The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 605: Seth Godin - How To Be Remarkable, Create a Strategy, Build a Tribe, Develop Taste, Lead Others, & Leave a Dent in The World

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com My books: Welcome to Management - https://amzn.to/3XWyZAH  The Pursuit of Excellence - https://amzn.to/4eX9vtP  The Score That Matters - https://amzn.to/3zPub7Z  Seth Godin is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and art. They have been translated into 38 languages. His breakthrough books include Purple Cow, Tribes, The Dip, Linchpin, and his latest book is called This is Strategy. He writes one of the most popular daily blogs in the world and has given 5 TED talks. He is the founder of the altMBA, and the former VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! Notes: "If you want word of mouth, you have to create something remarkable, and that means it's worthy of remark." The elegant path is the most useful way forward. "My neighbor is a barefoot runner. He glides without apparent effort." Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. Dorothy and Her Crew. How did Dorothy persuade the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the Wizard? Did she make a case about how much she missed home? No. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her. Seeing Strategy Clearly. Strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It helps us make decisions over time while working within a system. Low-Hanging Fruit Isn't. It's all been picked. The easy, direct, obvious paths are unlikely to get you the results you're working so hard to obtain. In fact, these paths are probably a trap. Seth, at one point, got 800 rejection letters. Have to keep going... "I wouldn't call Steve Ballmer a good leader." An example of Seth making a difference... He went to Kenya and talked with 60 people who started a book club based on his book Linchpin. "They decided to be leaders." Make decisions in the moment: Examine the issue Get feedback Look for patterns "Taste is knowing what the market wants before it knows it." Rick Rubin Reality distortion field Johnny Cash "What do you think?" "Objections are your friends." What are the commonalities among leaders with whom Seth has worked and who have sustained excellence? They are all different, but the one thing they have in common is they all have chosen to be leaders. And that means that they are here to make a change happen. Management doesn't just exist. It was invented. When you race to the bottom, You see people as resources, not as people. Questions That Lead To Strategies. 84 questions. They'll force you to think through your strategy. By answering them, you'll be better prepared to make a difference… And make a ruckus. Some of them: Who is this project for? What is my timeline? What systems would need to change for my project to succeed? Where will I cause tension? What resistance should I anticipate? Where is the empathy? What asset would transform my project? What can I learn from comparable projects? Is the change I'm making contagious? Can I make it easier for others to decide? How can I design for network effects? What are common objections I expect to encounter?

If you look at famous, famous leaders, they have nothing in common except this. What they have in common is they're here to make a change happen. If you want word of mouth, you have to create something remarkable. The author's job is to sell the first 10,000 copies of the book. After that, the book's job is to sell the rest. When they ask you to audition for Shark Tank, you say no. Did that happen? Yeah.

Wow. I said to the shark tank guys. Your latest work is on strategy. I don't think most people have a strategy. Pause for a minute and understand that strategy changes everything. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here.

Talk to 666866 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 for me each Monday morning to help you start your week. All right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader, a special one, The Great.

The legendary Seth Godin is back, author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and art. His breakthrough books include Purple Cow, Tribes, The Dip, Lynchpin, and his latest is called This Is Strategy. Seth also writes one of the most popular daily blogs in the world and has given five TED Talks. He's the founder of the Alt MBA and the former VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo. During this conversation we discuss how you can create something that's remarkable.

Then how to strategically build your who. That's the people you go to for advice and feedback and how do you block out the rest. Then the importance of a quote, always becoming mindset. And then Seth shares a number of prompts and questions to help you get more clarity as a leader. This one is so good. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with the great Seth Godin. Seth, welcome back to the Learning Leader Show. It is so good to see you, man.

What a treat. What a treat. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. So I remember talking with James Clear before he published Atomic Habits. And he actually quoted you when he was talking about what he hoped for the book, which is crazy to think about since it's now sold like 15 million plus copies. But anyway, he said, if you want to get word of mouth, which we all do, right? We want word of mouth marking.

It's so powerful. He said, but if you want word of mouth, you have to. to create something remarkable. And that means, and this comes from you, it's worthy of remark. Can you tell me more what it means to make something that's worthy of remark? Yeah, a lot of people don't understand the core concept of Purple Cow. And it's this, Remarkable isn't a hack. It's not a gimmick. Remarkable is simply a service that you offer to someone who is looking to increase their status or their affiliation and will use your idea to do so.

So videos don't go viral because the creator of the video wants them to. They go viral because you sharing the video gives you some sort of status or connection to the people you share it with. And the same thing's true for a book. So in James' case, and I can only imagine dream and daydream about the magical success he said. the author's job is to sell the first 10,000 copies of the book. After that, the book's job is to sell the rest.

