The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 480: Seth Godin - Becoming A Great Storyteller, Fixing PowerPoint Presentations, & Defining Leadership

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." You, along with 10's of thousand of other learning leaders, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week of right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12      https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Leaders have nothing in common. They don't share gender or income level or geography. There's no gene, no schooling, no parentage, no profession. In other words, leaders aren't born with it. Actually, they do have one thing in common. "Every tribe leader I've ever met shares one thing: the decision to lead. Leadership is a choice." Great Stories – Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. Average people are good at ignoring you. Average people have too many different points of view about life and average people are by and large satisfied. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one. The most effective stories match the world view of a tiny audience—and then that tiny audience spreads the story. Really Bad PowerPoint  - Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it's not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way. Communication is the transfer of emotion. make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you're saying is true not just accurate. Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog, and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It's unfair! It works. Define Brand – Seth's definition: A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another. Linchpin — the combination of passion and art is what makes someone a linchpin. Gifts — there are 2 reasons to give gifts. One is reciprocity. You give so that someone feels like they owe you something. That is manipulative and no way to build a career. The second reason is fascinating. Gifts allow you to make art. Gifts are given with no reciprocity hoped for or even possible. The paintings of Chuck Close - the gift he gives with no possibility of reciprocity gives him room to be in charge. Room to find joy. Because when he's painting he's not punching a time clock or trying to please someone who bought his time. He's creating a gift. My fundamental argument is simple. In everything you do, it's possible to be an artist, at least a little bit. "How To Be Remarkable" Remarkable doesn't mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you're average, and average is for losers. It's not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that's for sure. Lost in all the noise around us is the proven truth that creativity is the result of desire. A Desire to solve an old problem, a desire to serve someone else. It's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else... The difference between talent and skill: Talent is something we're born with: it's in our DNA, a magical alignment of gifts. Skill is earned. It's learned and practiced and hard-won. It's insulting to call a professional talented. In the words of Steve Martin, "I had no talent. None." If you want to change your story, change your actions first. We become what we do. Practical Empathy -- "We have to be able to say, 'it's not for you' and mean it. The work exists to serve someone, to change someone, to make something better.  

Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk, 266866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866.

Now on to tonight's featured leader. He's back, the great. Seth Godin is the author of 20 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and have been translated into 38 languages. He writes the most popular marketing blog in the world and speaks to audiences around the world. In fact, if you Google the word Seth, the first result you get is him. Seth Good. He's also the founder of the Alt MBA, the former VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo, and the founder of YoYoDine, one of the first internet companies. A few of the topics we discuss how to create a PowerPoint presentation that will.

will wow people in your audience. So important. And the one thing, all effective leaders have in common. They surprise you. And then how to become an original thinker and get away from being, what my friend Todd Henry calls, a cover band. And then how to be a better storyteller.

We cover that and so much more. This one is so good. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Seth Godin. Seth, man, it's so great to have you back. Fourth time. We do this every other year. We have for a while now. So good to have you back on the Learning Leader Show, man.

Well, thank you. The refreshments are excellent, and you're always a gracious host. You know, I've been a big fan of you for a long time. I want to start, though, with... I had a conversation with my friend Todd Henry, who I'm guessing you've probably recorded with a number of times. Todd's a great guy, the accidental creative. He lives here in Ohio where I live.

And we talked about the fact that cover bands don't change the world. And Todd was giving me this advice. because I was kind of my first book was turning into this reference book as opposed to enough of my original thought and it was amazing feedback it really changed how I how I view writing in my book and I thought one of the best in the world at being an original is you I think this is something that you've somehow figured out of where you're a professional your professional noticer of things and then you're able to distill down what you're noticing and share with your own unique perspective in your own words.

Can you talk to me more about how you've developed this skill to be a professional noticer and then sharing it with others to make it useful? Well, that's so kind. Noticing is something that people do all the time. And I don't think there's a three-year-old who doesn't notice. We tend to be indoctrinated into not doing anything with what we notice. to just accept things as they are because the system prefers that. So noticing isn't the hard part.

