The Tim Ferriss Show - #672: Seth Godin — The Pursuit of Meaning, The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Your Attitude, Overcoming Rejection, Life Lessons from Zig Ziglar, and Committing to Making Positive Change

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Starting point is 00:03:56 slash Tim. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim, all lowercase. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. I'm happy today. I'm happy because I get to have a conversation with my friend Seth Godin. Seth is a frequent flyer on this podcast. For those of you who do not know who Seth is, Seth Godin is the author of 21,

Starting point is 00:04:42 count them, 21 international bestsellers. You eclipsed the fingers and the toes. 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and much more. I'm going to add that on my addendum. His books have been translated into 38 languages and Seth's books include Tribes, Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. Seth writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, and he covers much more than marketing, I should say. And two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the Alt-MBA, the social media pioneer Squidoo, and Yo-Yo Dine, one of the first internet companies. So he's seen

Starting point is 00:05:19 many chapters, many moons. His new book is The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto for Teams. You can find all things Seth at sethgodin.com and seths.blog. Seth, so nice to see you. Hey, Tim. This is a great excuse. I would rather cook you dinner, but this is a close second. I will take you up on both. And I thought we would begin with what is present for me at the moment, and you were very gracious in being flexible with our start time. I went in to see an ophthalmologist for the first time in many years. He also happens to be a surgeon, but I wasn't going there for any type of surgery. And I did not anticipate when I had all the drops put into my eyes that I would be completely incapacitated for two to six hours. I couldn't see anything within 12 inches of my face.

Starting point is 00:06:11 They gave me some throwaway glasses basically just to get the job done so I could at least call an Uber and get home. And we pushed our start time. And the net-net of it was your eyesight like everything else is aging it's still very very good at least my distance is 2015 which is fantastic but it's not what it once was 2010 and i had i want to say a moment of crisis when he basically took a card and put it in front of me while my eyes were blurry and he said this, this is where your vision is going, just so you know. So his bedside manner could have used a little bit of work. But I wanted to ask you how you think about or relate to aging and the changes that come with aging. What a great place to start. I was on the internet in 1976 before many people listening to this were

Starting point is 00:07:01 born. And when I started one of the first internet companies, there was no World Wide Web. So the world keeps changing and so do we. And it's very tempting because the stars in front of us keep changing and getting younger to imagine that we are sort of fading away. And so my analogy, my dad taught me to ski when I was 12 and I was terrible at ball sports, not very good at hockey. I hated getting hit. I broke my nose. I broke my arm. But skiing, I was a maniac. There were no helmets in those days, but no one could get down the hill faster than me. And when I was 16, I fell under the cherry leaf at Sugarbush on the ice and skidded the whole way from the top to the bottom, face down,

Starting point is 00:07:45 head first, dislocating both shoulders and ended up needing surgery on both. The first one was botched by a neighbor. The second one was by the doctor for the U.S. ski team. And I said, I can't ski anymore. But when my kids came along, I taught them to ski and I got back into it with my dad. And then I realized when I hit like 35, you're just going to have to keep confronting the fact that you're afraid and you're not going to get better at this. So I switched to telemark skiing, which is twice the work and half the speed. And I did that for 10 years. And then I switched to skate skiing with Nordic skis and I get to still do that. And it's very easy when I think about my lack of recall that I used to have where I could run a seven hour session without repeating myself to my inability to ski anymore to 17 other

Starting point is 00:08:41 things that I'm walking away from and to feel a sense of loss, to feel like we need to grieve that we're not that person anymore. But I guess after my first bout with COVID, it was more like, what a gift I have today to be in the shoes of somebody who at 62 gets to do things well, but only because I'm walking away from things I can't do anymore. And instead of focusing on what I used to have, I'm really working hard and getting satisfaction out of focusing on what I do have, what I can do. And that just raises the stakes for things. And the reason that this is interesting, I think, is because boomers, and I'm a little bit, a lot older than you, but boomers have driven our culture since the day I was born. That when we were draft age, that was when the draft really mattered. And when we were listening to rock and roll, that's when music really mattered. And when people needed to make money for their family, that's when Wall Street really mattered.

Starting point is 00:09:46 And now boomers are dying. And so we are living in a culture where there's an overhang of all these people with loud voices talking about the end of the world. Because it's the end of their world, but it's not the end of the world. I thought you might have a few things to share. That was a rant to get us started.

Starting point is 00:10:07 My goodness, you just bought permission to talk about whatever you want. That put a salve on my existential crisis wound that I had earlier today. But before we move on, let me ask you, on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, you strike me and have struck me for a long time as a, let's say, default optimistic, generally if we consider baseline to be emotion neutral, generally above baseline person. Are there times when you catch yourself perhaps focusing on, noticing, dwelling is too strong a word, but ruminating on the loss of something? And in those cases, what do you do? I'm just wondering what the intervention looks like, what the self-talk looks like, anything like that.

Starting point is 00:10:50 So I really wish you had had a chance to interview Zig Ziglar. Me too. Zig was my friend. He was one of my first teachers. And one of the things I took away from Zig as someone who had gotten himself into a pessimistic cycle for five years early in my career

Starting point is 00:11:04 is the world is going to be whatever the world is. as someone who had gotten himself into a pessimistic cycle for five years early in my career, is the world is going to be whatever the world is. Approaching it with a positive, energetic attitude probably will make your experience of the world better than girding yourself by being a pessimist and maybe getting what you're hoping for. So I find myself coming back frequently, particularly in the last bunch of years when there's been so much doom and gloom, to this idea that we get to pick our attitude. And in fact, it's the only thing each of us truly gets to pick. And it doesn't mean what happened

Starting point is 00:11:40 to you is what you deserve. It just means that that happened. Now you get the one and only choice, which is how to process that. So that's not the answer to your question, but that's my approach. But I find myself in negative ruts when I'm confronted by too much media. When I first started organizing the Carbon Almanac, there was a full two months when the cataclysm that we have created was confronting me really directly, and it was hard to find my footing. Speaking of response and choosing response, and I don't want to shuffle the deck in such a way that makes things difficult. But we spoke a little bit before we began recording about the several thousand things that we could discuss.

Starting point is 00:12:32 And one name came up, which was Viktor Frankl. And would this be an opportune time? We can always hit snooze and come back, Viktor. But would this be an opportune time to invoke the name Victor Frankl and let you run with it? There are a few books that have been brought up on this podcast more than that one. Very few. And Victor Frankl's story, Survival of Four Concentration Camps, just generous, heroic. The thing is, a lot of people stop reading halfway through the first book that they touch of his

Starting point is 00:13:05 because the story is really powerful but then you get to this stuff about logotherapy and some people say that he was part of the triad of Austrian pioneers in the way we think about the mind there was Freud who focused on sensuality and sex there was Adler who focused on sensuality and sex. There was Adler, who focused on status, dominance. And then there was Frankl, who focused on meaning. And meaning, as far as I can tell from my limited reading of Frankl's work, is when a human being finds a thing that means something to them, a chance for a path forward, a pathway to hope, everything in their life gets better. And that his work, he lived for another 70 years after he got out of the camp, 65 years. His work in suicide prevention was extraordinary from the

Starting point is 00:14:00 statistics I've read, because he understood that for many people, I'm not generalizing everyone, but for many people, finding a path toward hope of meaning, of realizing that the struggle is the struggle, but you get to decide what to do with it, is really profound. And I think as our industrialized world has gotten more narcissistic, which basically says marketers need to make you uncomfortable so that you will buy more stuff to feel better about yourself and your standing, marketers are trying to push people to find meaning in purchases. And the problem with that, also in friends and likes and social media nonsense, the problem

Starting point is 00:14:43 with that is it doesn't scale. And after you've got one storage room full of stuff, buying more things doesn't seem to help you find more meaning. And I really feel like we're in this moment in our culture, this moment in time where people are waking up and saying, thank you very much, but I don't need to buy another thing. What I need to do is find something to care about. And I'll finish this with a two-parter about, I went to see a community orchestra last week. My friend is in it, all volunteers. And the thing