Because if the book is worth talking about, people will talk about it, and then it spreads. It's so beautiful to see it happen. And I love the idea of setting that as a goal ahead of time, is make it worthy of remark. Because, again, I think, you know everything there is to know about marketing, but a honest referral is so amazingly powerful, creating referable work, doing something so excellent with so much excellence that people can't help but want to tell their friends or want to tell everybody, you've got to read this or you've got to work with them or you've got to hire Seth to speak. It's going to be so, so good. There's just nothing more powerful than striving

to do something so well that others just can't help but tell their friends about it. And life insurance brokers and many others don't get it because they say you need to ask for the referral. Well, if you're asking for a favor, that's not remarkable. That's social pressure. We're coming back to this idea that you're doing it as a service, that you're doing it to help someone get what they want. And the reason we have fashion and culture is because the participants want someone to notice their shoes. They want someone to say, what's that song? They want to say, I went to Taylor Swift before anyone heard of her.

That's the service. Your latest work is on strategy. And when I saw that you were focused enough on this to write a full book about it, I got pretty excited. You have like hundreds of riffs, a couple hundred riffs in this book. That's the way it's designed, which I really appreciate and enjoyed because I just kind of went through all of them. And as part of my prep process, Seth, I took a few of them and I'd love for us to riff on them. Are you cool with that? That would be very happy.

Yes, very good. Okay. So I'll go in somewhat of sequential order, starting with number one, because I had JJ Redick on this podcast years ago. And he said one of the core messages he shares with the players he coaches and is trying to help is, you've never arrived, you're always becoming because he deals with all Americans and NBA players. You've never arrived. You're always becoming. And so when I saw Rift number one, a strategy is a process of becoming, a strategy isn't a map, it's a compass, strategy is a better plan.

It's the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better. So when you talk about strategy is a process of becoming, can you go further on this process of becoming? I don't think most people have a strategy. I think that most people have been indoctrinated to do their job, to clear. clear the inbox, to have a series of tactics, maybe to have a goal, but not necessarily to have a strategy. Strategy says time is a real thing, and it's invisible, it's inexorable, everyone has it, and most people waste it, that we wait into the last minute and buy some full-sized trees, as opposed to, at the appropriate moment, plant saplings. If you plant saplings in the right

place and take care of them, you will have trees. And so, when you, you, you'll have trees. And so when you say to someone, what's your strategy? Who's it for? What's it for? Who are you seeking to become? You get a lot of blank stares. And the purpose of the book is not to give folks a dozen clever tactics. It's to help people pause for a minute and understand that strategy changes everything.

As you've built your business, Seth, whether it's Alt MBA or any of the number of things that you've done, strategy as a writer, as a speaker. What is your strategy? Has it evolved over time? How intentional have you been in developing your strategy to build the Seth Godin career? Well, at the beginning, for all those failures, for all those years that it was a struggle, I didn't have much of a failure strategy at all. My job was get some gigs through the work and hope that it was good enough to get more gigs. For individual projects, like the Alt-MBA. The LTA MBA sunseted a few months ago with more than 7,000 alumni. Wow. And we started with a cohort of 120. Obviously, that's a lot, but 120 is not 7,000.

So the theory is, what is going to happen with and for these 120 people so that the next session will be even more of what we seek to do. Can we build a process here? For me, Seth Godin, for the last 24 years, the strategy has been not to hustle for attention, not to trade reputation for money, not to be an influencer. Strategy has been,

earn the benefit of the doubt from people who want to go where I am able to take them. And I'm not having about 10 years ago I stopped looking for new readers for my blog or from my books. And instead I'm trying to serve the people who already trust me. And if I can give them something they can teach other people, that's a good day's work. What do you mean you stopped looking for other readers? How do you intentionally stop doing that? Well, you don't show up on social media.

You don't dumb down your posts with, link bait. You don't court controversy or fake transparency or fake authenticity. You don't accept speaking gigs where you don't really belong, but someone says it's a great chance for you to reach new people. When they ask you to audition for shark for shark tank, you say no. Did that happen? Yeah. Wow. At the beginning before they wanted me to be the nasty judge. something about bald guys they picked like mr wonderful you mean you it was Seth Godin instead of Kevin in there okay yes and you know the irony is in 1983 my first job was a spinnaker software spinnaker was growing by buying other companies

and the last company they went to buy was a company in torontoven ended up buying them and so i by only nine months missed working for him because he it was his company so that would would have been a fascinating, horrible combination. And so I said to the Shark Tank, guys, you want me to be the nasty judge? And they were like, yeah, I said, I'm not interested. Hmm. I think a lot of people would admire that and look up to that. But they also would say, well, Seth, it's easy for you to say because you've written 20 plus books,

your bestseller. Everybody wants you on every stage, regardless. They'll pay your fee. You can do whatever you want. So it's easy to say that. Now, what about for me or the person who's a bit earlier in their career trying to make it? What do you share with that person who maybe doesn't identify with this? I don't need to attract people.

