The Nick Bare Podcast - 014: Seth Godin - Why Business Culture Matters and How To Make An Impact As A Leader

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Today's conversation is one I've been anticipating for a long time! Seth Godin's work as an entrepreneur, author, and teacher has massively shaped the trajectory of my business, and I'm excited to share his newest book, The Song of Significance. Seth is also the author of 20 best-selling books and the visionary founder of Akimbo, an online workshop designed to transform your leadership. In this conversation, Seth imparts invaluable lessons on why hustle culture falls short and reveals why significance is the ultimate aspiration in life. We delve into the essence of being a leader versus a manager, uncover why business culture is more important than ever, and give practical tips on how you can make an impact through your work. This episode will shift your perspective and propel you toward a life of profound meaning. BPN Key Lime Protein: ⁠https://bit.ly/bpnkeylime⁠ (code NICKBARE10 to save 10%) Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Keep up with Seth here: Website: https://www.sethgodin.com/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/sethgodin/ Seth’s new book - The Song of Significance: https://geni.us/pdnqnz Topics: (00:00) Intro (1:36) The Song of Significance (4:54) Why Seth wrote his new book (6:55) Hustle culture is a trap (8:19) Culture amplifies enrollment (11:09) Maintaining culture in a digital workspace (12:50) What employees truly desire (15:43) New perspective on turnover (20:52) Scaling isn’t the point (26:23) Choosing surveillance or trust (30:42) Leaders vs. managers (33:51) Teaching through tension (37:30) Organization commitments (41:34) Significance matters most

Hustle culture, as I understand it, is a selfish trap. And it's a trap because it doesn't scale. That people say, well, you're Seth Godin. Yeah, but I wasn't Seth Godin for a really long time. But I showed up and I always created some opportunity for value and respected people's attention. Write a blog post for 100 people. Or in your case, make a podcast for 100 people. Well, you don't have 100 listeners anymore, Nick.

How did that happen? Did it happen because you hustled? But did it happen because the people who listened to your podcast told other people. That is a long-term community-based strategy. It's resilient. But what I have found is that the waves of spammers that show up in whatever category we're talking about, they look like they're the next big hot thing, and then they're gone. If you're really in this for more than a couple years, you can't do it by hustling.

Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank you for tuning in and supporting the podcast. Now, we just launched and released a new flavor of way protein. and this is my signature flavor. Quite possibly the best flavor of weight protein we've ever created. And it is key lime pie. If you like key lime pie, you're going to absolutely love this flavor. Even if you don't love key lime pie, you're probably still going to love this flavor.

It's a limited launch, so once we're sold out, we are sold out forever. You can go to the link in our description and use code Nick Bear 10 to save 10% off your order. So go try our key lime pie away protein and let us know what you think. Well, Seth, thank you so much for being on the show today. Welcome. Well, it's an honor. People who show up on the regular selflessly teaching folks, count me in. So as I was telling you before we started recording this,

I've been a massive fan of your work for years now. And I have shared that work with our entire team. It has shaped the trajectory of my business, the way that we operate, the way that we think. And I know you have a new book coming out that I would love to learn more about. And I know it's not released yet, but your team sent over some notes and some topics on that book. And I'm extremely excited because of the way that the workplace and the environment and culture has changed over these last two to three years. And some of the topics that you kind of outlined that are going to be in this book, which is titled, The Song of Significance,

it's meeting me at a very interesting pivotal point in my career as an entrepreneur where I need to learn from a lot of these things that you have discussed over the topics. And I really just want to read over a quick blurb of what your team sent over to give some context before we dive into this. In this new book, The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto for Teams, the workplace has undergone a massive shift. Remote work and economic stability have depressed innovation. and left us disconnected and disengaged.

Paychecks no longer by loyalty, happiness, and effort. Alarmed managers are responding with harsh, top-down layoffs, surveillance, and mandatory meetings. Workers are responding by quiet quitting and working their wage. But there is a better answer, a human answer, and it is within everyone's reach. So I'm curious, what is the song of significance? So we need to talk about bees just for a minute. a feral bee colony at the end of a winter, if they've survived, will be out of honey, totally depleted.