Starting point is 00:15:16 about community orchestras is there are violinists and flautists and oboists who get paid money to do it. But no one in the community orchestra is saying, why aren't I getting paid? Because that's not why they're there. In fact, they often pay to be there. And I'm guessing, with no data whatsoever, that if you surveyed people who are in community orchestras, they probably index happier and more engaged in life than people who aren't. So the question is, where are we going to find our community orchestra? For me, the last year and a half, it was the Carbon Almanac. I have 1,900 friends in 90 countries around the world. I ran into a bunch of them yesterday, Union Square. And they're not doing it for money. None of us got paid. They're not doing it for me. I wasn't even there until I

Starting point is 00:16:01 showed up at the end of the day. They're doing it because the meaning that they get from it is so valuable. It gives them a reason to put up with all the other stuff they have to do every day. I think we should take a moment, just for those who are not familiar, to provide a little bit of background, just a brief description of what the carbon almanac is. And then we can navigate from there. As you so generously said, I've written 20 books. I wrote Permission Marketing, which invented the business of email marketing. And I wrote a book called Purple Cow. But I don't need

Starting point is 00:16:38 to write books. I don't wake up in the morning the way I used to say, what I do for a living is write books. What should I write about now? I only write one when I have no choice. And two and a half years ago, I read The Magnificent Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and it completely upended the way I saw the world. It was astonishing to me how much I didn't know about what was happening to the climate. And I realized that I wasn't talking about what marketing and corporations were doing to the climate because I felt stupid. And the reason I felt stupid is they wanted me to feel stupid, that they want us to be confused. And I thought, well, if I'm under-informed, I bet other people are too.

Starting point is 00:17:29 And I used to make almanacs for a living. I did the Business Almanac, the People Magazine Celebrity Almanac. I know how to make a complicated, long book. But I realized, A, it would take me too long, and B, it would be really lonely. So what an opportunity. I downloaded Discourse, set it up, invited some people to join me. And within a month, we had 300 volunteers, most of whom I have never met in person. And in 150 days, we built, edited, footnoted, researched, copyedited, illustrated a 97,000 word book with no errors in it. All as volunteers around the world, 24 hours a day, trading shifts. And the process of building it found solace for all of us. And I learned so much, which I incorporated in the new book, about what a community can do when people are enrolled.

Starting point is 00:18:17 And I also learned a lot, like plastic recycling is a fraud. And Exxon knew long ago about what was happening to the climate. And my favorite is the carbon footprint. The concept was invented by Ogilvy and Mather for their client, British Petroleum, as a way of getting privileged people to feel guilty about their behavior. And if you feel like a hypocrite, maybe you won't speak up. So where should we go here? We find ourselves at a multi-pronged fork in the road. We can talk about industrialism. We could talk about building community, which is something that is certainly on my mind, but I don't want to hijack. I can try to coax and direct, but I don't want to hijack if it's not a natural place to go. We could talk about creativity, trust, enrollment.

Starting point is 00:19:05 I'm choosing a few words here and there that come to mind. AI, of course, on many people's minds. But perhaps you could speak to the antidote to nihilism. And I want to preface that just by saying, when you talk about marketers and corporations, I would like to say, and I think it's fair to say, that you come from the place of someone who has worn the hat of marketer. You come from a place of someone who has worn the hat of founder, of executive. And therefore, I give it much more credibility than I would someone with 27 bumper stickers from 27 causes driving around in Berkeley who's never really worked in an office or in a

Starting point is 00:19:54 business of any type, who's spouting off about the evil corporations in the same way that someone might talk about the evil Illuminati. So that I want to establish. With that backdrop, could you speak to how you think about nihilism and addressing nihilism? Because certainly, even in my audience, and particularly among younger people, but I have seen it bleeding upward into my generation, even people who are older than me, what appears to be this creeping nihilism, this sense that nothing means anything. You can't sort true from false, right from wrong. Everything's too confusing. We have deep fakes, misinformation, disinformation. You just can't sort anything from anything else. And on top of that, it seems like the Titanic has already hit the iceberg.

Starting point is 00:20:49 We're on the way down. You can't really patch the hole. So is the best we can do playing violins on the deck while she goes under? Or is there anything else to do? That is maybe an overstatement, but not much of one. This is something that I really do sense in many interactions that I've seen and felt. And I would just love to know how you have thought about that because I have found myself similar to where you found yourself perhaps at one point with the carbon almanac in a malaise. And some would say, well, it's a well-warranted malaise. So what are you going to do about it? And I would love to know what you suggest we do about it or what you have done about it aside from the putting together the carbon almanac itself. Longest question of all time.

Starting point is 00:21:36 Thank you for listening to my TED talk. It's a great question and you should be driving because you know exactly what's going on. I'm going to start by saying I'm a hypocrite and so is everybody else. So I don't have to point out that I'm more pure than other people because I'm not. And now after just a few minutes of the podcast, we have to put onto the table a very simple statement, which is we're all going to die. But that was true 50 years ago too. And there's a great book that I loved called The Last Policeman. And I'm not sure I'd say it's a great book. It's a great concept and I really loved reading it. Imagine that there's an asteroid

Starting point is 00:22:16 that's going to hit the earth in a year and destroy and kill all of us. It's not, don't look up. It's just starts with that premise. And then it's a police procedural book about the last policeman left in a little village in New Hampshire. Because everybody else says, screw it, we're all going to be dead in a year. So marriages break up. Why would you go to work to clean the fryer if you know you only have a year left to live? Supermarkets fall apart, but he goes to

Starting point is 00:22:42 work every single day. Because we're all going to die. Maybe not in a year, but no one listening to this is going to be alive in 100 years. Even some Silicon Valley billionaires who are getting blood transfusions aren't going to be alive in a year, right? And so the only question is, are you going to die in a year or 100 years? And when we look at the data on the climate, it's very clear that there are going to be 10, 20, 30, 40 million climate refugees every year. That whole swaths of the earth are going to become uninhabitable.

Starting point is 00:23:15 It's not going to be pleasant for many people. Can we, quote, fix it and go back to, I don't know when? No. Is it a problem that we should address? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we could do anything to live forever. So given that we're all going to die, the question is, what's the point of tomorrow? And for me, I think the key question coming at this as someone who went to Stanford Business School a very long time ago, is some people believe that the purpose of business is to enable culture, to enable humanity. And some people believe that the purpose of humanity and culture is to enable business.

Starting point is 00:23:57 And I think those people have too much influence right now, and they are wrong. And Milton Friedman just made up this nonsense about the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize its profit. It lets people off the hook, and they become tools of a system that grinds stuff out. So if we think about Amazon, Amazon has had turnover as high as 30% in a 90-day period. 30 percent of all the people they hired across the whole company quit in less than 90 days. The data that I quote in the book is that it cost Amazon a third of their profit, a third of their total profit because of turnover. And the reason is simple, because when you get there to work in a warehouse, and more than half of all the

Starting point is 00:24:44 warehouse injuries in the United States happened at an Amazon warehouse last year, they don't treat you like a person. They say your job is to beat the numbers on this sheet of paper or on this iPad screen andwatch jerking people around. The expression jerking people around came from Ford's assembly plant in the 1920s because Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford used a stopwatch to measure every single motion. And a visitor to the Ford plant said, it looks like everyone here is wound up the way they are jerking from left to right with strings pulling them, it's a wonder that they can even live. And when we think about tomorrow or the tomorrow after that, given the damage we've all done, we still live in culture. We still have this miracle. You and I are talking, well, thousands of miles apart. We have access to every piece of information. We have magical computers that can understand us and talk back. We can reach out to someone in need. We can connect to people who need to hear from us. And if you want to just give up because the world is going to be different in 20 years,

Starting point is 00:25:54 that's your choice. But given that we've got this window, it feels to me like we need to up our focus on humanity and connection and possibility and improvement of the condition and maybe not worry so much about public demonstrations of power, firing people online, being brutal in the service of profit. Because we don't have a profit shortage, we have a meaning shortage. So what can someone listening do? You could personalize this to me if you like. I'm always looking for meaning. Seems to be a perennial subject for me.

