buzzer at jeopardy? These are things that I will argue you might be wired for. But the other stuff, persistent, open-minded, curious, generous, driven, those things are harder to build a game show around, but that's the rest of our lives. Those are the people who end up running the rest of our lives because that's what makes the culture work.

I think we all know it's cheaper for big companies to make, as you said, average things for average people. But now we're seeing all these micro-market subculture. influencers. So there's no Larry King Live anymore. I mean, maybe it exists, but not really in the way that it did in the 90s, right? Where, there were news articles that I read when I do research on people. It says, during Larry King Live, a plane crashed into, and it was like, well, that must have been at 10 p.m. on every weeknight, because everyone was watching this. That kind of is in a thing. And unless that happens during Game of Thrones or something, right? And even then, it's like, oh, well, on Tuesday, that's only when I watched it. So late night TV, even those, those are the big things that people talk about, and those are fragmented and those are competitive and those hosts are crying in their serial about the lack of ratings. And giant shows like Bill Maher or whatever on HBO.

You have a giant show. Your show is bigger than Bill Maher's show. That's what I learned that recently and I was like, that's not right. And then I asked people that have the secret inside details. And I went, well, where's my contract with HBO? Exactly. Where's my giant sound studio? Right. Well, there is a legacy business.

That's right. Yours is a growing one. We could talk forever about the dynamics here, but what happened was the FCC said there's only three channels that creates scarcity. Everyone's watching TV. That creates this value. The programming was not, how do I get more people to watch TV? It's how do I get them to not watch one of the other two networks? Because the game theory is pretty simple, which is if I get a third, I win. just a third, that's plenty.

And so if you're running a commercial against one third of the American population, you better sell them something they want to buy. Because that's a lot of people. So you have Heinz ketchup and craft singles and Ford Motor, right? But then the FCC stops mattering at all. And we go from three channels to Larry King. He actually wasn't as big as it may seem today. He was tiny compared to Mash or to Carol Burnett.

Then you go to 100 cable channels, and then you go from 100 cable channels to a billion internet channels. If there's a billion internet channels, if there's 70 million blogs, if there's five million or whatever it is podcasts, there's no shortage of things to tune into. And by definition, there will be some hits because we like to have something we can buzz about. But even the hits are tiny compared to what they used to be. that Mad Men, which was considered the greatest TV show of its time,

three million people tuned in every episode. Which is like if your podcast had that, you'd be one of the top podcasters, but I don't even know if you're beating Rogan at that point. Right. But if you're on TV in 1970, that was last three million. There was no TV show that had fewer viewers than three million in 1970. Really? Yeah.

Wow. It was last place because you had a third if you just tied. If you just tied, you had six. you had 60 million, 50 million, 40 million people watching you. Wow. This is 3 million. It's mad men because the whole thing fractures. And if the whole thing fractures, number one, it's not clear advertising makes sense.

But if advertising does make sense, why on earth would you advertise average stuff when you could buy specific places to put your ads? So if you know that it's a vegan podcast, you can sell them vegan stuff. Right. Which you never used to be able to buy an ad for a vegan stuff. Where could you afford to do that? So now we're way out on the long tail because it's also true. At the very same time, just a coincidence.

Containerships plus robots plus computers means we can make obscure edge case products at a reasonable price. So if you think about a product like the tile, I have one on my keys here, which is just thing that can help you find your keys if you lose them. Right, the little Bluetooth dongle or whatever. In 1970, you could never. afforded to make this because you would have needed to find 40 million people who would go to Kmart to buy one because you need a shelf space. Oh, we don't need shelf space. We have Amazon. Unlimited shelf space. So all these things lined up. 3D printer to make the prototype. 3D EPROM driver, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you don't need to sell that many tile the first year