The hard part is deciding to ask simple questions about what we notice. Why is it like this? What would happen if it was like that? What is trending here and why? And am I pleased with that or am I simply going to accept it? And so my work from when I very first started in the 70s has been looking at the world and not saying I'm in charge because I wasn't in charge when I was 15 or 20 and not saying I have to accept that, but asking simply, why is this ascendant? Why is this something that people are embracing? Why did that person win and this person lose? asking these why questions is something that I think is pretty common, but doing it out loud is less common. And then the work for me is to be able to cogently describe what I am noticing

without adding too much of my filter so that the people who hear what I said, said, yeah, I notice that too. Because if I don't say that, then I'm just pontificating. You seem to have a lot in common, I think. And let me see. Let me see. see what you think about this with great stand-up comedians. And maybe you study them because great stand-ups, what they do is they notice things about the world and they share it in a way where you're like, oh yeah, and obviously they're funny, there's a hook,

there's great storytelling. How do you, do you study stand-ups? Is that a part of kind of you working on becoming a better crafter of stories? It seems like it from my perspective. Well, you're very kind, and you and I think a certain kind of stand-up is great. I'm not sure everyone would agree with us, but yes, there is a heritage of Bob Newhart and Dusty Slay and Jerry Seinfeld and people along the way who have created humor by not hurting other people, by not willfully challenging certain sorts of status quo that probably would be better left on challenge.

but instead by giving us this sort of reflection. And I love those people. I don't know if you've heard Dusty Slay before, but you should add him to your list. I'd have it. And this is Seinfeld that is best of course. So yeah, I have definitely learned from these people. I've never thought to myself that I'm even close to their category,

but we are trodding on some of the same territory. As part of your regular life, you're always telling stories. And I think from a leadership perspective, this is a show focused on leadership, as you know, Seth. And from a leadership perspective, I think this is a skill we need to work on. It's very important. Stories are what move people, more so than big PowerPoints with graphs and numbers and stuff like that, as you know, which we'll talk about PowerPoint here in a second. Can you share some of your overall philosophy and mindset on how to become a better storyteller? So I don't think most people understand what you and I mean when we talk about stories.

So I will tell you a story. I live near the Hudson River. And for 300 years, whenever human beings had raw sewage to dispose of, they would dump it in the river. That's just what you did. If you had a factory, you'd dump the stuff in the river. Because other people were downstream from you, not you. And then they discovered that the oysters were dying, and they discovered that people were dying. and they made a rule that you can't dump sewage in the river anymore.

They didn't say, everyone, please do your best and stop dumping sewage. We would appreciate it if everyone just cut back. They said, no one can dump sewage in the river. And my work on my recent project with climate is about that, which is we can't stop individually using enough grocery bags to make enough of a difference, but we could work together to make grocery. bags a trillion a year stop appearing. And I just told you a story. I didn't give you statistics and I didn't give you gloom and doom. I described to you in words something you could picture.

And storytelling begins with empathy, that if you only spoke Italian, the story I just told you wouldn't work because you wouldn't have understood it. And what we need to do as leaders is go to people where they are with practical empathy saying, I don't see what you see. I don't know what you know. I don't believe what you believe. But let me tell you a story that might work with what you already know. Because I think most of us can understand what it would mean to live downstream of somebody who's peeing in the river. And that resonance helps us realize that we need to take action. you've talked a lot about PowerPoint and your presentations your speeches are it's just a masterclass to watch you perform your art on stage with the

the million slides click click click click click click click right way all always visuals always pictures and and one of my mission set that I've been failing at for a while now is I want to revolutionize the QBR the quarterly business review I've sat through a lot of them. I've done them myself and most of them they send you this template of a PowerPoint with all these kind of graphs and charts and stuff to fill in and they're the most boring meeting ever. Every once in a while you find someone who studies Seth Godin and they have found a way to make the PowerPoints beautiful, to make them art, to tell their stories using visuals, to do a lot of prep work to be prepared so that the the visual is beautiful and then they've done the work to add in the

color. Can you share more about why? This is possible in the corporate world. It's not just for the creatives like Seth Godin or someone who gives keynote speeches. This is possible in the corporate world to make the QBRs, the quarterly business reviews more enjoyable, more entertaining, more visually pleasing, I should say. Can you share more about this PowerPoint? in making them better. I might disappoint you. Oh, no. Oh, no.

So intentional design is answering two questions. Who is it for and what's it for? Who exactly are we here to serve and what change do we seek to make? So when I invented a new way to do PowerPoint presentations in 1994 or five, I was very clear without knowing it about who it was for and what it was for, that the reason that people were going to presentations was not to learn something they could read in a book or a memo, because it makes no sense to go in person in sync to do that. That what the purpose of PowerPoints, as then amplified by TED, was, was not to be a boring replacement for a boring memo,

but to actually be a systems changer, a pace changer, to be present in the room with someone you think of as slightly famous, to have moments to laugh, to hear stories, and to change the way you see things. And a lot of people in the public presentation business weren't doing that. They were reading a script. They were checking a box because they were stressed and they wanted to get it over there. So my innovation in public speaking resonated and spread to hundreds of thousands of public speakers because of the who's it for and the what's it for. The challenge you have is just look at the name of it. It's an acronym that doesn't even make sense.