Starting point is 00:26:32 What can someone do if they are listening and thinking, it is not my path or I don't have the bandwidth or fill in the blank to become, say, a climate activist? Not to say that's what you're implying, but what else can I do to be part of the light and not part of the dark, so to speak? So in a second, I want to talk about the Bs. But first, significance. So I surveyed 10,000 people and I said, tell me about the best job you ever had. And I gave people 14 choices about what made it the best job they ever had, including they paid me a lot of money and I didn't have to work very hard. And the results were the same no matter which country people came from, no matter how old

Starting point is 00:27:15 they were. The results were I accomplished more than I thought I could. People treated me with respect and I did work I was proud of. If we feel significance, we start to feel optimistic. We start to feel meaning. We start to feel human. Where does significance come from? It comes from making a change happen. Can you be really clear about the change you seek to make and who you are making it with and for? So when I think about climate, most of the people who showed up to work on the carbon almanac said, well, I'm doing fine. I recycle this, I compost that, I don't do that. And this is the myth of the carbon footprint. There is nothing you can do personally as a privileged person of the colonial world to fix the climate.

Starting point is 00:28:07 But what you can do is organize. That if you can figure out how to get five or ten people together, you can probably ban gas-powered leaf blowers in your village. And that will have 50 times the impact of you switching to an electric car. Plus, the idea of banding together with 5 or 10 or 15 other people, creating the conditions for other people to find something to care about and succeed at it, will fill you with meaning, not with despair. But leaving the climate aside for a minute, when we think about our days, where we go to work, who we work with, whether we're in a community orchestra or not, is it significant? Is it about you and the change you seek to make? Or are you, quote, I'm just a talk for Harvard and they said, what do you want to call it? And I told them and they renamed it, which I got them to unrename, to having your employees feel significant as if it's some sort of hand waving that you get to do with the free snacks. And that's not my point. My point is we built all these systems so we can actually be significant.

Starting point is 00:29:33 So we can actually point to what we made. So let's go back. How long ago was the first breakthrough book for you? 10 years, give or take? 15? Last breakthrough or the first breakthrough book? The four-hour work. Yeah, the four-hour work. Yeah, four-hour work was 2007. So let's call it 15 years ago. Right, 15 years ago. So what you said to people, to a lot of tutting and disbelief, is that you as an individual have access to tools so that you can find something or somebody or some system that can do the grunt work so that you can actually do human work that is valued by others. And that opened the door for what so many people are now capable of doing. However, there's still all this pressure to race to the bottom. If you put your freelance work on Upwork,

Starting point is 00:30:17 the race is to be the fastest, cheapest person. Well, if you're the fastest, cheapest person, you're just a mechanical turd. You're just cranking it out and no one cares about you because the minute someone's faster and cheaper than you, they'll switch. And what we're looking for is to find work where our work is unmistakably us, where our work is something we can point to and say, given who I am and what I see, I made this. I made this for you. Can you please help me make it better? And when we can do that, our days are totally different than when we're basically sure that an AI is going to take over our job for free as soon as the boss can figure out how to write down what we do all day. So let's just say as a thought exercise that you came across through, doesn't have to be through Alt-MBA. You end up taking on as a mentee the 25-year-old current day version of you.

Starting point is 00:31:18 Similar background, similar education. How would you help that Seth to do this? So I haven't run the Alt-MBA for a long time. I'm very proud that there's a B Corp and it runs and lives happily without me. And I don't have any official mentorships. And you've heard me talk about this before because it just doesn't scale and it becomes this bottomless pit of repair. Yeah. This is just a total thought exercise. Right. But I need to say it because sometimes people hear your thought exercises and then they send me notes. Seth's taking mentees.

Starting point is 00:31:52 The subreddit Seth's mentees. The point of my work is for me to be able to be a mentee without showing up in person. And I'm thrilled when that happens. When someone sends me a note saying I'm 25 years old, how do I become a marketer? Where do I get a job? Where do I train? My answer is, you do it by becoming a marketer. Go find a charity that you care about and go raise $10,000 for them. Go to a garage sale, buy $40 worth of stuff and sell it on eBay for $100. Go figure out how to tell a story to somebody else that changes them. And if you're a receptionist at an ophthalmologist, you can do the same thing. You can figure out how to take that patient who just came in or is on their way out and make them feel 10% better by

Starting point is 00:32:39 saying something, doing something, interacting with them. Not because it's in the manual, not because you memorized it, but because you see a way to connect to another person. If you can do that just a little, you can do it again. And that is the breakthrough that industrials do not want us to understand. That they invented public school so we would say, will this be on the test? How little can I do and still get picked? And all three of those things are wrong. And the option instead is to say, is there a human somewhere connected to you in person or online? Can you connect with them in a way that makes things better for them at least a little? And then can you do it again?

Starting point is 00:33:26 That's what culture is. That's what we've been doing for 10,000 years. That is what fills people with meaning. And you don't need tips or tricks or hacks like someone sending me an email saying, Seth, what's your favorite color? Because then if I write back, somehow we've built this sense of mutual connection. No, that is not marketing. That's hustling.

Starting point is 00:33:47 And hustling doesn't work anymore because everyone's doing it. And just wait till the AI spam shows up. The AI spam is going to make your head explode because it's going to be so effective until you end up not even trusting them. So putting AI spam aside, I agree with you. I mean, honestly, I'm just enjoying my current level of spam while I can. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AeroPress. That's A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S with more than 45,000

Starting point is 00:34:22 five-star reviews. It might very well be the highest rated coffee maker on the planet. And I've used it for more than a decade. This press uses a patented three-in-one technology that combines the best of several brew methods into one easy to use, very portable device. It takes literally five seconds to clean this thing afterwards. You can make Americanos, cold brew, espresso, and lattes all in about a minute. It is super fast. I love the Aeropress first and foremost because it makes absolutely delicious non-bitter coffee. Because it combines the best of three methods, you get a cup that is full-bodied like a French press, smooth and complex like when using the pour-over method, and rich in flavor like espresso. And best of all, you can pack it in your bag when you

Starting point is 00:35:05 travel so you don't have to drink that mediocre coffee at your office or Airbnb. For now, they have a new crystal clear version, sleek enough for display and tough enough for the road. You can pick one up and try it out at aeropress.com slash Tim for less than $50. Check it out. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. My listeners, that's you guys, can get 15% off. Just use my link, aeropress.com slash Tim. One more time, aeropress.com slash Tim. If people are listening and they want to, as you've outlined, create meaning, do human work, not succumb to a race to the bottom where they end up replaceable by the next fastest, cheapest, fill in the blank. Do you have any other guidelines besides get started, do the thing that you are aiming to do, or any other reasons to be optimistic? I think that

Starting point is 00:35:59 might be helpful also just to not level the scales a little bit, but I feel like optimism is often a precursor to action or a prerequisite in a sense. How would you speak to that? And I want to footnote, I did take a note on paper. You said, I think we're going to come back to the bees, if I heard you correctly. We're going to come back to the bees. We are. Let's talk about the boss. Okay. It is entirely possible that you work in a place where you have no options, you have no agency, you have no significance. If that is actually true, you should quit because you don't get tomorrow over again. My guess, it is not actually true. My guess is you have more agency than you are prepared to embrace. And so go start a book club at work. Start with one of Tim's books,

Starting point is 00:36:53 meet it with four other people. And so get on the customer service line after your shift is over and answer three questions. And so figure out how to engage with someone in the organization in a way that is not part of quote your job and figure out how to lead and connect you can do those things without getting fired or after work a friend of mine got married at a old folks home and the person the witness was 97 years old and two days days later, she passed away. So do you think that that's going to be a magical marriage to have honored that person, the one thing that she was staying alive for

Starting point is 00:37:33 that she got to see before the end? Or do you think it makes more sense to be a bridezilla and to just make sure you're part of the wedding industrial complex and everything matches everybody else's wedding, right? So in all these elements of our life, we are pushed to do something the normal way, the profitable way, the way where we are blameless, or we can choose to do something that matters. So now the bees, if you don't mind.

Starting point is 00:38:01 I don't mind. I am fascinated by the bees. So the story, it's more personal than most stories I tell, but I have been hoping to share it with you. So I'm glad we're getting this chance to talk. I got to know, I don't apply for work anymore because airplanes feel like cannibalism to me

Starting point is 00:38:18 after working on the climate thing. I feel like I can do my work without doing that. And after a thousand in-person speeches, I've earned the right to say, no, I'm not going to get on a plane anymore. But I needed to get somewhere for family reasons. And someone reached out and said, for family reasons, I have built a firm that's remote.