to be glad you started the company. That was inconceivable in 1970. So all these things lined up at the same time to create this long fracture thing, which means that most ideas are underwater. Most of the songs on iTunes sell zero copies a year. Most of the Kindle books sell zero copies a month. Zero, because it's under the line. There's a whole bunch that sell one, as I said, podcasts have 145 listeners, so you're not going to make a living at it. It's a great hobby. So what we're going to end up with There's all this churn at the long tail. And then the short head when the Rogans or whatever show up is a hit, because hits are harder to find,

you can make money from it. And because there's so much cheaper to make, you don't have to make that much money to be glad you did. So knowing this, can we make a huge impact like we used to be able to do by getting a hit or creating something and having it resonate with the mess? Is it harder now or does it just look harder? or are we kind of like

redefining what hit means? Yeah, I guess that, yeah. Do you mean, come to the exact same? You mean change the culture, but do you mean make a lot of money? Yeah, so is there even a such thing as cultural radar anymore at all? Yeah, we want there to be cultural radar. Right.

And so there is. And it's not, I watched 40 episodes of Seinfeld. It might just be yadi, yada, yada. And there's a whole bunch of people who know what you just said. Right. So it's a memeification of, of how we talk about it, but what's really happening, and I think we see this beautifully in the way the gay marriage movement succeeded so quickly,

is what are your friends doing? People like us do things like this, the people around you, what do you see? And so what they realized was they didn't need to make a case or change everyone's mind. They simply needed to make it so that people who can't. cared about the issue, would normalize it enough to the people around them. So even though there wasn't a central broadcast, a central show, it becomes this grounds up. Ground swell, yeah, fine. And so it's done, right? And so we're going to see the culture keep changing horizontally, not the vertical way. The vertical way was Oprah would have somebody on who said something that

It was heard by 25 million women at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and then boom, it's on the radar. This is slower than that and more horizontal than that, but it will change the culture, because the culture wants to change, and people want to be in sync with their people. That makes sense. It sort of leads me to what probably sounds like a dumb question, which is, does it still make sense for us to do good work, the high-quality work? And of course it does, but it kind of seems like it depends on the measure of. the semantics matters so much. Yeah.

So let's be clear about what quality means. Sure. Quality does not mean deluxeness. Quality does not mean, um, expensiveness. Those words are often associated in quality. Quality. Edward Stemming, Phil Crosby, their definition is meets spec. If you meet spec every time, you have created something of quality.

So a Toyota is higher quality than a 1968. Rolls-Royce. Because the 1968 Rolls-Royce made by hand, broke down more than a 1990 Toyota. It was higher quality. MetSpec. So the production of almost everything in our lives, food chain, the mechanical devices we buy, way higher than any time in history. Because engineers figured out how to improve quality.

Okay. Now, if I get a Kindle book, and it's filled with typos, it's low quality. Right. If I get a Kindle book and it's a trashy romance, well, was it marketed as a trashy romance? Because if it is, then it's a high-quality trashy romance. Right. It meets spec. It meets spec. So what does it mean to do good work?

Well, I think the difference between good work and great work is a good work met spec. Great work you can't stop talking about. It's so exceeded your expectations that you have to spread the word. and therefore if we want to have a change in the culture, we have to be remarkable. And what it means to be remarkable is to do something great. That doesn't mean quality. It might mean the opposite of quality. It might be wabi-sabi.

It might be a humanity to it. So when you saw John Stewart choking up last week when he was testifying before the Senate and the House, that was low quality and it was excellent work. right because he didn't finish his sentences he got choked up in his word so he didn't deliver the word properly but it was remarkable it got seen by millions of people it made a difference because it was human because it was great work and so i think our obligation is to not be this sort of full perfectionism of holding it back because it's not perfect but instead say this is important and i'm going to do what's necessary to make it important lobby savvy correct me if i'm wrong is

where the is a Japanese art form where they sort of, did they deliberately break the pot and then glue it together with gold? Or does it just? There is a thing. It starts with a K. I can never go on board. That's called. Okay. So if you went to Japan in 1960 and said Wabi Sabi, no one would know what you meant. It was actually a psychoanalyst in the United States. Leonard, I want to say the same's corner, wrote a book called Wabi Sabi in which he conflated two words, Wabi and Sabi. and basically I'm not doing a literal translation. One means depth and one means nature and one implies handmade. It's the reality of use.