And the maidens who run the hive will instruct the workers to go out and collect as much pollen as they can. And in less than a couple of weeks, they will replenish all the honey. And then they'll have the queen lay a new egg, a queen egg, which is very rare, to have two queens in the same hive. And then, in a 10-minute period of time, 12,000 bees will leave the hive all at the same time. Jacqueline Freeman calls this the song of increase. The song of increase is a miracle to see, this leap forward. But then when the bees leave, they form a tight ball in the tree nearby because they need a place to live and they only have three days to find one. And they sing the song of safety.

The song of safety is what we've been doing as humans. ever since the pandemic were before, hunkering down, hoping everything will get better, trying not to extend ourselves. But we're not bees. And so I wrote a book about the song of significance, which is what people actually want to do more than they thought they could, to achieve something, to be treated with respect and dignity, to be part of a team. That's what makes it the best job you ever had. And it turns out, amazingly, in 2023, it's also what makes you a living. I know when you first started writing books, you were writing a book a year kind of on that cadence. And then you stopped that cadence to really start putting out, I don't want to say more meaningful work, but I guess more intentional based off of what you were experiencing in the world in your personal life.

What was it that happened over these last two to three years that you personally observed that made you say, I need to write this book? Okay. So I just want to clarify the first part. I only wrote a book a year because my publisher wouldn't let me write three books a year that you needed to not wear them out. But I didn't set out to write books. I set out to teach. And what I found over the years is that I could reach more people with a blog post

or a YouTube video or a course often than I could with a book. So I only write a book if I feel like I have no choice. If I feel like the medium of the book delivers something that we need, to talk about. And what I saw in the last year, after all the trauma of a worldwide pandemic, was things that range from billionaires firing people online for public sport and humiliation, to big corporations having the lowest productivity they've had since they started measuring productivity, most of all, to the pain that so many of us were feeling, the dislocation, the loneliness, the disrespect.

And when I heard about the bees and the song of increase, I realized that we are settling for a race to the bottom. And that even entrepreneurs who are hustling all day, stealing attention, strip mining it, trying to get some one more sale, we're all cogs in a system that's outlived its usefulness. And so what I wanted to do was start a conversation was get people to speak to each other, their bosses, their employees, and say, we could do this differently. What are things like around here? Let's talk about that. Do you think that hustle culture is an issue in today's world surrounding entrepreneurs and especially in the social media space of entrepreneurship? Hustle culture, as I understand it, is a selfish trap.

It was invented by people who are selfish and has been adopted by people who are selfish. And it's a trap because it doesn't scale. That people say, well, you're Seth Godin. Yeah, but I wasn't Seth Godin for a really long time. But I showed up and I always created some opportunity for value and respected people's attention. So no spam, no outbound hustle, no sending people notes saying, quick question. That isn't a quick question. And trying to get more of that.

Instead, it's write a blog post for 100 people or in your case, make a podcast for 100 people. Well, you don't have 100 listeners anymore, Nick. How did that happen? Did it happen because you hustled? But it happened because the people who listened to your podcast told other people. That is a long-term community-based strategy. It's resilient. But what I have found is that the waves of spammers that show up in whatever category we're talking about,

they look like they're the next big hot thing, and then they're gone. And if you're really in this for more than a couple years, you can't do it by hustling. Yeah, I've been at this for about 11 years now. And I started my business in 2012. And I've really been proud of the culture that we've created within the business, with the people and the mission and the organization. But what I have found is as you scale and as you grow, it is harder to maintain that culture. and, you know, I watch other businesses promote and talk about culture all the time, but I don't know if they actually do care about the culture.

And, you know, one of the things you talk about is culture amplifies enrollment. And I would love to learn more about what that means to you and what is enrollment. Sure. Let's break it down. So I believe that everyone listening to this has options. You don't live in a company town where there's only one factory where you can work because you can only get there by walking. You have options, which means that wherever you work, it's voluntary. You could work somewhere else.

If you're going to show up at work voluntarily, at some level you're enrolled in where that organization is going. And the best organizations are filled with people who are eager to make a change happen. That's what enrollment is. have to tell somebody who's, you know, on the A-line of a hockey team at the Stanley Cup finals that the game starts in five minutes. They know it and they can't wait to go out and play. Not because they're going to get paid, but because they want to. They put in all that training and time and effort so that they could do this. Enrollment is what we do when we emotionally commit to the journey. And it doesn't have to be sports and it doesn't have to be

some company that's doing important non-profit work. It could be somebody who makes widgets or a barista at a coffee shop. And what culture does? Culture is simply, what are things like around here? For example, if you've got a sales rep who's a bully and a jerk, but they keep hitting their numbers and you keep them around, you have sent a message to everyone in your organization, which is we will tolerate bullies and jerks as long as you hit the numbers. That's your culture. and who we reward, who we elevate, who we applaud, these things determine what things are like around here. And so if you start looking for people who are enrolled in the journey and give them confidence and support, highlight them, applaud them, other people will follow in their footsteps.