Starting point is 00:38:39 I'm really remote in Australia because my daughter, who's 10, was born with some health problems. And I've tried to organize our lives to support her in having the most magical life that she can. And I'm running a conference for the entrepreneurs, my venture-backed, my venture firm funds. They're all in regenerative work. They're all dealing with the climate problem from a commercial point of view. Will you come help run a two-day seminar for them? And I happened to be somewhere near there. So I said, yeah, I can do that. And so for free, I showed up to do this two-day workshop. Well, the day before, he reached out and said, I'm not going to be there in person because my daughter's not feeling very well, but I'm sure it'll go great.

Starting point is 00:39:27 So the person I ended up running it with is a beekeeper from Australia. And he started talking to me about the bees. And he told me the story of Jacqueline Freeman's Song of Increase. And the Song of Increase is just such a great Tim Ferriss story. So here's what happens. A typical hive, not the big honey hive, we could have a whole conversation about big honey, but a typical feral beehive at the end of a long winter will have barely made it through. That's what the honey's for, to supply them with

Starting point is 00:39:57 food during the course of the winter. But if they made it, the council of maidens will meet, they're the ones who really run the hive. And they will do a couple things. The first thing they will do is build a vertical egg chamber and instruct the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg, which is very unusual because there's only one queen in a hive. And the second thing they will do is tell the rest of the maidens to go get as much pollen as they possibly can and replenish the honey supply. This happens in May and June in the northern hemisphere. And so what will end up happening is the hive will, this is 20,000 bees, will be back in ship-shaped condition by June.

Starting point is 00:40:40 And then, based on the weather, because they know what the weather is going to be, they're very good at this, they will organize without an organizer, lead without a leader. 12,000 bees will leave the hive in a 10-minute period of time. They will leap out of the hive

Starting point is 00:40:57 singing the song of increase. And Jacqueline has written beautifully about this. And then they end up in a tree 100 yards away in a tight ball because bees have to maintain a body temperature of 98 degrees or else they fall apart. They get into a torpor. And now they only have three days to find a new place to live.

Starting point is 00:41:18 And each one of the bees is doing what the bee does. Almost every bee, except for the queen, is only three weeks old, which I didn't know. I thought bees lived a really long time. So the scout bees are doing their scouting and the maidens are doing their, each bee is doing their thing. But the hive is basically a human brain inside out. They're neurons all working in sync to create this leap forward. And hearing this story, I was completely transfixed by what the song of increase could mean to people. And then I realized people aren't bees, and we're looking for something with even more internal meaning than simply this leap forward. So I ended up driving then really far, hundreds of miles to visit a friend. And early

Starting point is 00:42:06 the next morning, I went for a swim with all this, forgive the pun, buzzing going on in my head. And there was, as someone who swims almost every day, there was a very fierce riptide. And I came as close to drowning as it is possible for a person to come. And as it happened, I was pretty okay with the fact that that was the end of that. I would miss my family. I would miss so many things. But it was like, well, if that's the end of that, that's the end of that. And then this mission of talking about significance just flooded over me. And I somehow figured out how to get back

Starting point is 00:42:45 to shore. And then the next day I heard from Dan and his daughter, Frankie, at Bestoway. And the combination of all those things helped me realize that the world probably doesn't need another marketing book for me, but probably could benefit from thinking about all of those things at once and realizing that we have so much more power than we want to acknowledge. Thank you for sharing that, Seth. That is more personal than most stories you've shared. And I'll just take a beat on that and would love to hear what happened after that swim, after that phone phone call what did the next week or two look like for you or feel like for you with respect to this germinating seed maybe it was

Starting point is 00:43:37 beyond the seed of significance and shifting perhaps to a focus on that with your communication, with your thinking. What did the subsequent week look like? It's funny because no one's ever asked me that, but it fits right into the question you asked a little while ago about what can people do. I wrote a whole book in two weeks. I said, how can I honor Frankie? How can I honor Jacqueline? How can I honor all of the people who are being brutalized by billionaires in Silicon Valley? How can I honor the climate refugees? How can I honor everybody who has something to lose by doing the thing that some people think I'm good at? and what could I do for Frankie that would be better than this? And so that's why I did it, because writing a book, as you know, is more of a lift than is rational. And I could have just written a few blog posts,

Starting point is 00:44:36 but having people see you do this irrational lift helps them understand that you have something important to say and that maybe they'll share it with somebody else. I'm going to throw out a few terms. Actually, I'll give you two choices and we can go down whichever path you choose or option C, which I don't present. You're good at choosing option C when people say you can choose between A and B. So that may be where we go. Wooden tiles or Quakers, where would you like to go? So let's talk about, I learned something fascinating about the Quakers.

Starting point is 00:45:13 The Quakers invented solitary confinement. And when we think of Quakers, nonviolent, etc., the whole idea, think about the word penitentiary, right? It's where you go to be penitent, to repent. And the idea of solitary confinement was to create the conditions for people to get comfortable with their sins and to repent from them. And then across in England, they built the panopticon, which was a prison where you were under constant surveillance. So this is super low tech. You just put the guardhouse in the middle and make sure the windows are all lined up. So everyone feels like they're being seen all the time. When we add solitary confinement to the Panopticon,

Starting point is 00:46:02 we end up with surveillance capitalism. We end up with this idea, not measuring their output, and counting the clicks, constant surveillance, and for many people, the equivalent of solitary confinement. Well, why are we surprised that turnover is high and work satisfaction is low? Because we stripped meaning from people when they go to work, because we don't trust them to be people. We need them to be resources. And that's why the very phrase human resources is such a challenge because after you've optimized the machines, the next thing to do, of course, is to optimize the people. And, you know, the whole measured self-movement about how can you get better on your bike with Strava, but that's happening to at work, whether you want it to or not.

Starting point is 00:47:10 So let's just say you're the founder of a small company and maybe it started off as a solo operation or husband and wife team. And good news, you seem to have created something that people want or need. And it's growing, so you hire. You hire people. And you have the best of intentions. You believe yourselves to be moral people, ethical people. And that husband and wife team are listening to this podcast. And they have four employees. Maybe they're in a fast growing bakery. Who knows? And it could be any type of business. They have the tiger by the tail.

Starting point is 00:47:54 They're growing quickly. There's not a lot of room for underperformance because a lot of people are wearing a lot of hats. How would you talk to those people? Because they may hear this and say, yes, Seth, I want to value my employees as humans, not just resources. And the reality is we have pretty tight margins. We're attempting to grow quickly. We have a lot of inventory. We need our employees to really perform

Starting point is 00:48:21 at the highest level possible. And if they're not performing, we do need to let them go or replace them. Okay, so we're going to do an aside in a minute in my old voice about freelancers and entrepreneurs and growing a small company. But before we do that, I want to highlight, I am not here to say we need soft to replace hard. I am not here to say that workers benefit when the boss goes easy on them. In fact, I'm talking about the opposite, that the significance of what can be built by Cesar Chavez or what could be built by the Carbon Almanac team for no money has nothing to do with soft or hard. It has to do

Starting point is 00:49:01 with the idea that you make a promise and you keep it. And you need to have a lot of rigor where you are relentlessly criticizing the work, but you are not criticizing the worker. You earn enrollment on the change you seek to make, right? That the original Mac was built by 13 people at a pirate flag, and they worked harder than anybody in Silicon Valley has ever worked before or since, and they didn't get paid very much. And if you talk to Susan years and years and years later, I don't know if she's been on the podcast, but she's great. She will talk about it as being a seminal moment in her life, right? Because they got something done. So that's why we

Starting point is 00:49:48 need to have the aside about freelancers and scale. Freelancing is magic. I am a freelancer. I used to be a freelancer. In between, I was an entrepreneur. They are different jobs. Freelancers get paid when they work. They do the thing and it has their name or something like it on it. It's very hard to scale freelance work. What you need to do is strip away the busy work, outsource it. And what you need to do is get better clients because better clients demand better work and pay you more. But what usually happens when a freelancer starts to succeed is they hire junior versions of themselves and try to push those people to read their mind, work ever harder and faster for less money than they get paid, and then pass it off as their work. That's super stressful, and it almost never works. building something bigger than the two of you, I would say, tell me this thing you're building and why some customers will pay more for it because you added human value. Because if you're trying

Starting point is 00:50:53 to out Amazon, Amazon, you got troubles. Even Walmart can't out Amazon, Amazon. That's not a race you can or want to win. So what we see is if someone is going to build a bakery or a wedding services business or a physical therapy facility, they can win by racing to the top by saying, there are people here who do work you cannot find anywhere else. But do not expect that you're also going to get that work faster and cheaper than you can get it other places because you can't have everything. And if you could make a promise to your customers and your employees can see their contribution to that promise, you're not going to have any trouble at all getting your employees to do what they need to