And so an astro-turf lawn in the suburbs might be perfect, but a playground has wabi-sabi. You can see the footprints of the kids who came before you. The catchers mitt that's brand new from the store is new, but a worn-in catcher's mitt is worth more because it has wabi-sabi. It's been there and it's on its way to going away. And so, yes, there is a Japanese form of sculpture where you intentionally break a sculpture and then glue it together with gold to show that that's our lives, right?

Our lives are nothing but our scars, are the things that didn't work out. And I treasure them. We each do. That my failures are more important to me than my successes because it's my failures that made it so I could be here. that idea of Wabi-Sabi and humanity flies in the face of what happens when you see CBS make a three-minute piece of video. I was on CBS a couple weeks ago.

Really good people. There's only two of you here. There were five of them. And they were here for hours to make a three-minute thing because they wanted to take out all the Wabi-Sabi. They wanted to be like not, and this really happened, but that this is a version of what happened. Right. And one of the reasons that Hollywood movies cost so much is that when you have an unlimited budget, you spend the last half of it taken out all the stuff that would make it look real.

Right, yeah, everything is, oh, that wasn't lit perfectly, or if there was a, someone walked by outside, we have to get rid of that. And it's, yeah, we're in sets office, you know. Well, what's this? There's wires in the shot. Yeah, there are wires on the shot. There are wires in the office. Exactly.

And people like that about podcasting, right? The wabasabi is there until there's just two. much wabi that everything else gets lost. Exactly. I recorded my podcast in the bathroom right behind us here in the shower, and I lined it with some foam, and I just go in there and I hit record. And I have no staff other than Alex who does the final edit for me because I figured that's what people wanted for me.

To be clear, you're not actually taking a shower. If you turn on the water, I don't know what would happen. That might be a little, yes, no more wabi-sabie at that point. More like wet. Yeah, wet. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Seth Godin. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show.

Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. It really helped us out. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Seth Godin.

Let me tell you where I get a little discouraged. There are podcasts to talk about Real Housewives, what the host had for breakfast. She's drinking, she's three glasses of wine deep when she does it. It has twice the audience that I have. At least. Yeah, probably more like 5X. It's super profitable. Sure.

And everyone's going, we want to buy ads on that one. But then there is an element of, well, not ads for things that may be smart people would buy, because they're not listening to that. But you'll never have better ratings than Jersey Shore or something that makes us all go hug and cringe. Where the brands are paying the person to not wear the clothing. Right. Right. If you A-B test their website enough, it will turn into a porn site.

Really? Think about it. Is that an experiment that actually was run? No, think about it. Because you have two ads. One ad has someone sort of unclothed. One ad doesn't, which is going to get more clicks. You have two things that people can do.

involves getting a short-term hit of endorphin, one doesn't. Like, bit by bit by bit, it's going to keep pushing you in a direction for a certain audience, right? If you look, why is the spam from Nigeria so poorly written? Deliberately filtering in people that would fall for it? Exactly, because it costs them a ton to get you to the next six steps of interaction. They don't want a smart person in the funnel because it's just going to break before they pay. They want dumb people in the fun.

And so the question I would ask you is, what's your goal? If your goal is to maximize the income from a podcast, then the quality you want is the dumbest, most purient, short-fix, quick-hit thing you could come up with because advertisers are obsessed with mass and perversely pay extra to reach large numbers of undifferentiated people when they should be paying less per head than that. They pay more per head because they're lazy and traditional.