And it's not called a community action forum. It's a quarterly meaning it always goes on whether we want it to or not. Business, which means it's not personal review. which means we're not here to take action. And the purpose of the QBR is for it to be boring and blameless and let's get it over with. That's why we have it

so we can point to the fact that we did it and it's not our fault. So there isn't a desire to make them more energetic, emotional, connected, relevant because we're not there for that. So if you want to change them, you've got to start by changing,

why are we here and who is coming? that if you said there needs to be a moment in any organization where people who care, who want to make things better, come together to see the truth and ask themselves hard questions, well, that meeting deserves what you just described. But if you keep inviting the QBR people, it's never going to happen. You've got to say, this isn't for people who are satisfied with QBR. This is the meeting optional for people who actually want to lead, not manage. And if it's a leadership conclave, if it is the moment we come together to make things better by making

better things, now you can completely change the standard for who's going to take the next 30 minutes of our time because the time of those sorts of leaders is precious. The time of managers who are simply there to get the day over with is worthless. So they're acting accordingly. The meeting is exactly what it's supposed to be, a chance for you to check your email without having to pay attention. And we've got to change the bigger idea first. What would you do?

Your CEO of a Fortune 100 company and that company and all the other companies do quarterly business reviews with you on the name of them and how I despise acronyms, especially that one, but I use it because it's so common. What would you do if you were in charge? Instead of that. The first thing is I would be clear with my stakeholders, which include my employees, my board, my shareholders, that I'm here to make change happen. And if they don't want that, I'm in the wrong place.

Most organizations that are in the Fortune 100 don't want change to happen. The second thing I would do is cancel the quarterly business review and say, please send me a memo instead. Because memos are asynchronous. Mammos are more permanent. Mamos leave way less room for misinterpretation. And then I would say, all right, well, I personally cannot change this organization. I can create the conditions for change.

And in the conditions for change, I can make heroes of people who do things that might not work, who are innovatively leading instead of opening the door for upstart competitors to take our place. Because I would acknowledge that not, I don't think, 10 of the 14th, We're in the Fortune 500 in 1940. They're all gone because there's a creative destruction that goes on, which is as soon as a innovative company gets acquired by a big company, the people who run it are now caretakers. They are not breakers and creators.

Well, if I want to build a resilient institution that's going to change things that can't stand, right? And so we have to say, what are we measuring? What are we keeping track of and what are we spending our time on? A friend of mine runs a company that's worth, I think, more than $100 billion. And he also knows how to program. And he went in to Google Calendar and wrote a script that canceled every meeting in the whole company that was regularly scheduled to happen every week. And then he said, he's on Sunday.

And then he sent an email to everybody and he said, I canceled all those weekly meetings. If you really need it, you can have it again, but you're going to have to manually start up. and most of the meetings went away because he didn't want to build a company that was good at doing what they did yesterday. But I think we have a bigger problem here. You're seeing a symptom of it. And this is my whole focus right now is on systems, which is that when we are in a system, we do our best given the system. And the system that we are living in right now is poisoning the planet we all live in. and we can try to do our best within the constraints,

but let's just change the constraints and change the system. It feels like you're talking some about leadership and management. I had this conversation yesterday, a middle school age daughter, and she was actually asked this. The teacher knows of my work, and the teacher asked her, called her out, like, what do you think is the difference between management and leadership, which I thought was a pretty nuanced question for a middle schooler? And she said something along the lines of,

I think she was a little nervous and felt some pressure, but said, you know, managers kind of make you do stuff. and leaders inspire you. I was like, oh, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. What would you say if you took it a step further on the difference between managers and leaders? I'd say, listen to your daughter. Yeah.

I mean, I'm guessing that that teacher has read my work, but maybe not. Managers use power and authority to get people to do what they did yesterday, but cheaper and faster. We need managers. That's why fast food places have managers because if they didn't, no one would show up for their shift. But leaders, leaders don't have authority, not necessarily. but leaders gain enrollment and they do things that might not work that make things better that have

never been done before. And we confuse the two words all the time, which is ridiculous. If you're a manager, be a manager. And if you're a leader, be a leader. But don't get hooked on one or the other if you should be doing the other one. I was reading tribes this morning again, you know, a quake book. It's on the back list. Obviously, it'll be there forever. You write, leaders have nothing in common. They don't share gender or income level or geography. There's no gene, no schooling, no parentage, no profession. In other words, leaders aren't born with it. I'm sure of it, you're right. Actually, they do have one thing in common. Every tribe leader I've ever met shares one thing. That is, the decision to lead. Leadership is not a title. Leadership is a choice.