Starting point is 00:51:42 because you created the conditions for better. You didn't try to manage your way into getting them to give you a bargain. So let me take a step off the highway onto the footpath, the bike path on the side for a second because this is related and very self-interested, but I'll ask it anyway since I guess this whole podcast is pretty self-interested. I get'll ask it anyway. Since I guess this whole podcast is pretty self-interested, I get to have conversations with people I like and respect. But you've known me for a long time now. I would say that I think that's a fair way to put it. We've known each other for a decent stretch. I consider you very good at being aware of your own assumptions, the constraints that you've applied to your life, choosing the

Starting point is 00:52:26 rules, choosing, for instance, a story about money past a certain point, past the requirements, past your basic needs and wants. Money is a story, so choose a story you can be happy with, etc. Is there anything you've observed over time with me where you're like, it's funny, you know, Tim has this sort of conceptual limitation stuck between his teeth all the time and he can't seem to see it when he looks in the mirror. It's always got that spinach between those two teeth and it bothers him. He's always picking at it, but he can't quite get it loose. This is a very long-winded way of asking, what are some of the maybe questions or issues that you seem to come up repeatedly with me? Is there anything that comes to mind? I was completely wrong about my first impression of Tim Ferriss.

Starting point is 00:53:14 And that's because I based it on people who didn't understand what you were trying to do, trying to do that to me. And so I was getting hustled by people who said that you were the person who was teaching them how to hustle. And I didn't bother to spend the time to understand what you were actually doing. And that's completely on me. And you have developed a voice and a contribution to the culture and your community faster and at a younger age than almost anybody I've worked with and way faster than I did. And I don't see any spinach in your teeth. I think that it's unlikely that you knew 16 years ago that you would be having conversations like this, that you would have built this platform and leverage you have to teach so many people things. But at the same time, when the opportunities have arisen, you have been really smart about saying, no, I don't want to be a judge on Shark Tank. And no, I don't want to figure out how to hustle people to pay me on Cameo. You're saying, I have something to narrate here for people, whether or not I know exactly what tomorrow's going to be like. And it's not easy to do that regularly at the level that you do it with the amount that you put out. So I know you

Starting point is 00:54:43 weren't fishing for me to say this, but I've needed to say it in public because in private, in my head, for the first nine months that I sort of knew you, I didn't really know you. I appreciate that, Seth. And I should provide a little context for folks. And the context is when we have dinner together on the East Coast, or I guess it's always on the East coast because you're very good at setting your geographic bounds. I ask you for a lot of advice and you're very forgiving and tolerant of me asking many, many questions, which I really deeply appreciate. So that question came from a genuine place. And thanks for the very kind words. I love doing this. I love having these conversations. And there's absolutely no way I

Starting point is 00:55:33 ever could have foreseen this being my quote unquote job 16 years ago. No way. Absolutely not. And I think probably four or five years from now, whatever I am doing then, I will have the same statement for. There, oh, you studied mechanical engineering, so you're going to be a mechanical engineer for the next 70 years and then you'll die. And that's not what humans are capable of. What a joy to be able to say, I have no idea what I will be saying and doing in five years. What a privilege then. It is. I feel really fortunate.

Starting point is 00:56:21 Can we talk about false proxies for a minute? Let's talk about false proxies. I'll let you lead the way. Okay. So people might be wondering about the wooden tile. So I have a 70-watt laser cutter in my basement. Doesn't everybody? And so I make these things that are like I Ching cart. And so instead of having notes or something,

Starting point is 00:56:40 I just really like the texture of them. So that's what the wooden tiles are. And so there's a wooden tile right here that says false proxies. False proxies, we need proxies when we go shopping at the supermarket, because if you're going to buy ketchup, you're not allowed to taste the ketchup before you buy the ketchup. So the label on the bottle is a proxy for what's inside of it. And we're even capable, as consumers, of figuring out,

Starting point is 00:57:05 we haven't had this particular flavor of salad dressing before, but we can guess from the other clues that it's going to be good or not good. And we use proxies to pick which restaurant to go to and proxies to figure out what book to buy because you're not going to read the book until after you buy it.

Starting point is 00:57:21 Judging a book by its cover is a very common and important thing. At work, we developed proxies because we have to hire people for a 20, 30, 40-year career before they work for us. So one proxy is, did you go to a famous college? One proxy is, are there any typos on your resume? One proxy is, are you good at interviewing? But of course, unless you're hiring someone to be an interviewer, being good at interviewing is a false proxy. Yeah. And the thing about false proxies is they lead to caste systems, to social stratification,

Starting point is 00:57:59 to prejudice, to misogyny, because we are quickly making decisions on who to swipe left or right based on clues that aren't actually related to whether the person can do the job or not. If someone is in a wheelchair, they might be a great programmer. Whether or not they're in a wheelchair is irrelevant to whether they're a great programmer. And yet, it's 2023 and it's still happening. So there's all of this information that's now available to us where we can look at the work instead of looking at the proxies. So the simple solution, which I've been lucky enough to adopt, is I won't work with someone unless I've worked with them before. And that means I will pay someone to do a short project and I pay them whether they do a good job or not.

Starting point is 00:58:45 But if they're good at the project, now I know that they're good at the project because they did the project. And with all of the stuff that's happening in our world, with the rate of change that's going on, with the need for people not who know something they learned at school, because they can look it up online, it's stock overflow in two minutes. What we need are people who are resilient and risk-taking and honest and transparent and connected and loyal and all these other words, which don't match up with the proxies we usually use when we decide who to hire, who to let into an institution, who to reward, who to follow online. So I think it's important to just name it. There are false proxies in our life, and they're expensive. They get in the way of our output, and they also steal our souls, and they denature our culture. Because when a proxy becomes important, when, for example, a celebrity gets the benefit of

Starting point is 00:59:46 the doubt, what we've done is we've handed this person leverage that isn't really helping anybody. Did I hear you correctly, Seth? And if so, I'd love to hear you expand on this a bit, that you only work with people you've worked with before. Did I hear that correctly, or was that a different line? No, no. So what I mean is if I'm going to do a project, the old way to do it was to look at the 10 million viable people, pick the one who has the shiniest set of easily measured proxies and hire them. And I have hired hundreds of people that way. And for a while, I told myself I was really good at it, and then I thought about it, and I realized I just thought I was really good at it because of all the people I didn't hire

Starting point is 01:00:31 because they didn't match my perception of what I was looking for. And what I learned, particularly working on the Carbon Almanac, is everyone was a volunteer. Everyone got the keys, you know, take the car for a drive. And if you did something that was really good, we asked you to do more. And if you didn't, we asked you to do something different because the work was the point. And so now I'm working on this interesting software pilot thing. And I went to people who I've seen do projects and who I've danced with before,

Starting point is 01:01:05 not based on where they live. One lived in Nigeria, one lives in London, one lives in Portland. I've seen your work. I don't know you personally. The personal stuff is an interesting proxy, but it doesn't usually match. So let's dance again. And once we can seek enrollment, once we can say to the world, I'm looking for a freelancer who wants to make this change in the world. This project is this size and I'm going to pay you this much to do it. We can use our human judgment to decide who to offer the project to. But then when the project comes back, this one hour, one week project, yeah, pay them fairly and then decide based on the work product, whether it's useful.

Starting point is 01:01:49 This is exactly the way Matt builds WordPress. That automatic is a reading and writing culture where if you're good at reading and writing, you get to do more stuff. But there's no point for being good in a Zoom meeting. No one gets promoted for that. No, definitely with Matt, no being good in a Zoom meeting. No one gets promoted to that. Definitely with Matt. No one gets promoted for Zoom meetings. And you do have to do some customer service, which I think is actually a fantastic practice.

Starting point is 01:02:12 Even if you're C-suite, you get to spend a couple of weeks answering customer tickets. Question for you about employee retention. And I'd love to hear you speak to your personal experience. You've hired many people, and this may not map directly to the writing or the principles in the Song of Significance. It may, but I'm wondering, because hiring is one thing, retaining is a close cousin, but not exactly the same. And there are people out there, I know quite a few people, who are really good at putting in the time to hire really good people, but they haven't been able to, for whatever reason, observing others, some of the key ingredients or possible approaches to ensuring that you retain high performers? So if we look back just 50 years, the purpose of a company town is if you are the landlord, it's much harder for someone to quit.