So if that's work you're proud of, this is the easiest thing in the world to do. Right. It's not. It makes me want to take this pencil and push it as hard as I can for my years off. I don't think you should because you're comparing apples to oranges, that those people, what they really should be doing instead of a podcast is making a network TV show. They're failing too because they only have one tenth of reach they'd have on network TV. So it's a hierarchy, but it's not a ladder you want to be on. Instead, you're saying for the people, people on a journey I care about, I can go with you over there who wants to come. And that's not the way to maximize your profit. The way to maximize your profit is going to work at Goldman Sachs. This is the way to maximize your impact on the people you seek to serve. Do people come to you

and say things like, how do I stay motivated to do what matters rather than what makes profit in the short term? Or is that a question you think that they should be able to answer on their own by existing. I don't get asked that question. I don't do any consulting or coaching, so I don't get asked as many questions as you think. Sure. But the question I get asked much more often than that is,

I have been moved by the muse to do X. I want why, and I'm not getting it. How dare the culture do that? How can I fix it? Right. That sense of entitlement happens constant. And the answer is, what made you think that X and Y were related?

You're entitled to do X. You're not entitled to get Y. That there might be a disconnect between the X you're doing and the Y you think you're entitled to get. And it's that but, that and that is getting in the way of your joy. I can tell you how to get that kind of output, but you won't be able to do the kind of art you say you want to do. You'll have to do something for them.

And what I write about in this is marketing is most marketers say, I have a key. Show me the lock it fits. That's a really dumb way to get into the house. Yeah. The smart way is to say, here's a lock. Why don't you go make a key that will open that? That makes much more sense. That is a service mindset built on empathy to say, I'm not going to force you to change

for me to serve you. I'm going to go to who you are and where you are going and bring you something that you know you need. What advice would you have for something than somebody who, as you put it in, is it the Icarus deception? I always mess this title up. That's the name of the book. Yes. Did it have another title or was there just a misprint in an article that was big that had the title wrong?

Interesting. In my head it had another title, but in real life it never had another. What was the title that was in your head? I don't remember. Okay. Maybe I heard it on a podcast or something because it is just polluting my brain. What advice would you have for people who fly too low, right? because there's people who are making things that think, this doesn't matter.

There's too much noise. No one cares about deeper thought anymore. That person might be me. Maybe I'm using you as my therapist right now. But in a way, right? Because there's people who are going, oh, why make smart content when everyone's dumb? Which is not necessarily true, but it can feel that way. So once you make that statement is your next statement, all right, I'll make dumb content.

But you don't really want to, right? So now we're back to the, I want to do what I want to do, but I don't know. not getting what I want to. Right, right. You know, the number of blog posts I've written that have won the internet is zero. 7,400 blog posts and I have never had one go super viral. And that's totally fine with me. In fact, I know how to write one of those blog posts. I don't want to write one of those blog posts because if I did, I'd get hooked on that and I'd have to do it again. Sure. And so I'm flattered when people look to me as a big success.

Except authors that I really respect, the Liz Gilberts and the Malcolm Gladwell's the world sell 20 times as many books as I do. 20 times. And I don't have 20 times the podcast listeners you do it. 20x is a lot. That's a lot, yeah. And if I was going to focus on that, it would be foolish. Because if I want to go be Liz Gilbert, I should figure out how to be Liz Gilbert.

And then maybe I'll get what Liz Gilbert gets. But there already is a Liz Gilbert. I should just be me and figure out how to organize my overhead. so that what I'm getting for being me can sustain me to do it again. That doesn't mean you don't try to do outreach that's appropriate. You don't try to find leverage in a social ratchet and learn how to do that kind of marketing. It just means you don't do it with a chip on your shoulder.

Right. Because this idea that you're entitled to X because you put the effort in, you just got to go to the floors of museums with artists you never heard of. Painting after painting from people you never heard of. Go to the record store of records after. They're just as good. They're just not famous. Right.

Right. And it's easy to go. But I've been doing this for 12 years. I should. And I always have to check myself on that because when I look at people, people will say, your YouTube should be bigger. And I go, yeah. So what would you do?