What it says on the back cover in my book is the purpose of a beehive isn't to make honey. Honey is the byproduct of a healthy hive. Do you think that you can maintain the same type of culture in a digital workplace as you can in person? I've helped on a summer camp in Northern Canada for 43 summers. Nothing makes me happier than walking into a building that's filled with that buzz. But I have discovered that you can, in fact, create a better, more powerful, more resilient culture in a distributed way, can't do it by saying it's just like real work, except we're distributed. So in my case, as a volunteer, I organized the Carbon Almanac, 300 people, now 1900, we created a 97,000-word book,

footnoted graphs, charts, tables, typeset, fact-check, didn't make a single error that was important, shipped it in less than five months, beat our deadline by three days. We got translated into six or seven languages. It's been a bestseller around the world. And every person was volunteer. Every person in 40 countries. We worked around the clock, shift by shift by shift. And the people who were part of that care about each other. They take care of each other. They go to each other's weddings when they have the chance. It's a real community. So yes, it can be done. Matt Mullenweg, who runs automatic, which powers part of what we're talking on right now. 40% of the internet is run on things that automatic and WordPress built. They don't have an awesome.

office. They have 2,000 people, no email, no office. They are usually productive. They are really profitable. You don't have to have an office. You just have to do things with intent. I'm curious your thoughts on what you think most people are looking for in a job. And I'll give some context to that. As I'm building my business and we're scaling the executive team, we're bringing in people have more experience. I've interviewed so many people that, one, they've gone remote and they've gone digital and they want to come back into the office. And two, I'm interviewing a lot of people who are leaving their previous job because they took that job for the pay. And I've heard this time and time again of this is the first time of my career that I've taken a new job because of pay

and it was the biggest mistake of my life. So do you think people are looking for more meaningful work than ever before, or has it always been that way? So here's what the boss thinks. You can do this just by watching how they behave. The boss thinks that workers want two things. Get paid a lot, don't get fired. Because those are the only two things they ever talk about, right? That they list how much you get paid when they're trying to hire you,

and they use don't get fired as the way to discipline you. Well, I surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries, and I said, what's the best job you ever had? Everyone has an answer to that question. Everyone. And then I said, here's 14 attributes, which were the ones that made it the best job. And the bottom two, the two least important ones were I didn't get fired and I got paid a lot. And so people are taking a deep breath and saying, I don't get tomorrow over again.

So I want a job where I am paid fairly. You're not going to get off easy. You're not going to pay me less than I am worth. But that's not why I'm showing up. I'm showing up because I'm here to make a change happen and to be treated with respect as I do so. And the flip of this, which you mentioned about interviewing a bunch of people, is job interviews are a false proxy, that unless the people you are hiring are going to become people who for a living are interviewed, a job interview doesn't tell you what you need to know.

it leads to permanent systems of caste and social standing and discrimination against all sorts of groups because we're looking for people we'd like to hang out with, have lunch with, date, whatever it is. But that's not the measure of whether we are going to be able to together make a change happen. And these false proxies get in the way ever since we started taking the SAT. The SAT doesn't tell you if you're going to be good at anything. It's just this accepted measure of whether you're going to get to the next level or not. So what we have is the chance to find people who are enrolled in the journey, create a culture that brings out their search for meaning

and then rewards them and the team as they build something that matters. I would love to talk about turnover. And I notice one of the things you highlighted is that turnover is okay. And that for me, I'm not going to lie, it kind of shook me because one of the things I've always been proud of in our business is we've had low turnover. And I've kind of bragged about that. And we have low turnover in operations and marketing and, you know, fulfillment. And I'm curious, what makes turnover okay? Because I'd assume that a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners, they want low turnover because they would assume it reinforces.

is a strong culture, but am I incorrect in saying that? So I agreed with you for a long time. The turnover at the companies I built, and I built one of the first internet companies, was close to zero. And I thought that that was part of being a good human. Here's what I have found. We were talking about enrollment before.