Starting point is 01:03:22 That the goal of the old school industrialist is that your employees have no options. Because if they have no options, you don't have to pay them very much. Let's compare that to an ad agency. I read a book about them many years ago called St. Luke's in London. There were 30 people.

Starting point is 01:03:38 They won a whole bunch of awards. When you win a bunch of awards as an ad agency, what happens is you get a whole bunch of fancy new clients, which means you have to hire more people, which means the average goes down. And then you get big enough that you've exhausted and you sell it to Saatchi and Saatchi, and then you're done. And the 30 of them looked at each other and they said, we don't want to do that. So they made a rule. And the rule is we're never going to be more than 30 people. They then said to their clients, that means we can't take any new clients unless we lose an old client.

Starting point is 01:04:11 So they have a waiting list of clients. We have a waiting list of clients. You can go to your old clients with your best ideas. And if they give you a hard time, you can say you're fired because I got another client ready to take your place. And it also means that if you're only going to have 30 employees, if someone wants to leave, let them leave. There's a waiting list of people who want to work there.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Turnover is a good thing when we are doing human work, not a bad thing. And what I would do if I was running a real company is I would say, the first thing you got to do on your first day is update your LinkedIn page and keep it up to date. And we're going to have a resume job finding seminar every two weeks here. I don't want you to stay here because you can't get a better job. I want you to stay here because the conditions we've created, the work we are doing is worth you staying here for. And then I would listen. If I am not creating the conditions where the people who I need to be dancing with want to stay, I have to change the conditions, not curse the people who

Starting point is 01:05:16 are leaving. And this permeability is where the future lies. We don't have 40-year careers anymore. We have four-month careers or three-year careers. So onboarding is faster because you can say to somebody, read everything in Slack, come to work tomorrow ready to start because it's all there, right? So now instead of onboarding you in a month and a half, I onboarded you in three hours. And because we're project-oriented, turnover is a little different. And if I can keep somebody here for a long time, it's because they want to stay here. This enrollment is the key. Minad Khosla has written a book called Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play about B2B selling. But the lesson of Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play is simple. What promises are you going to

Starting point is 01:06:03 make this week? Promises about your career, promises about your learning, promises to our customers. Show us your work. We will relentlessly make it better. This is how we're going to treat each other. If this is the right place for you, I hope you'll stay.

Starting point is 01:06:17 If it's not the right place for you, I hope we can agree that it's not. But seeking retention doesn't feel right to me. So let me just elaborate on this book because it's overlooked and so beautiful. If you're in business-to-business selling, selling expensive, committed items to large organizations, large organizations can now find out everything they need without calling a salesperson. So the intelligent, trained, expensive salesperson benefits by saying to the prospect on the first day, look, you've told me you have this big problem you need to solve. You have a $5 million assembly line that's letting you down. If we can

Starting point is 01:06:59 solve this problem together, are you ready to install our system? Because if it's not real, let's not play. Don't waste my time. I won't waste yours. You're not going to buy from me because I'm going to take you to the golf course. You're not going to buy from me because our RFP is going to come in cheaper than somebody else's. You want my valuable time. I'm going to engage with you and tell you the truth and you'll tell me the truth. You're going to draw your org chart for me. You're going to tell me other complicated products you've bought and why your company bought them. And I'm going to get you promoted by teaching you how to buy the thing that's going to save your assembly line. Let's get real or let's not play. That kind of selling is how you sell a $10 million product. You don't do

Starting point is 01:07:42 it by spamming people and pretending you know their favorite color. Yes. Very true. This is truth. I long ago in a former life when I had a lot more hair and was just out of college was selling to CEOs and CTOs. And you do not sell expensive systems by guessing their favorite color or even having that conversation. In fact, it'll be really counterproductive. The topic of sales makes me think of Zig Ziglar. And I'm wondering, out of my own personal curiosity, were there things that come to mind where you disagreed with Zig? Maybe you respected his position or a principle he had, but you personally did not embrace whatever it was that he used as part of his own script for navigating the world

Starting point is 01:08:35 and people. Is there anything that you disagreed on? Many things, and we did it as friends. So it's funny, Zig has come up twice today before you brought him up, which is weird. I sent a picture of him holding one of my books to someone just four hours ago. Zig was my teacher from afar for a long time. I memorized more than 72 hours of his tapes. I listened to the selling tapes until they wore out, and then I bought another set. And I saw him in person a bunch of times, and each time brought him a letter afterwards, and each I bought another set. And I saw him in person a bunch of times and each time wrote him a letter afterwards and each time he wrote back. And my letter would highlight the

Starting point is 01:09:10 things that worked and talk about the things that didn't. And one of the highlights of my speaking career was when he and I shared a stage in front of 22,000 people. It was pretty cool. And then I got to publish his goals book toward the end of his life. Zig and I disagreed about astrology and yoga because he was coming at it from a different cultural point of view from Yazoo City, Mississippi. And we were like, okay, we can disagree about stuff like that and organized religion and things like that. What was interesting is when my understanding of permission marketing evolved and Zig's key sentence of, you can get everything in life you want if you'll just help enough other people get what they want, kept coming up. Because he meant it two ways and one of the ways didn't work for me. He would say, you can get everything in life you

Starting point is 01:10:05 want if you help enough other people get what they want as a way of encouraging self-interested short-term people to see that the best way to get ahead was to do a favor for someone else because that forced empathy opened the door to making a sale. And what shifted for me over time was, how about you can get everything in life you want, and you can help other people get what they want, but they're not one gets you the other one. That what we have is the chance to hold open the door and let somebody else go in, not because we want them to give us something in return, but simply because holding open the door is in itself a significant, useful act that will fuel our next cycle of war. And we talked about it a little bit

Starting point is 01:10:59 toward the end of his life, but what Zig did for a lot of folks is help them become professional instead of just hustling. And I also learned a lot about living the life of the professional speaker and I could go on and on. But if your listeners haven't listened to a bunch of Zig, yes, it's dated, but you can find the good stuff and be glad you did. Where would you suggest people start, or what would you suggest they search for? Because the universe of Zig, as you mentioned, 62 hours is a starting point.

Starting point is 01:11:33 Where might you suggest they start? What should they look for? The stories in the book, Secrets of Closing the Sale, are gold. I could tell word for word the story of the overalls. And his original classic, See You at the Top, also filled with stories. When I was starting out, I failed for seven years in a row. It was a very long slot. And his tapes, which you can still get today on CD, also filled with

Starting point is 01:12:00 nothing but stories, were super dated even then, but so cheesy and wonderful that if you listen for an hour a day, you can't help but not quit. And to give us an image in time, what were you failing at over that period of time as you listened to these audio cassettes and wore them out? So my first job was in 1983 at a software company in Boston. I worked with Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury. I was a brand manager. I was 24 years old.

Starting point is 01:12:32 It was spectacular. And then I left there, moved to New York and started my own gig and just kept failing at the book business. Chip Conley and I did our first book together and then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. That meant every day I opened the mailbox and three people had taken the time to write me a letter with my name on it and put a stamp on it saying, we don't like your project and we don't like you either. And it's very easy in the face that, and then, you know, I was just pitching and pitching and

Starting point is 01:13:01 pitching and often in a way that amused me but was selfish. And I was pitching to people whose job was to be pitched. I wasn't calling people up on the phone at home, right? This was the head of acquisitions at Simon & Schuster, whatever it was. But when the rejections feel personal, if you don't have a way to keep caring, but understand that what they are rejecting is the work, not the person, it's super easy to give up. And that was the transition that I needed to make. You didn't like this idea. It's not that you didn't like me. What can I learn from your criticism of the idea so that the next one will be better? You strike me as someone who's quite happy to have solo time, engage in solo projects, maybe a project with a family member or something else, like building canoes. That could be a whole

Starting point is 01:13:58 conversation in and of itself. How are you building? Are you building a community orchestra for yourself it seems to alleviate a lot of the existential dread and mitigate some of the nihilism that people feel. If they simply have some type of shared purpose or activity with a few people consistently, how are you thinking about that for yourself? This is just me. I don't know how to broaden this to everybody. So the reputation I had from the beginning was, I don't miss deadlines. I never go over budget. And I'm going to deliver you what I said I was going to deliver you. And no one who has worked for me has ever been part of a layoff. People have lost their jobs because it wasn't a good fit. But I've never said, all you guys, we're downsizing. When Google

Starting point is 01:15:05 shut down Squidoo in one day with no warning and no honest explanation as to why, my eight co-workers and I all went down together, but the promises I make, I make very seriously. So that's good and it's bad. It means that I hesitate to make big promises that might create the possibility that the big thing is going to happen. But on the other hand, I can live with the confidence of knowing that you can count on me to keep that promise.