love to hear you expound more on this fact of leadership being a choice. Well, we can point out that the system employs managers, rewards managers, gives managers stability. And so you were probably raised to at some point become a manager. But leadership is a choice because it comes with plenty of downsides. And they include feeling like an imposter. They include not being sure of what you're going to do next. They include having people you don't have authority over that you need to influence. If you want to make a change happen, you have to make the choice to help make change happen

and then live with all of the consequences. And you might not even get paid as much as a manager does. But what you get is the satisfaction of knowing that you did something. One of the topics you write about that I enjoy and want to talk to you about is gifts. And there are a couple reasons to give gifts. One of them, which is not good, is reciprocity. You give it so someone feels like they owe you something, right? That's not what we're talking about.

It's manipulative. It's no way really to build a career. Some people do it. Some people have short-term success from it. It's fine, whatever. The second one's more fascinating to the one that I want to focus on. Gifts allow you to make art, you write. Gifts are given with no reciprocity hoped for or even possible.

The paintings of Chuck Close, I believe is you're right. Chuck Close's paintings. That when he's painting, he's not punching a time clock or trying to please someone who bought his time, he's creating a gift. And you write, my fundamental argument is simple and everything you do, it's possible to be an artist at least a little bit. Seth, I hear a lot from people who work in corporate America, fortune 100 companies, mid-level managers, whatever it may be. And they're like, dude, yeah, it's nice that you can do all this creative stuff and it's fun for you. You can be an artist and all that and write books. But that's not really how it works my world.

And I push back on that heavily saying it can, if you make the choice, about gifts and about being an artist. And as you write, being in everything you do, everything, it's possible to be an artist even just a little bit. I want to continue to push that message. It's something I wanted to bring up with you. Well, you know, let's start from the what do I give, what do I get mindset first, which is take a look if you're in one of those systems about the people who have. jobs you wish you had? Did they get those jobs by being more obedient than you and working more hours than you? Can you out obedience everybody and can you out our everybody to move up? Because a few people get jobs that way, certain lawyers, for example, but in general, that is not the way people

move up. They move up because they did something other people were afraid to do, because they did something that might not work because they did something that was generous. And the second one is, whether you move up or not, let's acknowledge how much privilege you have. That I was super lucky with where I was born, how I was born, how I was raised, the benefit of the doubt that I got all along the way unfairly, the casts that I'm in. And even if you don't have that background, you still have privilege in that you get to work indoors, you have time to listen to cool podcasts and you get paid well. What are you going to do with it? Are you just going to grind your way out like a ditch digger? Or are you going to say, wait a minute, I get an hour where no one's checking what I'm

doing. Why don't I spend that hour organizing a book group? Why don't I spend that hour circulating something among the team that will make them think about something? Why don't I spend that hour finding a junior person in a different department and giving them some advice that would really help them. Not because they're ever going to repay me, because they're not, but because my act of doing that will make me feel like a different person. And we do it in the tiny all the time. We open the door for somebody, not because they're going to open the door for us tomorrow, but we can do it at so much more scale than we used to. And, you know, the typical person who's listening to this on average, spend seven hours a day with television or social media. What are you getting from

that seven hours? What would happen if instead part of that time was spent creating something that other people looked for were elevated by instead of just consuming something and being driven and dragged to the next trend of the day? Because if you add it up, the trend of the day a year ago, didn't add up to very much. And so everyone I've ever met has done at least one thing in their life that was interesting, creative, generous, possible, expanded the boundaries. If you can do it once, that means you can do it again. And Chuck Close, rest in peace, I've seen many paintings that Chuck Close has painted.

And this is someone who was tragically disabled and figured out how to be. to still paint from his wheelchair. And Chuck has no idea that I ever saw any of his painting. He didn't get anything out of me seeing his paintings. I got a lot out of me seeing his paintings. And the same thing's true for the work you're capable of doing. Consistency is a hallmark of the Seth Godin brand, I think, because you show up and do the work every day. Publish, you ship work, you write, right. Can you go a bit deep? on why consistency is so important to you? Well, if you want to make any change happen,

it's worth noting that all cultural change happens very slowly. It seems, if you're not paying attention, like it happens very quickly, because we notice a new rule or a new ruler or a new principle. But it didn't happen in one day, drip by drip, day by day. And my late friend Zig Zigler used to talk about the difference

between a wandering generality and a meaningful specific. And what it means to be a meaningful specific is that like the woodpecker, you keep pecking out the same tree. If a woodpecker jumps from tree to tree to tree with one peck, they'll never ever eat lunch. But if you sit still and peck and pack and peck, you will find what you're looking for.