And you talk to the expert. And they go, oh, you know, you need like a snazzy explosion in thumbnail. And it has to say, this quote blew my head up when Seth said it. and then people will click and then they'll go, that wasn't, my head's not exploding. This is dumb, but then you get more. You've traded trust for attention. Right.

You're optimizing for dumbness. So magazines that I used to respect, now I've headlines like, this one thing United Airlines did will blow your mind. Right. Well, okay, I clicked once, but I'm never coming back. Right.

And so in the long run, we've seen it again and again and again. In the long run, you can trade for attention, but you can't trade for trust. I think that's a really good point. You see websites that were once the preeminent whatever magazine, and now it's called a click farm, and they're not really exaggerating.

Right, exactly. And you can turn your work into that if you're not careful by going, wow, look, when I put more cleavage on Instagram, well, maybe not for me or you, but some people can do that, and they'll get more followers. But then are you getting people that want to buy your floral arrangements? Are you getting people that want to hear your opinion on something? No, you're getting emojis. we have in the office every day, right?

I don't use Instagram the way I'm supposed to. I don't use Twitter the way I'm supposed to, and I don't use Facebook the way I'm supposed to, and I'm aware of that. But my job is not to make Mark Zuckerberg happy. My job is to work with the people who want to go on this journey with me, and if using a social media outlet

the way that will make the CEO happy will undermine what I'm trying to do, then I don't want to do it. I'm also not doing a particularly good job making Barnes & Noble happy, right? Fine. That's not my job. You turned down this billion dollars in stock options.

Was that for Yo-YoDine? No, no. After I sold Yodine, I was at Yahoo. And Bill Gross, the guy who invented so many things on the internet that he doesn't always get credit for, including Google's business model, ran a company called Idealab. And Idealab was the next hot thing. It was going to be a multi-mult. Steven Spielberg was on the board was the real deal.

and Bill called me up right around the time I was thinking of leaving Yahoo and he said we'd love to have you be the chief marketing officer for Idealab. We're going public in six months. And there's a billion dollars in stock options in it. And I said no. And it doesn't matter that the internet bubble burst in between the two. I'm sort of sad it didn't. It would have been great if it really was worth a billion dollars.

Because the magic for me was I never again had to say I got to do something for money. Right. Because I turned down a billion dollars. Right. Great. So why sell out for $100,000? Exactly. Done. Yeah. And my life has been better ever since. Right. Yeah. I can see that. That's my follow up to that was what did that teach you about doing things for money? Because yeah, if you're going to, I used to be a Wall Street attorney. My bonus check was supposed to be as big as my annual revenue is for this. But I would not, we would not be, you'd be talking to one miserable guy or not at all at this point. And I can see that. I can see that being almost liberated. Like, look, if I didn't sell out for that, there's not really an amount of money that's going to make me then change by principles.

Exactly. Or make crappy work. But I also have a lot of other principles about industriousness and forward motion that make me work way harder than I would work if I was just seeking to maximize profit. How do we know what feedback to listen to? Because we're getting a lot. Whenever our work is out there, we're getting a lot. a whole lot of feedback. Some of it's unsolicited.

And I like to improve my show or whatever. People like to improve their writing their work based on feedback. But there's a YouTube comment that says, I don't like your purple glasses. And then there's different types of people that might love them or not comment on your glasses at all because that's not the freaking point. Exactly. How do we really know when it's not such an obvious example who to listen to?

So I just recorded a whole podcast about this very topic. So I'm trying to read myself too much. But here we go. the most important thing to remember is a simple sentence. It's not for you. That if someone gives you a piece of feedback, that indicates what kind of person they are by the nature of the feedback, so you run an Indian restaurant on 6th Street in New York,

and you have a $24 spicy Vindaloo. If you finish it, you get it for free. It's that spicy. And someone comes to the restaurant and says, I hate spicy food. it's really obvious what you should do. And it's not take it off the menu. It's say to that person,