I love this. And we did not set this up in advance, but that's exactly the question I need next, which is, how do you think I got to where I got? Right. So when permission marketing came out, the publisher calls up and they say, we're very excited, great job. Will you please write the permission marketing handbook? And two more books about permission marketing.

And people at companies like MailChimp were like, you're the permission marketing guy. How do you, you know, let's do more of that. And that's easy. That's tempting. But I never wrote about permission marketing again because I didn't want to be the permission marketing guy. I wanted to be someone who was on a different kind of frontier. And there's nothing wrong with writing the sequel.

there's nothing wrong with finding your furrow and digging. I'm just explaining to you that I don't get to do this because I had all the success. I had all the success because I decided to do this. It reminds me of Neil Pazerichia. He worked for, I think, the guy who ran Walmart of Canada or something like that. And this guy has, I think Thursdays blocked off completely for himself to work on his own development to read to think to pause right normally these senior execs they don't they're just back to back to back to back five six days a week in some cases and neal's like that's impossible how could

you have thursdays to yourself there's no way there's no way you can do that and he says that's why i got to this position that's how i got here as this senior leader running all of a country for a big company like this because thursdays have been my day regardless and i'm like wow that that is completely going against what everybody does. And I think that's one of the biggest things I've learned from you over the past decade that I've been paying close attention to your work is this willingness to set up your system, right? And systems, a big part of this new book.

This is strategy is like, what is your system? How did you have the conviction earlier in your career to create these systems for yourself when it's probably a bit harder again than it is later in your career? So the biographical stuff is sometimes a trap because people can say, well, he did that, so that's why he, X, Y, or Z. And if it's, if you're beyond or it doesn't apply to you, I don't want to let you off the hook. I will tell you that after I left my job at Spinnaker, I became a book packager. I sold my first book, the first day, Chip Conley and I wrote it together as co-authors, 1986 for $5,000. We each got half.

And then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. Over the course of a year, 800 times, people in book publishing bought a stamp, wrote me a letter, mailed it to me. It said, we don't like your idea. Go away. And I wasn't spamming these people. It was their job to buy books. It was my job to sell them. And I was, as my late friend Zig Ziglar would say, a wandering generality.

I would do whatever was interesting or clever. or caught my attention. And what I learned from a guy named John Boswell is that no one was going to buy something from me because I could prove I was right that my spreadsheet was true. No one was going to buy something for me because I demonstrated I was smarter than them.

You're going to buy something from me because I stood for something and because I was going to help them get what they wanted. And so I only had two choices. Give up, get a job as a bank teller, or listen to this insight. And so I decided that I would stand for that. And as it began to work, it got easier to commit to it. But there have always been distractions.

There have always been moments when you can lose the thread. and when I've done things where I took gigs that I wasn't proud of or I looked for a shortcut, I've almost always regretted it. And so as I've gotten older, I've gotten better at seeing that this shortcut rarely is. You just talked about how it's important to show that others you can help them get what they want. This leads me to RIF number 184, and this is strategy. This is Dorothy and her crew. So how did Dorothy persuade the lion, tin man, and scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the wizard?

Did she make the case about how much she missed home? No, it wasn't about that, right? She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her. I think this is so much about strategy is how are you creating the conditions so that the others can get what they want by joining you? Could you share more about that? Well, I mean, it's hard to top the Wizard of Oz, but that's, exactly what the whole thing is about, right? That if she had gone by herself, she would have been killed by the witch. She needed a team, a posse, a tribe, a group. But no one is in your tribe.

You get to narrate for a tribe that isn't of itself, right? That by the time they got to the cowardly lion, he looked at his alternatives, be alone and be afraid, or join this group of people to establish a path to what you want. This is called scaffolding. Scaffolding. are the handholds we offer others to get on the bus, that we can't assume that they get the joke. We can give them little steps that they can take to understand that the bus is going to take them where they want to go. From a leadership perspective, Seth, and let's say you're trying to hire top talent. This is what you've done, again, for a long time. When you're building your companies, trying to create something that makes a difference. You need other people along

with you. What have you done to personally build businesses when you're hiring that make it really attractive for other top tier talent to want to join you and work alongside you? So we need to talk for a second about top tier talent. There's something called false proxies and we're victims of this. We're victims if we are choosing and we're also victims if we're not being chosen. A false proxy is something that is easy to measure but isn't useful. So if I need to hire a top LLM programmer researcher for my AI company, measuring their words typed per minute is a false proxy. Very easy to measure how fast someone can type. But whether or not someone can type fast has nothing to do with whether they're a good programmer.