And how long have you had this daily practice of writing? And when did you make the choice, choice to do that and the choice deliberately every day to continue to do that. So I, my English teacher wrote in my high school yearbook that I was the bane of her existence and I would never amount to anything. Really? And I took her advice and in college I took exactly one English class. And when I got to my first real job after business school, I discovered that when I wrote

things, things went better than if I hired people to write them because I was able to do things quickly and directly that changed other people's minds. And when I went out on my own, I was a book packager but not an author. So I came up with ideas, found people to do writing. But again, I discovered that when I wrote, I could help change people's minds. When blogging came along, Joey Edo introduced me to it at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, in 2003 and I was just really fascinated by how it looked. So I tried it. And my first 100 blog posts got read by perhaps 50 or 100 people. And I decided after an early flurry of it that this practice was making me better too, not just the few people who were reading it. But the act of noticing and

writing things down helped clarify my thinking. And right about then, I think the first post that sounded like me was my blog post about visiting the Apple store. Right about then, I said, I'm just going to keep doing this. And I haven't missed a day in 9,000 days if you account for one time zone shift. And it's now my practice. And having a practice is really important, whatever you decide your practice is. You mentioned clarity of thought. And I think that is one of the big things that happens when you write.

This is why I push leaders hard to create a writing practice. And usually the pushback is, look at my calendar, man. Look at how busy I am. Look at all the stuff I have going on. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. What do you say to that? What do you say to that person?

Did you have lunch today? Did you have lunch yesterday? Tell me the last time you skipped lunch, right? If we have time to bathe, if we have time to brush our tea, and we have time to have lunch. We have time to spend 10 minutes writing. Also, I want to clarify, I have 9,000 posts, but I have not had 9,000 days.

Some days I do more than one. I just want to make sure I didn't leave an error in the record there. So, again, pushing back against these excuses that I regularly get. Do you get those same excuses? Do you push people? Are you like, hey, do you do what you want to do? Or are you not as pushy as I am with these leaders you work with? You know what I mean?

It's shun the non-believers. There are plenty of people who want to get out. your bus that's going to Topeka. If they really want to go to Miami, don't try to talk to go into Topeka. It's not for them. That's one of my favorite things about you. We've talked about it before,

but I'll bring it up again, is this willingness in being okay. And I wonder does this happen as you mature? Because I feel like I'm growing into this a little bit more, but I'm not there. What is this being okay by saying, it's not for them? It's not for you.

And you seem to be very comfortable in your own skin saying, not for them. It's okay. And how do we get closer to that? So I was one of the first people to sell advertising on the Internet. And I made thousands of sales calls. I have been in every office on both sides of 6th Avenue years and years and years ago.

And when the stakes were as high as they were in 1993 and 1994, no was really hard to hear. when you said to yourself, I have something here that I can prove is better than what you are doing, that you pretend that you care about this, you have plenty of money, and you don't want to do this, and you're avoiding it simply because you don't want to listen and you're afraid. It was very, very hard to hear. And then I had a revelation. It happened at a sales call. I bought my VP of Sales along.

And these people, because we could get a meeting with anybody, because if your job was headed in new media, you had to meet with people like me. And these people are just jerking us around with one objection after another. And David was ready to launch into yet another response. And I closed my briefcase. I had a briefcase. I closed my briefcase. And I said, you're probably right. This isn't for you.

We're not going to waste your time. And we got up to leave. And they chased us into the hall. And they hired us. because some people, this is a great Monty Python sketch, are just there for the argument. Some people are trolls. Some people are in the business of saying no. Why would you want to waste your time with them?

Should Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan run after people who are listening to rap music and say, no, don't you understand? And start singing, blowing in the wind to them? There's plenty of people who want to go hear Bob Dylan. Go play there. And what we have to acknowledge is that the mass is over. I was just reading about the worst TV show in the history of TV, which I had never seen, fortunately called Cavemen.

And it had higher ratings before it was canceled than almost any show on television today. And the reason is even the worst show when there are three TV networks did better than a great show when there is a million TV. network. So if you're going to do this work, shun the nonbelievers. Just do it for the people who care. That's enough to change the world. What about for the person who's really early in their career saying, easy for you to say, Seth, you have millions and millions of fans who do believe I have zero or one. What about to that person? I would challenge you to have 10. If there are 10 people who would miss you if you were gone, if there are 10 people who talk about what you do, you will have trouble getting to 100. The problem people run into is they don't have 10. It's not that they

don't have 100 million. They don't have 10. Go do work that will get you 10 fans and then get back to you. Speaking of that, we've been talking about you being an original, a noticer. I think that's part of your brand and you define brand as a set of expectations, memory, stories, and relationships that taken together account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another. and I want to take this to the personal branding element, regardless of where you work or what you do. I don't know if you've consciously worked on your personal brand, if it's something you think about, or it just kind of has happened. For that person who is thinking about that as they're, because now with online content creation, when you're selling a book deal, they're always asked about what's your platform, basically saying how many books can you sell because we're not going to do any marketing for you. So that type of thing, what advice do you give to somebody who's thinking about building their thing?