Veselka, Ukrainian food, is two blocks from here. Nothing in the restaurant is spicy. Here's their phone number. Thanks for stopping by. What I sell is not for you. Being able to do that is hugely powerful. So I look at the 100 most beloved books ever written. All of them have more one-star reviews on Amazon.

than any book I've ever written, all of them. Because if you're going to write to Kill a Mockingbird or Harry Potter, a lot of people are going to read it. And if a lot of people are going to read it, some of them need to say, it's not for me. And the way they do that is by writing a one-star review. But Harper Lee shouldn't have read her one-star reviews because it's not going to make her a better writer tomorrow. All it says is, I don't like spicy food. Good luck to you. So that's the most important thing. Do not go looking for these one-star reviews because they will not help you do better work. And it's in our instinct, people like us, to go look for the one-star reviews because we want to put ourselves in the state of angry underdog again, beating ourselves up,

thinking that that's the fuel for our best work. And I'm not sure that's true. It's like you've seen me, Seth. How do you know I do that every single morning? Yeah, there's a part of that. I haven't read it Amazon review in seven years. That's probably wise. Yeah. I think looking for like a three star, that's where sometimes you get value. Not always, though, right? Maybe more like the email that's three paragraphs that comes. Email feels very different to me. Yeah. Because email isn't in public, so the person is not trying to raise their status in hierarchy. Email's not anonymous, right? And email has a history. So if I've never heard from you before and you write about a blog post I just wrote, that's negative, I'm going to ignore you. But if in the 145,000,

emails I've answered through the years. I've seen you float by now and then, questioning something, asking about something, and then you send me a note. That feels really different to me. Sure. Right? So, like, one of the things I learned is people in Australia don't like it when you say it's summer and it's hot because it's winter in Australia right now.

So they feel left out. So I now say, for people in the Northern Hemisphere, right, or whatever, because I want to acknowledge, how did I come to know this? I came to know this because someone, several people I trust, who I've been back and forth, who I've never met, like, you know what? We preferred if you do this. I'll listen to that. That's advice.

That's not feedback. Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's hard to remember in the moment, but it's worth revisiting that, especially if you find yourself at 2 o'clock in the morning, scrolling through your most critical reviews on whatever platform you do. And also, as long as we're talking about, what's true as opposed to what's emotional. If I said to the two of you guys, name the greatest jazz album of all time.

I don't know. Maybe Kind of Blue, Miles Davis. Yeah, I was going to say some, John Coltrane or Miles Davis. So Kind of Blue, John Coltrane. Miles Davis, five days, beginning to add. Got the idea. Five days later, it's completely done. So if Miles Davis, and then if you listen carefully, you'll hear their mistakes.

you'll hear there are notes that are not perfectly in tune. If Miles Davis can make one of the greatest jazz albums of all time in five days, why is what you're doing so hard? Or another question, how long would it take you to type a 150-page book? Or if you know how to type, you could probably type it in four days. So why does it take a year? It's not the typing. It's the getting out of your way part.

Miles got out of his way. that you can write a book. I wrote the dip in two weeks. You can write a book if you get out of your way. So the work here is not that you have to get network standard and practices and the ANR people to say yes, we will put you in the store. And you don't need to get tower records

to give you shelf space because they're all gone. You can publish anything you want. So the work is find the people you seek to serve. Bring them a true, honest version of the change you seek to make. and then let it happen. Don't obsess about the one-star reviews. Learn what you need to learn from good advice and do it again. I've heard you say things that indicate that you're not a fan of hustling, so to speak.

For sure. I hate that word even because I think that the whole internet is full of hustle porn, as I call it. Yep. There's whole bodies of work that are just to motivate people to, I don't even know, stand on a beach and do this or something. Can you elaborate on why? Hustle is selfish. It's selfish. Hustle says, how do I create enough reciprocity debt plus close talking plus promises that are hard to keep

so that someone will let me go forward rather than doing the difficult work of saying, that's a hustle, right? So you can get hustled by a life insurance salesperson. You get hustled at the car dealership. You can get hustled at the bus station in New York City. So it's not bullying, but it's in the same category that, you know, one of the hustle things that went around a couple years ago is one way to hustle somebody is engage with them a little bit and then ask for a favor.