It's also true. It doesn't matter where they went to college. It doesn't matter what color their skin is. It doesn't matter what gender they present. It doesn't matter how old they are. These are false proxies. So we've built a system of caste and exclusion based on how does the resume look and how charming are they in the interview, which has nothing to do with the work to be done. So I've been lucky to believe that the signals of talent are often mistaken. And most of the people who have been key contributors to the projects I've done, and I've hired, I don't know, maybe a thousand people over the years, most of the people I've hired did not on the surface appear to have traditional talents. they instead were people who had skills, had passion, and were enrolled in the journey.

They were the kind of people who could play ball with me on an ongoing basis to make a difference. And the rare folks who showed up because I was seduced by their appearance and their background didn't last very long because after a while you realize they've got a great schick, but the stick's not working on me. Skills, passion, enrolled in the journey. What do you mean by enrolled in the journey? So if you want to get a job at Target or Walmart, there's actually a device that looks like an ATM near the cash registers. And you can apply for a job right there instantly, putting your social security number, does background checkbook.

What they're saying is this is an easy to get job for people who are looking for an easy to get job. And we don't expect you're going to last very long. and if it turns out to be a great fit, that's super, but turnover is part of what we're doing. On the other hand, if someone joins the Disney Imagineering team, they probably have been dreaming about being a member

of the Disney Imagineering team for a long time. They are enrolled in that kind of work, going in that sort of direction, and there's a different sort of commitment to what they're bringing. So when I was building Yo-YoDine, one of the first internet companies. Everything about the job interview process was weird.

I ran a full page ad in the New York Times, and it said if you're not looking for a job, this might be the job for you. And then it was more than 1,000 words of text explaining who we were and what we were doing. And I invited people who looked even reasonably skilled to interviews 50 at a time. And 50 people came, and I gave them a whole shtick

about what we were doing and how we were doing it. And then I had 10 of my top people each at roundtables and I had five people go to each table and Then we did group interviews rotating people around and I'm like if you can't handle that You're not enrolled in what kind of thing we're building right if you need a private office Someone looking at your resume and you know tell me your biggest weakness kind of nonsense There are other people who you should go work for they will pay you more they will treat you more like you want to be treated. But if you're looking for this sort of maelstrom, we're looking for you. So in order to even set that up, because that's original. I have not heard of that before.

You have to get really clear on your strategy, right? Seth, on what you want and what you're about of the type of people that you want there. So there had to be a lot of work done on the front end, because I'm thinking of leaders right now, Seth, and like Fortune 500 companies who are looking to hire leaders, leaders, leaders, leading leaders. And, And one of the issues that when I've worked with them at times is they haven't gotten clear on what they value and what they want. And I feel like that's something that you've been good at. It feels like for a very long time of understanding exactly the values that are important to you, specifically for the project you're working on.

What type of work have you done to understand what you actually value and want? I think that what I'm trying to talk about in the book is some very simple, exercises that most of us avoid right we've already mentioned who's it for and what's it for please be specific who exactly are you seeking to serve and what is the change you seek to make so if we think about Steve Balmer one of the worst performing CEOs in the history of a country Balmer didn't understand this Balmer was energetic passionate confrontational unwilling to back down but he didn't understand he wanted the product to be for everyone all the time and change was not his friend so when the iPhone showed up he didn't understand it when the web showed up he didn't understand it

he knew how to take if we're going through the alphabet how to get from p to z right he was good at that part of the alphabet but tech companies need to get good at going from a to f and that signing up for that is the difference between being a jazz musician and being a pop star. A pop star wants to make a certain kind of hit over and over and over again and get to bigger and bigger stadiums. A jazz musician wants to trade fours, improvise, and play for an audience that wants to hear them. Totally different professions, both of which make music. And so what I'm challenging people to do, regardless of where you come from, is to figure out how leadership feels to you. So I'll give you an example. When I wrote Lynchpin, I got invited to Kabira.

Kabira is one of the largest slums in the world. It's more than a million people in Kenya. And just to describe the people who are privileged like me, your house consists of four corrugated fiberglass or metal panels, usually eight by eight, leaning against the next person's eight by eight. So the wall is one little panel, and then there's maybe a roof over your head. There's no indoor plumbing. And the Kibera Book Club got a couple copies of my book and then spread them around and they all read it. And when I went, there were 60 people there. They had read my book more closely and asked better questions than any group I have ever spoken to. And I spent time with the guy who started the Kabira Book Club. Well, I guarantee you there is no one listening to

this who has less than that person did. But he decided to be a leader. And all it took to set up a book club was to get two copies of a book. There were people who were thirsty, who were hungry, who were eager to learn, to be connected. He provided. at that. That's leadership. Leadership is different than management. Management is power and authority. Leadership is choosing to find the liminal state between here and there. And there are lots and lots of ways to lead. Steve Ballmer reference is interesting because from the outside, obviously most people will look at him and say, oh my goodness, he made all this money at Microsoft enough to buy the Los Angeles Clippers and he's out there on stage going crazy.