Whatever that thing happens to be where there's a brand element to it. Okay, there's so much to decode here. Let's get clear about the words. When a publisher says, I'm not going to do your marketing for you. What they're actually saying is I'm not going to do your promotion for you. Promotion and marketing are different things. Marketing is the story we tell and the life we lived and the change we make in the world. Your brand is not your logo and your brand is not how many people notice you.

A lot of people who are busy hustling online think they're building their brand, but all they're doing is earning a reputation as someone who hustles online. That's not your brand. So I wrote the first book on personal branding. Tom Peters wrote a better book, which is why you've heard of his book, The Brand Called You, and Not the book I wrote with Jay Levinson called Get What You Deserved, now out of print. But everyone has a personal brand, whether you work on it or not.

And your personal brand is, what do I expect from you when the phone rings? What do I expect from you when I know you're coming over? What do I expect from you if you tell me you are working on something? These expectations, these promises, that's your brand. You have one. So now the question is, what do you want to stand for? And do you want to earn the benefit of the doubt? If you want to make your living doing things like Ryan and I do, you have to build a different

sort of platform and brand than a typical human who just wants to make sure that their next gig is better than their last gig, right? But these are intentional choices. When you show up to borrow someone's attention, do you hand back that attention better than you found it? Have you earned, as I said, the benefit of the doubt? and what I wrote about in permission marketing is can you find actual followers and students as opposed to just occasionally interrupting people?

And this is why Clubhouse is so foolish because Clubhouse is easy to join. It's easy to join, but you gain no followers because it's just a hit or miss sort of situation. And as old and antiquated and throttled by Gmail as email is, email at least is this person. consistent connection to people who want to hear from you. And there are new versions of it, but you need real followers, people who would miss you if you were gone. That is the essence of building a brand that's worth something. Hang on, I want to show you something. Just so one second. What do you think of this, man? How many of these did you print? For the audio listener, I'm holding up this giant huge book gifted to me by Jason Bells, a great guy. That's called This Might Work.

and it's this giant book of post that Seth has written, and it's actually super heavy. You can hear me trying to hold on this thing. Can you tell me more about this and why you made this? 17 pounds. It's volume one of two volumes. Why did I make it? I made it because I believe in books,

and I believe that making something in a substantial permanent form changes its meaning. And I looked at 500. blog posts that I was proud of and I said these are going to disappear one day. But at least if it's in a book, they won't. And when I did one of the first successful book kickstaters, I made that the super high prize. And I think we only printed 2,200 of them. That's how many there are of these? I think that's all there are. And the sequel, which is what does it sound like when you change, when you change your mind illustrated by Thomas Hawk, we printed 3,000 and we could have printed more,

but that's all we made. And I'm really proud of both of those. them because the substance of it is what Alex Peck and I led with in its design. And I would like to think that the content lives up to it. It's amazing. I love it. Seth, I was just curious thinking about this before we started. My favorite thing to do when it comes to my work is this, right here, long form, deep conversation with a thoughtful, curious person.

What's your favorite thing to do? With the work? Yeah. solving an interesting problem. I don't get to do that as often as you get to have interesting thoughtful conversation. I can do it in small and very, very small. There's something that clicks in my brain. When I see something I didn't know how to solve and then I solve it in a way that helps other people.

And my second favorite thing, which happens much more often, is I hear from somebody who taught somebody else something useful because I lit a light for them. And that is what I am trying to do every day. I don't want followers. I like having students who teach other people. You talk about solving problems and your most recent work, which you wrote the foreword to this book, is called the Carbon Almanac. It's not too late. What made you want to put your name on this book, write the forward and have it be a problem that you're trying to solve? Okay, so some background. I didn't write the book, but I've spent 15 hours a day on it every day since September 15th,

coordinating a group of 2,000 people in 91 countries, all volunteers, including me, to put together a definitive foundational document about the world we live in right now, with more than a thousand footnotes. I used to make almanacs for a living. I've made more almanacs than most people are alive, business almanacs, celebrity almanac, women's almanac. And I could have made an almanac by myself, but that's not the point. The point is we have a we problem, not a me problem. And if we don't talk about it, the people who want us to not talk about it will win.