It used to be that the boss wanted zero turnover, and if they saw you were working on your resume, they would fire you. They didn't want the employees to think they had options. because then they could get the employees to do whatever they wanted and pay them as little as possible. Also, turnover is really expensive because training takes three or four months where you're paying this person and they're not producing very much. But thanks to Slack and Google Docs and seven other things,

a committed, competent person can get up to speed in a day and a half now. They can read all the threads of what came before. They're not a superstar in two days, but the disruption is much. smaller. But the key to the whole thing is this, let's get real or let's not play. If you don't want to be here, don't be here. That, like, with our blessing, we're going to run classes where everyone can update their LinkedIn page. If you can get a better offer where you can contribute more and be more involved, please do so. That that's not a moral failing by me or by you. This bus is going to Cleveland. If you want to go to Tucson, getting off this bus is a good idea. But if going to

Cleveland is what you need and want, here we go. And now I don't have to spend any time cajoling you or bullying you because you want to be here. You want to go where I am going. And once that is in place, I mean, what we saw in our all-volunteer Carbon Almanac is a bunch of people came and stayed for an hour, two hours, four hours, and they said, nah, not for me. But the people who stayed contributed an enormous amount more than any employee ordinarily would. And then when life got in the way, they said, I got to go. But they left their work behind and someone else could take it on. So as we're looking at this new way of work, yeah, you're going to have some people who are journey people,

who are doing a set of tasks. But you should probably outsource that work anyway. The core team, the core, you know, you don't want Ringo to stay in the Beatles because he has no choices. You want him to stay in the Beatles because he wants to be in the Beatles. Are there any organizations that do this very well, have a very healthy turnover that you've kind of seen that are larger organizations? Because I know you talk about how Amazon has a turnover problem. I'm curious your perspective there and what they're doing incorrectly.

Okay, so Amazon's turnover problem is a different thing. It is a symptom of brutality that half of all the warehouse injuries in the United States happened in Amazon facilities in 2022. That if you go to work for Amazon as a driver or a warehouse person, which is most of the people who work there in terms of numbers, the chances are that you will last less than 90 days. Because there's someone with a stopwatch, there's someone who's constantly turning the crank on your labor

and eager to replace you with a robot. That's very different than what happens at a place like Union Square Cafe, Union Square hospitality group. Danny Meyer, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, shake shacks worth over a billion dollars. The turnover at one of his restaurants is definitely not zero because the very nature of working in a restaurant is it's unlikely you're going to be front a house or back a house for 10 years in a row. But if you visit Maillino or Union Square Cafe or the modern, you will have a world-class experience. Because what does you? What? Danny and his team did was they said, we're going to build an onboarding system that gets someone

to understand our culture in a matter of days, to not tell them every movement and what to do, but to teach them our attitude, spread to our culture, how things are around here. And here's a business that does tens, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue for tens of thousands of customers, and the customers don't notice the turnover. Turnover is fine because Danny has standards. They keep raising the standards. And if it's not working for you, you should go work somewhere else. So you don't believe that the scale and growth of a company

is an excuse for a poor culture or the issues that some of these larger corporations experience? I think that scaling for scaling's sake is a fool's errand. it doesn't increase often the revenue or the peace of mind of the owner, and it ends up commoditizing what you do. That if we think of a world of projects, we don't think that Marvin Gay or Van Morrison should scale what they do and just sing moon dance over and over and over and over again,

because then they're a lounge singer, right? That the idea is to live in a liminal space on the frontier. That's why people are interested. So, yes, we see businesses scale, and sometimes they scale in a way that produces value. When AT&T scaled and started Bell Labs, Bell Labs invented the transistor. Bell Labs invented the touch-tone phone. Bell Labs did all sorts of extraordinary things. But there were also people hundreds of thousands who just put the cable into the wall over and over and over again.

that culture has to be different than the culture of Bell Labs. So you should think about how you want to spend your day. You should think about who you want to spend your day with, because the purpose of your company is not to make the maximum profit. The purpose of your company is to create the conditions for the people who are enrolled in the journey to be glad they did. And the byproduct is a fair profit. And what's wrong with a fair profit?

when I think back to starting my business and really focusing on just who we were, what we were doing, what we were creating and who we were creating it for, that's what I'm having the most fun. When there's moments when I start focusing on scale and growth and things that are going to drive scale on growth, that's what I'm not having fun. That's what I'm not enjoying. and, you know, something that you've talked about historically that's really resonated is focusing on the smallest, viable audience and going really deep with that audience. And, you know, you made a comment on the podcast and the interview you did with Tim Ferriss. And you mentioned that 99% of the world hasn't ever read one of your books, right?

but the books you've created, I mean, for me at least, and the people that read your books, Seth Godin is huge. He is an entrepreneur, he's an author, like very, very powerful. So do you still believe in going very deep

in deep in these roots with a smaller viable audience as opposed to going too wide too quickly and just staying very, very focused? So I wasn't exaggerating. It really is 99. It's not about 90. It's 99% of the people in this country have never bought one of my books.