So email, hey Seth, what's your favorite color? Yeah. Right? You write by saying, oh, really? My favorite color is yellow. Will you blur my book? Right? It drives me absolutely.

The worst is, Jordan, I'm a huge fan of your work. This thing really changed my life. And I'm like, oh, I'm having a good read here. This is really, would you? and then I go, oh, so this was, you're just buttering me up. Now I feel dumb. You're trying to create an environment where I will feel worse by saying no. That's hustling because it's nothing generous.

It's nothing that you would do if you weren't going to get something in return. Right. It's something risky on your part. Like sometimes people will say, I'm taking a big risk here. I'm asking you for so and so. What exactly is your risk? Right. There is no risk.

What you're doing is trading favors and working your way up ladder after letter so that in a hurry, you can hustle your way up. And it has never been easier and more socially acceptable to hustle. And my point is, hustle is different than what that other word hustle means, which is the hockey player who always skates a little bit harder. The hockey player who always practices a little bit longer. We also call that hustle. That hustle's fine because you're doing it in service of supporting your team, not because you're trying to trick your way forward. And I think that when we ask most people, would you like to be hustled? Right.

They would say no. And if that's really the case, then I'm going to propose to people that they have a better way forward than hustling people. You advocate often for taking this long-term approach versus the short-term approach. And that's a, for a lot of people, I think they really love this. When it comes to investing money or investing in yourself or a business, generally it's a good idea. It's more scarce these days, which I think is an opportunity.

But I wonder how you or we would go about persuading people to take the long-term journey instead of just what's going to work short-term. Speaking of hustling, right? Yeah, I guess I still come back to, well, what is it that you're hoping for? Ideally, a fulfilling career, right? So if you're trying to get to Cleveland, don't head south. Unless you live in Michigan. Right?

Because it's not going to head you in that direction. I've spent some time recently talking to 18, 19-year-olds who are trying to move their way up, and they are surrounded by images that say million dollars by 22 or bust. The hustle porn. Yeah. And it's like, okay, those people show me what happened to them when they turn 30. Where are they now? Because if the trajectory was a straight line, they'd be Warren Buffett by the time they're 30.

They're not. What happened between 22 and 30? And what you see is these people are signed up for an endless cycle of boom and bust. And they have to constantly engage with new people because they've burned all the old ones. If that's what you want, go model them. Leave me alone. But if you want the other path, start living the other path. Take a look at how long it took for someone to do it and do it and do it.

And the story is never end, right? I want to be Amanda Palmer. Well, Amanda wrote down exactly how to be Amanda Palmer. It does not involve. One day Oprah called me, and then I was Amanda Palmer. That's never the story. Wait for that phone call from Oprah. But Seth, in the meantime, I know we'd said 55.

We are at 55 and 5 seconds. You're amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's been fun. Great big thank you to Seth Goat, and we're going to link to a bunch of his books here in the show notes. And we're teaching you how to connect with great people like Seth.

Reach out to people that you admire. Keep relationships going with people that you've known for years. reignite those old relationships that you've let lapse. It's a free course on how to do this over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. I literally have nothing to sell you. I kind of wish that I did. But in the meantime, this is all free. I don't plan on making it not free, but no promises there.

I would love to hear what you think about this. A lot of people don't dig the well before they get thirsty. And they find out the hard way when they need relationships. So ignore this at your own peril. Jordanharbinger.com slash course is where you can find that. And most of the guests here on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. It's a bunch of successful people.

It's not a, it's not sort of one of those bottom rung, scrape the bottom of the barrel type of things. This is skills that successful people use, not just introverts, not just people who don't know how to send an email. I'd love to hear what you think about it because you all are pretty damn smart from my experience. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Seth Godin. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and there's a video of this interview

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