And these are people who have indoctrinated us, who have tricked us into thinking about carbon footprint, who have lied to us about plastic recycling, who want to put. the value of the oil they have in the ground. But that's almost nobody. Out of 7 billion people on the planet, that's a million people. The rest of us, 6.99 billion people have a real significant problem. And the problem is we live in a system. And the system prizes convenience and profit. And it pays for it by burning things. And those things are really cheap to burn. And now we're paying for it. And the level at which we are going to pay for it

boggles the typical human beings imagination. We have no idea what it would be like when the ice caps melt, except they are melting. And when they melt, we can't unmelt them. That every single day, more than 100 species go extinct. And once they go extinct, we can't un-extinct them. And a couple years ago, eight million people the last year they measured, 8 million people died from coal. That is one of the five largest

sources of death worldwide before COVID, burning coal. And when we add these things up, what we see is that we have a we problem that we can fix because it's not too late. But we're not going to fix it by buying into the myth of our carbon footprint, because we're all hypocrites. I'm a hypocrite too. We have to speak up even though we're hypocrites. And what speaking up means is community action. And I talked earlier about peeing in the river. You just make it against a lot of pee in the river. And the thing is, a leaf blower, you probably have leaf blowers in your town. Leafblowers didn't exist 30 years ago. A leaf blower emits as much carbon in one hour as driving a car from New York to Los Angeles and back. That's crazy because they're noisy and ineffective.

Just get an electric one. But gardeners aren't going to do that because gardeners are in a system and the system is a race to the bottom and they think I can't charge extra for that. So they won't. In my town, 50 people came together and now leafblowers are against the law. Everyone wins, including the gardeners. Because they say, wow, this is more convenient and my employees are happier. And so we have a chance if we talk about it.

And the purpose of the almanac, all volunteer-driven, is to create the conditions for the conversation. Our slogan is, you don't have to take our word for it. You can look it up. And what we did with cartoons and graphs and tables and art is explained to people the world as it is. So you don't feel stupid. Because if you don't feel stupid, now you can do something about what you actually know is happening. What are the first things somebody who doesn't have a clue about this? What's the first things that person can and should do?

Well, the first thing to do is don't be willfully uninformed. And that's why the almanac exists. It's not expensive. You can give one to four other people and you can talk about it. That's why we built it. The second thing you can do if you want to feel like you're doing something is you can switch your search engine from Google to something called a COSIA. which you can find at thecarbonalmanac.org.

You press one button, and now your searches get better, faster, way more private, fewer ads, and you start planting trees. I've planted personally hundreds and hundreds of trees for free just by searching the web. It's a non-for-profit, and they've planted 150 million trees. Pocosia? E-C-O-S-I-A. But the way you'll find it is at the Carbon Almanac.org. And if I could get 50 million people to switch their search engines for free, that would make a big difference.

If everyone who used Google switched, we would eliminate all the carbon created by all the cars in the world. But I'm not going to be able to get everyone who uses Google to switch. I'll settle for 50 million. But the biggest thing we can do without a doubt is we can just keep talking about it. The fact is politicians have a list of like five things they have to check boxes on. else they can't run. There are five things. They have to say, I'm against this, I'm for this, blah, blah, blah. And climate isn't on the list because they don't get letters. That if a brand manager at a company that's dumping stuff in the river gets 50 letters, 100 letters, they're going to

change their policy. That when Nike realized because the public spoke up that they couldn't get away with sweatshops anymore, they'd have changed their policy. We don't need very many people to speak up. So don't worry so much about whether or not you're composting. Don't worry so much about your personal carbon footprint because it matters a lot, but not enough. We made a trillion plastic bags last year on this planet. A trillion. I can't even count to a trillion. You giving up plastic bags is important but not sufficient. What is sufficient is to organize 20 people, to have a book group, to do a letter writing campaign, to change the standards for the people around you, that if the high school cafeteria in your town starts having a meatless Monday,

that will make much bigger impact than you giving up a hamburger. That community action changes the system. So earlier, you and I were talking about quarterly business reviews, it would be fine if you could come up with a clever way to do one quarterly business review. But if you really want to change things, you've got to change the system. And the way we change the system is by establishing what people like us do. People like us do things like this. That's what changes the culture, day after day, drip by drip. When I started this, I had no authority to do so. I didn't have a lot of assets or resources that I had to devote to it. I simply got 10 other people and 10 other people got us

100 other people. And then the next thing you know, we'd written a 97,000 page book. that is now going to be published in Czech and Dutch and Italian and Japanese and Chinese. And I can go on because volunteers all showed up and said, we're going to change things. Wow. What do you think about Tesla electric cars in general? So I live in an all-electric family, and my posture about this is as follows. if starting an electric car company guarantees that your first year of sales will be great, more people are going to start electric car companies.