Fine with me. And the thing is that in the era of mass, you have to have mass. Tide detergent only works because they sell 70 million boxes. That mash, the last episode, reached 70 million people. Compare that to whatever's hot on Netflix right now as we're talking. 2 million, 3 million people, but the people who made those shows have just as much creative freedom and income

as the people who made MASH. So scale comes with its own requirements, but it's not the point. So I don't agree with the people who say you have to niche down. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you have to get on the hook. You have to find the people you seek to serve

and make an audacious promise to them. This is for you. If you don't get it, if it's not something you like, I understand. But in my mind, I made this for you. And so I'll just pick an example. Hershey's sells a lot of mediocre chocolate to millions and millions of people. If Hershey's disappeared, they would just buy Nestle's instead. But this race for scale has led to child labor and slavery

among some of the poorest farmers in the world who grow the cacao beans that go into a Hershey bar. It has led to a chocolate bar that doesn't taste anything like a real chocolate bar. If I look at my friend Sean Askenozy in Missouri, Sean makes a chocolate bar where he meets the farmers, pays them five times a fair wage, puts their kids through private school, has open book management, and sends kids around the world to do field projects. And he still makes plenty of money. Sean's chocolate bars are off the charts for someone who appreciates chocolate. But the average person who wants a Hershey Bar would never buy one because it costs $12. Fine.

It's not for you. But I'm proud of it. And that lets us do work that we can point to and say, I sacrificed for this and it was worth it. Whereas if you say, well, I'm really, really big, I will point out to you, particularly on the Internet, that everybody who gets really, really big doesn't stay there. I'd love to talk about surveillance and trust. and you talk about the intersection of trust and essential work, what happens when the stakes get high in an organization,

will they decide on surveillance or trust? And your team sent over, it was this block with four quadrants, and it was the intersection of low, high trust, low, high stakes. That's it right there that you're showing, yes. That opened up my eyes to so much, and a lot of self-reflection, honestly. and it made me, I mean, after I haven't read the book yet because the book's not out or public, but just reading the notes that your team sent over, I went to our leadership team and says, as soon as this comes out, we're all reading this.

Because for me, it's spot on. I would love for you to talk about the difference between surveillance and trust and how that is projected in an organization for healthy, culture. Well, first, thanks for the kind words. And if you have your team, send me your address, I'll mail you a book as soon as I get one. Well, thank you. We do high stakes things all the time. If you're going to get on an airplane and fly to Seattle, if it doesn't work out, you're in really big trouble, right? You're like at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. So we want pilots to be under surveillance. We want air traffic controllers to follow the exact steps. We want the mechanics who work

on the planes to have a checklist. We don't want them to make stuff up as they go along. This is high stakes, low trust work. Because I didn't get to meet or work with any of those people in advance. I don't trust them. It's a system. And lots of things in our life are like that. If you need blood from a transfusion, you want to make sure that entire supply chain was under surveillance. You're not trusting anybody. On the other hand, if the debut at Quartet is going to be on stage at Carnegie Hall, this is high stakes for that. them. If it goes well, and the record album they're producing that night goes well, they're made forever. But it's only going to work if there's high trust. Because he doesn't say to Paul Desmond,

play those notes exactly the way I wrote them down. He says, we are here trading with each other in front of people. It's high stakes and high trust. In the other corner, there's low stakes and high trust. if you go past two Starbucks to your favorite barista coffee shop, you want that person to treat you like a person, not like she's an automaton. You want her to ask about how the weightlifting competition over the weekend was. Because that is why you pass two Starbucks.