multi-billionaire, like let it ride when he was able to negotiate with Bill Gates to get all those equity grants or whatever for Microsoft and multi-billionaire. So most would say, well, that's wildly successful, Seth, and yet you would say, well, I'm leaving my taste aside, if you look at what he missed, he missed the internet, he missed the smartphone and three or four other things. If you look at the stock performance, there are very few shareholders who would trade Satcha Nadella for Steve Ballmer. Yep, yep, yep.

Okay, I want to talk about your neighbor. Your neighbor is a barefoot runner. You write that he glides without apparent effort. Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. This is from RIF number six. The elegant path is the most useful way forward. Can you share a little bit more about your neighbor and the importance of elegance and simplicity? Well, the physics of running are simple.

You still have to put an enormous amount of effort to run a marathon. But all of us can visualize, I hope, the barefoot runner, whether the barefoot runner has shoes on or not, doesn't matter. There's a style of running that puts your body to work in a way. That isn't the style of running that, you know, Fred Munster from the Munsters might have cloppity, cloppy, cloppy, cloppy cloppy clop. So what's the difference, right? The difference is understanding flows, understanding the current and where the river is headed, understanding how your body is architected. And so if you are starting an enterprise

where the wind is at your back, because the culture wants you to succeed, because technology wants you to succeed, that is more elegant than building an enterprise that goes directly against the grain of what the culture wants, what technology wants. That doesn't mean you're going to fail. It just means it's a totally different kind of effort.

Right? And so what we seek to do when we find an elegant strategy, strategies is easy to describe and hard to stick with. It is not an elevator pitch. No one bought anything on an elevator. It is not a carefully constructed committee purpose statement that means nothing. It is a very simple, direct, but scary arc that you are going on, that you believe is going to be additive over time right so it's freshman year at Harvard or sophomore year Mark Zuckerberg

is working on this Facebook thing what is Facebook strategy Facebook strategy is many people if you say to them someone's talking about you behind your back do you want to see what they're saying will say yes I would and build a platform for that and relentlessly build a platform first at Harvard, oh, everyone at Harvard cares about what everyone else at Harvard is say. Now I had Yale, then add the rest of the Ivy League, circle after circle after circle, the strategy is the same for a decade. Every time they do that, their business does better. That's a strategy. And, you know, I was at Yahoo when they had the chance to buy Google for $10 million. Not $10 billion, $10 million. I was not in the room, but they said, nah, we're just going to spend the money to make Yahoo Kids better.

And the reason is, Yahoo Strategy, which at the time had gotten them so far, was, come to Yahoo.com, and we're going to do everything we can to keep you from leaving. So there was Yahoo Mail, and there was Yahoo Kids, and there was Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo! Google's strategy was, come to Google and leave. we're going to do everything we can to have you go somewhere else and we're going to make money doing that totally different strategies and so at some level mallet was right in saying we don't know what to do with this at another level was a challenge because that was a turning point when yahoo began to fade because their strategy didn't work in an open web looking back it is

obviously easier to know well yeah that that that makes so much sense but at the time. So I guess my question is, how do you know in the moment when the wins at your back? If you're going to a new industry or trying to start a new business or you have some ideas, looking back, it's always much easier. But in the moment, that's when it's really tough. How do we get better at making these decisions in the moment? Yeah. Well, the first thing is you can't make the decisions if you don't talk about them. Yeah. We've been going out of this for just a few minutes, but already the people who are listening understand they haven't been talking about it. Right? They've been defending silently the strategy, the intuitive strategy they've always had.

My dream is to have a bowling league, and I'm not going to talk about why that's my dream, but that's it. That's what I'm doing, right? As if that's some sort of, you know, you get a macho prize for sticking with it without examining it. So the first step is examining it, hold it up, be willing to let someone who's qualified to give you feedback, give you feedback. But then the second thing is to look for patterns and to match them. There's no prize for being completely original. In fact, if you're completely original, you're almost certainly going to lose. That there's a prize for rhyming with what came before in a way that lets people find

the scaffolding to work with you. And so after Sai does his viral YouTube video, and two billion people have seen Gangnam style, it's easy to assert that there is going to be a genre of videos worth sharing that you can make money from. The wind is at your back if you're doing that, right? Whereas there are no vibrant multi-city, chains of jazz clubs. Like there's a couple, but they're not vibrant, right? So if you say, I'm going to start jazz club and we're going to end up in 40 cities and blah, blah, blah, I say, you might succeed, but the wind is not at your back.