Starting point is 01:15:38 So when I think about what am I going to do for my next five or 10 year gig, I think very hard about who am I going to do for my next five or 10 year gig, I think very hard about who am I promising and what am I promising them. So I can't say to people what I used to say, which is, we're renting this theater, come and for seven hours, I will be on stage answering questions. And by the way, I'm organizing the whole thing with one volunteer and I'm going to serve you lunch. That's what I used to do. And 400 people would come. It was thrilling to stand there for seven hours and weave together all the answers.

Starting point is 01:16:11 If I announced I was going to do that, I could sell it. But I couldn't keep that promise for sure. I don't want to do that because I don't want to, as my career evolves and has a different pace, try to regain my ability to ski at high speed. Not what I'm trying to do. So where is that sense of community? The Carbon Almanac was that and continues to be,

Starting point is 01:16:36 but there's going to be another one. And I think about whether I need it to be in person or whether this future you and I have been describing for so long is real. And it it to be in person or whether this future you and I have been describing for so long is real. And it won't be in person because I'm very comfortable engaging with people who aren't sharing the same hair as me. And most of all, is it worth doing for others?

Starting point is 01:16:57 Not, am I just here to entertain myself? Seth, what else would you like to talk about here? We can go in a million directions. What else do you have on your wooden tiles? You want to talk about? Okay. So I want to tell the story of the piano cover at the B Conference, and then I want to talk about meetings.

Starting point is 01:17:18 Is that okay? Sounds great. Okay. So I'm about to go on stage in front of these entrepreneurs, all of whom have raised far more money than I've ever raised, all of whom are young whippersnappers who are going to save the planet. I got no slides or anything. I'm just there at this beautiful winery north to like Yountville or Boonville or something.

Starting point is 01:17:38 This is in Australia or somewhere else? No, no. This was, I haven't been to Australia in a long time. This is north of San Francisco. Got it. And I need a shtick. I need some anecdote to get started.

Starting point is 01:17:51 And off to the side is a piano in one of those quilted piano covers. Can you visualize that? You know, they have those special custom-made piano covers.

Starting point is 01:18:00 And on top of the piano is one of those little metal things that says, do not place anything on top of this. And on top of the piano is one of those little metal things that says, do not place anything on top of this. And on top of that is the sign, but I can't read the sign. So I walk over because that's going to be my shtick, which is, did you ever notice that people put a do not put a sign on top of that? And on the sign, it says, this is the original Steinway Grand D piano. Not an original, the original from 1884.

Starting point is 01:18:33 And I had my story. I went over and I said, the folks who built that Steinway in 1884 had no idea that 140 years later, it would be working, it would be creating magic, and we would be talking about it. And I said, there's no guarantee that what we do is going to be around in 140 years, but we could act like it might be. We could say, this thing we're doing together is not to say, how do we raise as much money as we can? Or how do we get written up well on this blog site or whatever? It's important. And there are lots of kinds of important. It could be important to one person. It could be important a century from now,

Starting point is 01:19:18 but this idea that the piano is still here, that just, it gave me chills. I love that piano cover. That is wild too. The original experience just to be able to touch something like that or be close to it. Wild. So meetings? Meetings. I have been obsessed with these for a long time and have lived a different path for meetings. Our friend Toby at Shopify wrote a script that deleted every group meeting that was regularly scheduled in the whole company. And then the next day sent an email to everyone in the company and said, I just bought you back your day. Because if you have 10,000 employees and there are all these weekly or daily meetings, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars of wasted time. But on top of that, we're talking about the enervating, brain-deadening idea of watching someone talk because they couldn't care enough to take the time to send a memo instead.

Starting point is 01:20:21 Or couldn't care enough to just record a 10-minute video and send it to everyone to watch as many times as they wanted, slower, faster, read the transcript, and then get back to them. And Toby said, if you really need the meeting, go ahead and put it back on your calendar. You're welcome. And what meetings have become. So Zoom is a miracle because Zoom eliminates geography when it comes to being able to connect with people. And memos were a miracle because they eliminated time. They're asynchronous. And when we add video to this,

Starting point is 01:20:54 what we get is either we're going to have everyone get together for an hour so I can talk at you and I can take attendance based on you sitting there. And what we know from surveys is people hate this. It's one of the things they hate the most about their day. And it's a form of power, authority, status, and control. So conversations need to happen more. Meetings need to happen never. You can have conversations all day.

Starting point is 01:21:24 You can have a two-minute conversation, a six-minute conversation, talk to this person or that person. But a conversation means there are questions and there are answers. People are talking to each other. Everyone is changed at the end. A meeting is a delivery of information for the convenience of the person who called it. And I think it is possible. I know it is possible. We never once had a meeting the whole time we built the Carbon Almanac. There were times I sent a video to people and said, this is what's up, watch it if you want to. But because we were in time zones around the world,

Starting point is 01:21:55 a meeting wouldn't have made any sense. We had things where I said, I'm having office hours. You can come ask questions, but I didn't do that other thing. And it feels to me like the future of the resilient organization is a lot closer to what Matt does at Automatic, which is how do we build this asynchronous, geography-free institution that doesn't depend on me making stuff up while I'm on camera? Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 01:22:30 And for people who may not have caught his name before, Matt Mullenweg is his name. He's been on this podcast a number of times, and he also has been part of a podcast, and this is, I believe, automatic produced, called Distributed. I may be getting the name wrong, but it is entirely about distributed organizations and unorthodox ways of approaching the type of thing that we're discussing right now. Meanings or lack thereof, different means of communication, et cetera. And he's been distributed first for a very, very, very long time. So they were incredibly prepared, albeit coincidentally, for everything that happened during lockdown and so on. Right.

Starting point is 01:23:09 Well, but coincidentally, everyone else was unprepared. Have you seen what his team has built with ChatGPT for blogs? Has he shown you the version yet? I don't know if it's public. I have seen screenshots, but yeah. Is it public? I don't know. It's not public, but we're only talking.

Starting point is 01:23:24 So we're allowed to talk. Okay. Go for it. So if you want to talk. I was just going to say, it is the single best use I have seen of chat GPT or whatever they're using being implemented in a way where it's not just a talking llama. It's actually, oh yeah, I need this. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 01:23:48 They create some amazing products. So yes, that'll be the teaser, the teaser for people for things to come. I'm just here for the hype. That's what I think when I say that, when I think Seth Godin. Oh, Seth, is there anything else you would like to chat about before we begin to... Okay, so your listeners love tips.

Starting point is 01:24:10 I got one last tactic tip that changed the lives of a lot of people, and then we'll do the magical wrap-up stuff. We invented something called page 19 thinking, and we knew there was going to be page 19 of the almanac. It was going to be written, copy edited, illustrated, typeset, footnoted, but there wasn't one person on our team who knew how to make page 19. And so we said to the team, we know in the future there will be a page 19. We know that it will come from this group, but we also know there's not anyone here who's qualified.

Starting point is 01:24:42 So what should we do? And the answer is someone should write a paragraph of page 19 and say, please make this better. And then someone else will add to that and someone else will footnote that and someone else will illustrate that. And we will relentlessly criticize page 19 without one saying the person who worked on it was wrong or incompetent. And page 19 thinking, I've always had page 19 thinking, I didn't need it. But so many people, when they heard this, felt the freedom to now speak up and contribute because they knew it was going to get better. And if you think about it, that's Apple, that's Ford, that's every company you can name. Sergey did not program the Google you are using today. It started with a little tiny German and someone and someone and someone and someone and someone.