Because even though it's low stakes, the coffee, you probably can't tell the difference. But the trust matters a great deal to you. And in that last corner, is so much of what happens on the internet. low stakes, low trust, right? I need something done. I need five pictures retouched in Photoshop. I just go to Upwork. I pay the cheapest person. If it doesn't work out, I'll pay somebody else. No big deal. And our lives are either best lived in low trust, sorry, best lived in high trust, low

stakes work, where we get to show up for humans where if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And I find my blog is like that. I get to write a blog from my heart. If it doesn't resonate with you, you can have your money back, but my blog is free. Or high stakes, high trust work. And I get to do that sometimes. I'm giving a speech next week. And they don't get to hear my speech before I give it. The client is trusting me. If it doesn't go well, there's going to be a few thousand people who are really pissed off that they paid to go something and it wasn't good. So in that moment, I have to rise up because they're trusting me. And so what I'm arguing for is as AI, as robots, as outsourcing are going to take over so much of the surveillance work.

What's left for us is to find the human work. And human work requires trust. And a lot of this is driven through the leaders in a business and organization, correct? Right. Leaders are not managers and managers are not leaders. Those words mean different things. Managers use power and authority to tell us what to do. need them, but leaders are doing something voluntary.

They're saying the future is over there. I think I know how to get there. Who wants to come? And that shift is really hard because managers think they have to be leaders. They don't. And leaders think they need to have authority, and they don't. So we should be really clear if we're going to lead that our job is to create the conditions for people to find significance.

Do you think leaders can also be good managers? and managers can also be good leaders, or is there a clear distinction between the two? Sometimes they can. I'm not. I'm a bad manager. I just don't have the heart for it or the patience for it. But I know people who have worked their way up to very senior levels,

significant companies and smaller ones, who can switch hats. They can manage when they need to manage, and they can lead when they need to lead, but they are clear about which job they are doing when. When I am managing a project, I've done 140 books or something, I've never missed a deadline. I have never gone over budget because I know how to do project management. I don't really like it, but I can't find someone to do it for me.

So I do that when I have to. But on my best days, I'm not managing. I'm leading. I felt that battle internally for a long time. Or naturally, I believe I'm a strong leader. and I have tried to be that manager as well and I found that I enjoy being the leader. I'm a better leader than I am manager

and for a long time I fought that because I thought I had to be both. And that was difficult for me to kind of learn and experience that process which I would assume that many other people also good through that as well. Yes, exactly right. And when I was building Yoyodine,

I had 65, people and 40 of them reported directly to me, which is insane because I wasn't managing. I was leading. And then I hired Barbara Johnson to be my CEO and then president. And I said, Barbara, you're in charge of managing people. You need to move me out of the room anytime management needs to be done. And in the last five months that before we sold the company, we became profitable. because Barbara understood that we needed to create systems for management in addition to doing projects that need leaders.

Yes, it's past January. I stepped down from the CEO role in my business and put a true operator in place. James Kat Thomas, phenomenal leader and manager. And it has only done remarkable things for our business, which reinforced. the right decision for me to make and the trajectory for the business to kind of lean into. Well done. I would love to talk about being a teacher. And, you know, spending time on your website, first off, I love the blog on your site and that you email out.

Like these small snippets of just very powerful information is something I constantly send down to our team to just chew on. I think it's a remarkable resource. but on there, you kind of position yourself as an entrepreneur, as a author, and as a teacher. And when I first read that, I saw a teacher, but I didn't really think too much about it. And then I heard you talking about in an interview about being a teacher and how much being a leader in a business is about being a teacher through tension. And that for me just, it clicked. things just made so much sense in terms of what teaching actually is.

And it's guiding people through tension to not necessarily give them the answers, but help them find the answers themselves. Can you really lean into what that tension looks and feels like a little bit? So there's a great word. I didn't know what it meant for a long time. Autodidact. Someone who's autodidactic is someone who teaches themselves. But I have come to the conclusion that everyone is an autodidact.

that when a teacher shows up, they can say things, they can have you read things, but you will not learn anything until you teach it to yourself, through experience, through figuring it out. And the reason this is hard is because once you understand there is something you don't know, and you know that you are about to go through the process of learning it, you feel incompetent. You feel incompetent the first time you try to ride a bike or juggle. You know it can be done, but you also know you don't know how to do it.

And in that moment, there's tension. The tension of will I make a fool of myself? The tension of maybe I won't be able to get to the other side. The tension of this could be out of my reach. And the tension of if I do learn this, will I like the person that I become? And stress is bad, but tension is good. And, you know, if you think about something like weightlifting, it's nothing but the tension of gravity compared to your ability to control the motion of an object through space.