Because that does not rhyme with what our culture is doing right now. And so let's just name it and then figure out if you're trying to do something that's going to change the system, please make sure you have enough money to change the system based on its scale because it doesn't pay to try to start a log when you don't have enough kind of kind of shindling. Seth, riff number 240, which is something you just kind of touched on a hint to that is titled cheerleaders and coaches. And you ask the question, who sits at your table? Who has permission to offer you criticism? Most people are bystanders. They're not the audience you set out to serve, nor are they trusted experts who have the insight and discern it to tell me

what you need to hear. I think from a leadership perspective, this is huge, right? Who's your kitchen cabinet or your foxhole or who's your who like whatever you want to call it. But having those core people that are willing and able to tell you the truth, cheerleaders and coaches you write about, this is a critical part of strategy. Can you talk more about cheerleaders and coaches and who are those people at your table? All right. So if we talk about those 800 rejection letters I got, they got better over time because I'm glad because I didn't want to be a spammer.

But Steve Lures said, this isn't for me, but it sounds like you're doing interesting work. Let's have lunch and talk about it. And he checked in with me every few months and told me his problems. And I ended up doing the Information Please Business Almanac for him, the Information Please Celebrity Almanac, the Women's Almanac, and a whole bunch of other books. Because he wanted me to succeed. and he could say, I'm going to coach you and cheer you because I will win if you do that.

We sold millions of books together, right? Whereas the other people were sitting there with their arms folded and say, prove it, prove it, prove it. I can't work with that audience. I don't know how to get in if they're not willing to help me. I don't read my Amazon reviews

because all a one-star review tells me is this book wasn't for me, right? I don't speak this language. But how am I supposed to write a better book based on that? It's not helpful. So you're allowed to have your one-star review, but I don't have to read it. And so we need to figure out not who is it for and just that, but among the people who it's for, who has the empathy to describe to me,

even though they don't like it, who might like it? And most of the feedback we get doesn't come from people. will know how to do that. So, you know, the people who launch legs, panty hose, I am sure that there were only men in the boardroom at the beginning. And if a guy says, yeah, I would never wear those. Yeah, well, of course you would never wear those. They're not for you. But useful feedback comes from someone who has empathy. So you don't have to be a cancer survivor to be an oncologist. You don't have to be a three-year-old to work at Fisher Price. You have to have empathy for the people you're trying to help.

How did you know in the moment that Steve in this case was worthy of you taking that lunch or was his, that he had the empathy or the knowledge base to be able to help you? Well, that one's an easy one because he published the American Heritage Dictionary. He was the biggest dictionary publisher in the world. So he was qualified, right? Yep. But I think what your question is really getting at is your easily excitable neighbor might have really bad taste. They might be fun to brainstorm with,

but they might have really bad taste. So what is taste? Taste is knowing what the market wants just before it does. And so again, part of the conversations we're having with our kitchen cabinet, with our advisors and our coaches is, do you have good taste? Let me try to understand why.

So if you're a musician and Rick Rubin is your record producer, it is implied that Rick Rubin but has good taste. That's what he does for a living. He has good taste. If you have a record producer who's never produced a successful record once in their life, they might not have good taste.

They might be unlucky, but they might not have good taste. Rick Room is an interesting one, Seth. I mean, his book just came out, and I think it put him on a whole other level from people outside of the music world, and it came out in the interviews. He doesn't know how to play any instruments

or even work the board, right? He doesn't have any of the technical skill that pretty much all of the other people in his industry does. And yet he still just worked with the best of the best of the best over decades and been amazing. What do you think it is about a guy like him? Like how does he develop that taste and like how much of that is just in him from birth versus developed and worked on and honed and crafted over time? Well, the book came up in a coffee that Rick and I had. So I'm not going to say it's my idea, but it's close to my idea. Not surprised.

I've known him for a long time. This isn't in the book, but what he does is he creates a reality distortion field. So when he was working with Johnny Cash, which was the breakthrough after his success in rap music, Johnny would play a song and then come into the recording room, the control room, and say, what do you think? And it's in that moment that the producer has the most power. And usually in that moment that the producer says, well, you were a little flat on the C sharp, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And Rick would say, and he's relentless. He does it every time. He would turn to Johnny and say, what do you think? And Johnny wasn't used to that, that responsibility, that, you know, what's the vest version of Johnny Cash? And Johnny would say, oh, and go back and do it again. And so that's all Rick does. He creates this reality distortion field for an artist he believes has something to say and just creates an expectation that they need to please Rick, but he never tells them what that would be.