Starting point is 01:25:33 When you feel stuck, just look for page 19 thinking. And is the way to look for page 19 thinking to take the pressure off by lowering your expectations in a sense so that you can iterate your way to excellence? Is this applicable to a solo shop or a very small shop? Could you maybe elaborate on what you mean, what it could mean to embrace that thinking? It puts the pressure on. It doesn't take the pressure off. It puts the pressure on. It doesn't take the pressure off.

Starting point is 01:26:05 It puts the pressure on. Because you can no longer be a prima donna who says, I'm afraid someone's going to punch me in the nose. Because you have to say, my nose is not involved. And I heard Danny's great story about my nose, and it made me smile. This is Danny Meyer, folks, for people who don't know. After he broke my nose, he offered to straighten it out. And as you can see in the video, it's still crooked. But once you understand

Starting point is 01:26:33 that you live in a page 19 world, the pressure is on for you to put out work that can generously be criticized. Don't ship junk, not allowed, but create the conditions for the thing you're noodling on to become real. That doesn't happen by you hoarding it until it's perfect. It happens by you creating a process for it to get better. So now you're on the hook. Fish don't like to be on the hook. People should be on the hook.

Starting point is 01:27:04 I love it. And I was thinking of how this might apply to my own. And I have, since we last spoke, been writing fiction and shipping fiction. I'm not saying it's Ursula K. Le Guin, but I'm happy with it. I am on the hook and I've tried to create, I haven't found exactly what I think will be most helpful later, but to create an environment in which perfect is not the enemy of good, but that I also have a means of not shipping garbage, right? And actually having people review my work. How do you like to solicit feedback on writing? This is, I know, a tangent, but if you reach out to people to proofread or review drafts of something you've put together,

Starting point is 01:27:49 how do you enable them to be the best proofreaders? Three words and then some definitions. The three words are criticism, feedback, and advice. I'm terrible at criticism. Don't like criticism. You're terrible at receiving it. I'm okay with good feedback. Receiving it, yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:07 Criticizing people, no problem. But being criticized, not my thing. Feedback, good feedback is precious. But advice, advice I can handle. Because advice is one human who's on the side of the other human helping them turn on lights. Now, when it comes to writing, there is line editing, copy editing,

Starting point is 01:28:30 developmental editing, and proofreading. They do not mean the same thing. Proofreading means, did the changes that were instructed to be made get made? So proofreading is sort of trivial. Copy editing says, what do you think about the Oxford comma? Copy editing says, I don't like the way you spelled this kind of thing. Line editing says, this sentence would be better if you move the second half to the first half, that I'm going to smooth your voice out.

Starting point is 01:29:01 And developmental editing is magic. It's, I read your work. Let's just talk in general about the change you seek to make and why it could be made better in a different way. So I work with the magical Nikki Papadopoulos at Penguin, mostly because her developmental editing is the best I've ever encountered. She says, the title of the book is wrong and you need to move these three chapters to the end. Like, what's that worth? That's spectacular. But I will confess if she's not listening that before I send her a book, I send it to a paid copy editor who works for me. I don't work for him. And for a thousand dollars, he copy edits the book. So he's not allowed to change any of my voice, but he fixes every one of the little things.

Starting point is 01:29:52 So when I send it to Penguin, they think, wow, this guy's so good at all the detail. No, I'm not. Dr. Aker is, but you don't know he exists because I sent it to him before I sent it to you. So the point is, you will run into people who think that the most important thing they can tell you is you're missing a comma in the third line. This is not helpful. This work is now cheap. It's free online. You can just upload a file and someone will fix it for you. But developmental editors, they're priceless. You need to find someone who has that as a skill. Opinions don't matter. That's why the whole thing with logos, don't show anybody your logo and don't tell anybody your new kid's name before they're born. Because everyone thinks they have an opinion

Starting point is 01:30:36 about a logo, but no one's got expertise. It's none of their business. Pick your logo and do your logo. The same thing's true with your kid's name. And when you show your writing to an amateur, they're going to give you logo advice. The book isn't for them. You need to engage with people who the book is for, watch what they do with it, see what lights them up. So in my case, after permission marketing, hearing people say back to me which parts of the book resonated with them taught me how to write the next book. Because I didn't ask anybody, how do I make this book better? I just said, I wrote this book. And seeing what they did, I gave them more of that.

Starting point is 01:31:17 By extension, Zig could have taken the fact that you know the overall story word for word and be like, okay, interesting. Let's take a look at why that worked and maybe I'll give him an extra heaping dose of something like the overall story in the next book. Exactly. And I know for a fact that that's exactly what Zig did. So Seth, the new book is The Song of Significance, subtitle, A New Manifesto for Teams. People can find you at sethgodin.com, seths.blog. Is there anything else you would like to add? Any requests you would like to make of my audience? Any complaints you'd like to lodge formally? Criticisms, maybe. Or anything else you would like to say before we wrap up? I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I get to do this.

Starting point is 01:32:06 And I'm feeling the murmurs of generosity and abundance replacing the small-minded scarcity that was so common for so long as people hustled their way through one thing after another over the last bunch of years. And I think as we all come out of, hopefully come out of this worldwide pandemic, their way through one thing after another over the last bunch of years.

Starting point is 01:32:29 And I think as we all come out of, hopefully come out of this worldwide pandemic, people are taking a deep breath and focusing on contribution and generosity. And all I can tell you is I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for you and for the people who support my work, just making things better. Because if not that, what? So thank you. Thank you so much, Seth. And to everybody listening, we'll have everything that we discussed in the show notes and probably quite a bit more at tim.blogs.com podcast, where you can find this and show notes on every other episode. And until next time, just to be a bit nicer than is necessary to yourself and to other people,

Starting point is 01:33:07 make things just a bit better. Have that extra conversation. Say that extra nice word. Do what you can. It doesn't have to be huge. Probably shouldn't be huge because then you can hide behind that as we've covered in previous episodes.

Starting point is 01:33:19 Make it small, make it matter. And until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Starting point is 01:33:37 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me

Starting point is 01:34:05 by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog.com slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog.com slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for

Starting point is 01:34:51 big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life. And you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third-party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine. They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when

Starting point is 01:35:25 I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008 when I became an advisor, and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required. Access powerful

Starting point is 01:36:05 tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day-to-day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome, the Build a Business competition and other things. Plus, with 24-7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources, you don't need to feel alone in this case. More than a store, Shopify grows with you and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to shopify.com slash Tim to sign up for a $1 per month trial period. It is a

Starting point is 01:36:46 great deal for a great service. So I encourage you to check it out. Take your business to the next level today and learn more by visiting shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim, all lowercase. This episode is brought to you by Allbirds. Incredibly comfortable shoes, sustainably made with design rooted in simplicity i am speaking from experience here i've been wearing all birds for the last several months and i've been alternating between two pairs i'm traveling with them right now i started with the tree runners in marine blue in case you're curious and now i'm wearing the tree dashers and the tree dashers are my current daily driver. I wear them for everything. They're easy to slip on, easy to tie. Everything about them is just easy, easy, simple, simple.

Starting point is 01:37:31 I stick with the blue hues and the dashers in this case are in buoyant blue. The color pops, I've received a ton of compliments, but putting the color aside, the tree dasher is an everyday running and walking shoe that's also great for light workouts. It's super comfortable, and I've been testing it on long walks in Austin. I've also been testing it on the trails and pavement in places like New Zealand. And let's come back to the sustainability. I mentioned that earlier. In the Allbirds Innovation Lab, they research how to make the most out of sustainable materials like leather made from plants, sugar cane, and tree fibers.

Starting point is 01:38:02 In fact, the Tree Dasher is made with eucalyptus tree fiber. That's something also found in New Zealand. Eucalyptus tree fiber to create a lighter and more responsive shoe. Allbirds is making shoes better than natural. They are super natural. Find your perfect pair at allbirds.com today and use code TIM, that's T-I-M, for free socks with a purchase of $48 or more. That's allbirds.com using code TIM, that's T-I-M, for free socks with a purchase of $48 or more. That's allbirds.com using code TIM, A-L-L-B-I-R-D-S.com. One more time, allbirds.com using code TIM.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #672: Seth Godin — The Pursuit of Meaning, The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Your Attitude, Overcoming Rejection, Life Lessons from Zig Ziglar, and Committing to Making Positive Change

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #672: Seth Godin — The Pursuit of Meaning, The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Your Attitude, Overcoming Rejection, Life Lessons from Zig Ziglar, and Committing to Making Positive Change

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