The tension is the point. The tension isn't a problem. It's why we are there. And my friend Gabe has a great example for this, which is I got two things here. In this hand, I have something you can't see. And if this hand, I have a dollar bill. Which one would you prefer? And when a friend says that to you, there's tension.

Because you're thinking to yourself, well, there might be something. really good in the other hand or might not be. What is this, what is our relationship like? And then if you take the dollar bill and say to me, what's in your hand, the longer I keep my hand closed, the more the tension persists. But if I open my hand, it all goes away. It's like a knock, knock joke. And so what we do when we teach as leaders is we don't say, here's a memo that describes everything that's going to happen and all the decisions are already been made. What we say is, I think the wizard has what we need to get me home to Kansas and he might be able to get you a heart and he might be able to get you a brain. Do you want to come? Well, the entire movie from that

moment forward is the tension of will they get what they want from the journey? That's what teachers do. So there's tension that teachers are creating. There's tension that leaders are creating in business for employees to teach and guide them. But you also, you also, you also, you talk about these commitments that leaders and employees both have to have in this mutual relationship that we have in business. What are these commitments? What do they look like and how do they benefit both the leader and the employee? So the core of the book, the reason it's a book, is because I want this conversation to happen. I want the boss to say, these are my commitments, and I want the employee to say,

these are our commitments. Let's hold each other to them. And what you will notice as you hear them is they're not related to the commitments that Henry Ford made or Ray Kroc made or pick your big company boss. So here we go. We're here to make change happen.

It's not the status quo. We are acting with intention. We are doing it on purpose. Dignity is worth investing in. It's not free. tension is not the same as stress mistakes are the way forward take responsibility give credit this one i could talk about for six hours criticize the work not the worker a lot of managers have trouble with this one turnover is okay mutual respect is expected and there's like six or seven others

but when you think about these they all seem obvious they all seem real and yet it's very hard find an organization that's willing to live by them. I saw a quote years ago and it kind of broke down conversations that business owners leaders need to have with employees and it explains how it needs to be a dialogue rather than a monologue instead of we're not talking to you. We're not telling you what to do. It's this open conversation. Do you believe that some of the best cultures and organizations in the world have this dialogue as opposed to this monologue. Is that is that the hidden gem that most organizations that are failing are missing? I think that an organization fails for a whole bunch of reasons. It usually succeeds for one. So I'm not sure exactly why any organization is failing.

But let me tell you about our Vind Eye Hospital as we start to wrap this up because they capture so many of the things that I'm talking about. If we look at the population of New York, Chicago, in L.A. Add them all up. That's fewer people than Aravind Eye Hospital has restored eyesight too. That's how big an impact this group has had. If you go to Aravind for corneal surgery in India, they will say, well, it costs $130 or it costs zero. You get to pick. And you'll get exactly the same surgery regardless of what you pay. And they are really strict and high surveillance when it comes to what happens in that operating room. Their infection rate is less than the infection rate at a similar hospital in London, that they have that buttoned down completely.

And so ophthalmologists from the U.S. regularly go to Aravind to do eye surgery because it makes them better eye surgeons. On the other hand, the vast majority of people who work at Aravind aren't surgeons. They have a framework for what it's like around. here. But it's their job to make the patient feel welcome. It's their job to help it, the person who paid zero, not feel like a pauper. It's their job to understand how to use emotional labor to create a connection that helps people heal. And when we look at an institution of that size, where a lot is on the line if they screw up, we can see that it is possible to organize these cultures in a way that makes things better

by working with people who matter. So is it focusing on the people that makes, is that that one thing that makes successful companies successful? I think that what makes it successful is focusing on the work to be done, the change we seek to make. Can we make that change in a way that also enables us to relentlessly raise our standards,

to criticize the work and not the worker, but also, and treat people, with the dignity and respect that they deserve. And what happens is if you buy into that Milton Friedman nonsense and think that you just have to make the maximum profit, you're just going to race to the bottom. You're going to treat people like a machine. And when the machine isn't working well,

throw it out and get another one. And that worked for a long time, made us rich. It's not working anymore. So it's the significance that matters. Correct. That's right. Well, Seth, thank you so much for the time today. I am looking forward to reading the song of significance and sharing with my team. And hopefully more than 1% of the world will read and learn from this book,

especially coming off these last two to three years. But I appreciate your time, your work, and everything that you have done and continue to do. Well, thank you, Nick. Keep making a ruckus. It really matters.