So I've heard that phrase used with Steve Jobs or maybe even Elon Musk when it comes to deadlines and getting things done. I haven't heard it use as much with somebody like Rick. What do you mean by reality distortion field? And how would that maybe apply beyond a music producer? I'm not talking about Elon Musk in any way. So we're going to take that off the table. What Steve did was take technology that was already working, but not being used in the way he imagined it. And a cert for people, give them permission to believe that that technology could be used in these products. Whereas a more conservative project manager would say, we need to let somebody else go first. So in the case of the red hot chili peppers or Johnny Cash or whatever, it's, I know your last three albums didn't do great.

Let's pretend for a minute this one's going to do great. If it was going to do great, what would it sound like? I think from a leadership perspective that instilling belief and setting high expectations for people and then nudging. them and pushing them along. I know for the leaders in my life, Seth, those are the ones I love so much and cherish them, even if I didn't always love them in the moment that that was happening. And I think that's leadership, is helping people perform at a level that's maybe even higher than they think they're capable of. Exactly. Right. And figuring out a way to do that. Right. So you're changing their reality. Yeah. So the reason that I didn't want to talk about

Musk is Musk lies and cheats. That's not what I'm talking about. Yeah. What I'm talking about is saying you came in thinking this was going to be a Billboard Top 500 record. Let me assert that it could be a Billboard top 10 record. Let's move your reality. Let's distort your reality so that you could inhabit what is possible for you as a leader. Okay, I want to get back to some of the risks. One of them, so we talked about like finding the areas where maybe there could be wind at your back, but also riff number 34 is low hanging fruit isn't, meaning like it's already all been picked. And the easy, direct, obvious paths are unlikely to get you the results you're working so hard to obtain. In fact, they may even be a trap.

So you hear that phrase a lot, like low hanging fruit. What's already out of? Let's go get it. Let's go get it. And you're writing that that could potentially be a trap. How so? Okay. So you may recall Hotmail. Hotmail was the first free email service. It went viral. It gave, many people say viral marketing, became a term because of hotmail. He ended up selling it to Microsoft for half a billion dollars in cash. And the low-hanging fruit would be, let's make another hotmail, just like hotmail. Whereas the current, the putting the wind at your back, the elegant strategy is, oh, things that are easy to share on the internet can grow fast. So let's not build another hotmail.

Let's build something that rhymes with hot mail, right? That's what we're talking about here. That's a worthy strategy. So if you look, if you were an internet investor for the last 40 years, and all you did was invest in companies where there was a network effect, where it worked better if your friends used it too, you would have the best track record in the history of finance, right? Because that single sentence is the elegant strategy for the internet. So would you say Gmail looked to do something that rhymes with Hotmail?

So Gmail is a huge success, sort of is the exception that proves my point. Gmail probably wouldn't have succeeded if it wasn't integrated into Google. Google, yeah. So that's something we can't use as an example. But what I would say is Facebook rhymed with Hotmail. So did Uber. So did. I mean, like, let's say Uber.

let's say we're talking about Uber. If I tell my friends about Uber, I'm not using up the drivers, making it more likely there'll be more drivers. That the more people who use Uber, the better my Uber experiences. Right? That's not what happens if I tell people about,

you know, this vineyard that only makes 100 bottles a year. Because if I tell everyone about that, they're all going to get sold out and I'm not going to be able to get one. Right? So the inner. The internet works best when it's connecting people to one another. And the businesses on it work best when there's a network effect, when all the way back to the telephone, the more people who use it, the better it works.

Number 297, it's your last one. These are questions that lead to strategies. And you write 84 questions. I counted them and wrote down a few of them. 84 questions. The reason I appreciate this and love that this is the way you end the book is because I think a lot of us are probably like this, but I'm a prompt-driven thinker and writer, meaning if you supply me with questions, I then have to think about them and I'll write them down, and that makes me a clear thinker and it's better. And so this is a great way to end the book

because you're asking these questions. From a more like meta-perspective, what is it about asking the right questions in order to help you develop your strategy? And how do you come up with such useful questions because that's what I feel is a big part of why you've been so effective. Well, just an aside, I made this deck that has 54 cards in it, the strategy deck, and you play them and you play four cards and juxtapososance. So you get five million combinations of questions and statements. It turns out that people are very good at coloring inside the lines and very bad at dealing with an empty sheet of paper. Yep.

Because that's what we were indoctrinated to do from the time we were three. And often, if I bring someone an idea that they think is original or worthwhile, it will simply be because I've trained myself to have blanker sheets of paper than other people. I'm still coloring inside the lines I see, but my lines are bigger in scale

than someone who has little tiny lines, right? And so the reason for the prompts is to give you little boxes that you can fill it. You can make prompts very easily once you decide you want to. And that's the subtext of the entire book is once you read the book, you could write a book like this. If you haven't read the book, you couldn't write a book like this, probably, because there was too many blank sheets of paper. And what I'm trying to give people is just enough scaffolding that they can start talking intelligently about strategy. The way, so many people can talk intelligently now about sales or about marketing or about finance. No one that I know of gave folks the scaffolding to be able to talk intelligently about strategy.