And if more people start electric car companies, there will be competition, and electric cars will get better, and then there will be more chargers, and then the price will go down. That's not going to happen if you wait for the perfect electric car. So every single time someone starts an electric car company, I buy one of the cars. And I'm able to sell it later for break-even or even a profit. But by going first, I helped change the system. And so I got the second Rivian in all of New York State.

I was on the waiting list for two and a half years. And I drive my electric car around town and I'm establishing a new standard because people go, oh, there, that's a cool thing. We need to start creating these cycles because some of the things that people don't realize about the climate. The four biggest contributors to climate change, concrete, which surprises most people, That's 8% of all the carbon that's released because the only way they make concrete in most settings is by burning coal to heat it up to 2,000 degrees. Number two is coal because coal deserves its own category. We should shut down every coal plant in the world and we don't need very many people getting together to do that. Number three is cows and the numbers around cows are astonishing.

Half of all the land in the continental United States is devoted to raising cattle. that we spent $50 billion of taxpayer money last year in the United States paying other people to raise cattle, that the amount of meat that people eat keeps going up, and that if everyone around the world starts eating the way Americans do, we will need an entirely new planet just to hold the cows. And the fourth one is combustion, which is it's absurd to run your own power plant in your own vehicle

as you drive around burning something just because you can't see the smoke that comes out the back. And we're going to have to fix the grid. We're going to have to put renewables on the grid, but it's going to be much easier to put renewables on the grid than it is going to be to do things that people still have cars that burn oil. And there's no doubt that the future is electric or fuel cell

because electric cars are way faster, way more fun, way more reliable, way quieter, and safer. So what else are you waiting for? The new Ford F-150 Lightning is only $38,000 when it comes out. I think it's going to be really surprising if 10 years from now there are any cars you can buy that use oil. It's really unlikely. The book's called The Carbon Almanac. It's not too late. Obviously, you just heard about Seth's involvement in addition to the foreword that he wrote. So I highly recommend checking out. The first thing we can do, as you said, is not willfully be uninformed. So I think this is a big deal. This is certainly an area for me that there's a lot of

learning that needs to happen. One side note, Seth, before we go, that has nothing to do with this. What was it like being on billions? So my friend Brian makes that show. It has never been my dream to be a walk-on cameo. I will tell you that if you have never seen a television show made, it is significantly more difficult and more boring than you could imagine. The scene that I am in took eight hours to film. And it's not because Jacqueline and I had trouble with our lines. It's because you do everything and then they remove all the cameras and the lights and then they set them up again from a slightly different angle and then you do it all again,

over and over and over and over again. and I have huge respect for the people who make and do that kind of work, but it's not what I signed up for. So I'm glad you got to see me on billions. I love the melodrama and humor in that show. And some of the people who work on that show are extraordinary humans. I've been lucky enough to meet them and be their friends, but don't count on seeing me in any future.

Oh, okay. Well, they've mentioned your name a few times. I'm a huge compliment fan. I actually went and got to tour the writer's room and then record a podcast with Brian in his office. So it was amazing. So I'm a big fan of all their work, love Rounders. And all of a sudden, I'm like,

well, there's Seth. He's actually on the show. They don't know. I'm just talking about his work or quoting him. He's on there. So it was so cool. But anyway, Seth, thanks so much again, man. And as you know, I'd certainly love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man.

Thank you for leading in that. Thank you. I treasure the conversations. I'm fortunate to have with the great Seth Godin. Really cool. It's this fourth time on. the podcast just love the way he thinks love his kindness love his curiosity love his ability to tell stories he is just a true mentor and I'm very grateful for him a few

topics from my notes cover bands don't change the world Seth is a professional noticer of things and then he distills those details to their essence and shares compelling original stories based on what he notices. I really enjoyed talking about this with him as he described and deconstructed this process. I think this is a skill that all of us should work on developing. And then consistency. Seth hasn't missed the day of writing and publishing in two decades.

Think about that. And as he said, this is an easy one. There is no excuse not to write, regardless of what your calendar currently shows. then how to be someone who is not willfully uninformed, as I think I currently am when it comes to the Carbon Almanac, his new book that he put together and then wrote the foreword for. I think this is a good start for those who are in a similar spot to me, where there's so much to learn.

And it's worth it for us to become better educated when it's, comes to our environment. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. If so, I love it if you would tell a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with the legend, Seth Godin. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to write reviews and rate the show,

hopefully five stars on Apple Podcast, you continue to give me the opportunity. to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can we?