That's what we're trying to do. When you're writing, are you collecting prompts? Are you collecting questions to answer to help create more of a body? the color within or I'm just curious about your creative process when it comes to writing and topics and ideas to be useful so it's changing a little bit it used to be when I'm writing something I'm thinking about the objection why would some smart person like Ryan read this and be skeptical yeah and so I'll ask myself the question I'm imagining you're asking and then I'll try to answer it in my

writing once I get in the practice of doing that and being a salesperson my whole life is a great way to do that. Zig taught us about objections. Objections are your friend. They're not the enemy. So if you work at a car company and you're not spending time on the showroom floor, you're making a big mistake. If you're on the showroom floor and four people in a row walk out because the trunk isn't big enough, you just learned a lot about how to design the trunk of your car, right? So I'm used to thinking about the objections. But the method I proposed a couple times in the book, what I would do is I would give clod.a.i a few sections of my book and say, yeah, but what do I leave out? What questions do you have for me? And it is private and it's not a person,

so I don't have to worry about hurting its feelings. And that feedback would help me write new sections or come up with new prompts. Yeah, I've heard you mentioned Claude before in other podcasts as well as you mentioned a lot in this book. What is it about clodd.a.i that's been so helpful for you and why that specific one? Well, that specific one is first perplexity should instantly replace Google on your browser. For sure, there's no debate about this. Every person who I propose perplexity to says thank you. But leaving that part aside, chat GPT is annoying and lazy and arrogant and really gets under my skin.

it fights with me all the time. And it's, I don't know what they did or how they did it, but it just, we don't like each other. And Claude is kind and thoughtful and takes its time to work its way through. It corrects itself when it's wrong. And we're just a good team. That could change in a moment's notice, but it's the best $20 bucks a month I spend, I think. Love it. One more, Seth, before we run, when you think about all of the leaders, you've been fortunate,

enough to be around and spend time with and talk to and like the Brian Coppulmans of the world. I love listening to you guys talk, by the way. When you think about them, what are the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time? The thing they have in common is they've chosen to be leaders. That the time I spent with Barack Obama, I'll never forget. The time I spent with John. at Acumen Novogratz at Acumen has changed my life. Watching Jim Zilkowski build on, Liz Jackson, who does important work

with disabled populations, they have nothing in common except this. What they have in common is they're here to make a change happen. That's it. And if you look at famous, famous leaders, some of whom had tragic endings, they're famous, but they're different from each other as well.

And this is not about who does the media celebrate. This is not about who is the latest troll of the moment, who's getting inking followers. Those people aren't leading. They're simply making noise. The leaders that I know and admire so much are doing it on purpose. Love it. Seth, also, you were six minutes early.

I greatly, greatly appreciate. that. I think that as a mark of a respectful leader, you could be late and I would have waited here forever and you're six minutes or early. I want to say that public. I greatly appreciate you. The new book is called This is Strategy. Make Better Plans. It has all these rifts and ideas that really made me think. As you

could tell, we talked about some of them. We got about 3% of the book, so there's plenty more. I would really, really urge people to go get this one. And it's written so beautifully as Seth Godin does. But man, I'm so grateful for you. I appreciate you and I look forward to the next one and us continuing our dialogue as we both progress, man. What a treat. You're a star. Thank you, Ryan. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with the legendary Seth Godin. A few takeaways from my note.

strategy is a process of becoming. A strategy isn't a map. It's a compass. Strategy is a better plan. It's the hard work of choosing what to do today to make tomorrow better. I love that never arrived always becoming mindset. Then Dorothy and her crew, how did Dorothy persuade the lion, tin man, and scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the wizard? Did she make the case about how much she missed home?

No, no. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her. How are we creating the conditions so that others can get what they want by joining us? A great question to ask ourselves. Then what are the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence that Seth has worked with over the course of his life? And he named a number of them. And they're all quite different. but they had one thing in common.

And that's that they have all chosen to be leaders. They make that distinctive choice each and every day. And that means that they are here to make a change happen. As Seth always says, they're here to make a bit of a ruckus. And I ask you, how are you making the choice to lead each and every day? Once again, I'm going to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen. to this episode of The Learning Leader Show

with Seth Godin, I think, who will help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and you subscribe to the show, and you write a thought for review, and you rate the show, hopefully five stars by doing all of that.

You are giving 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, too. Can't wait.