#43: Seth Godin, Author and Marketing Strategist — showing up for yourself, creating conditions f...

Well, hello. Today is a very exciting day because today I talk to the legendary Seth Godin. Seth Godin calls himself a teacher. He's also widely known as a marketing guru, and he's the author of about 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, This Is Marketing, and The Practice. Seth has also written a daily blog for over a decade. You can find it at Seth's seths.blog, that's S-E-T-H-S.blog. And this is how he describes himself there. For more than 30 years, I've been trying to turn on lights, inspire people, and teach them how to level up. Speaking from personal experience, I would just say that Seth is one of the most incredibly generous and encouraging people I've ever met. I trooped up the Hudson to his office in Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester, New York, and we talked about the key insight in his very first job that shaped his entire career and how he dealt with massive rejection early in life. We also talked about his recent near-death experience and how that affected him and why that was the catalyst for his new book, Song of Significance. And I loved our discussion about how Seth gets motivation when he's not feeling quite himself. You'll find that very enlightening. What can I tell you? This is a phenomenal episode, so let's get right into it. Please enjoy my conversation with the remarkable Seth Godin.

Seth, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be here in your incredible home in Hastings-on-Hudson.

In real life. We're not, we're not in my home because I'm so messy that I can't do this at home. We're in an apartment nearby.

Okay, got it. Thanks for the clarification. We're in an apartment near your home and it's amazing and it's a riot of color and pictures and just so many visual stimulation. So I wanted to start by asking you, you know, your career is full of generosity and teaching and making things that matter. You've written over 8,000 blog posts and you showed up again over, over and over again for decades and you've become kind of a big deal. So I'm curious, you know, I'm just curious, was there a moment that you realized you were not just Seth Godin, but the Seth Godin?

You know, I have been Seth Godin my whole life, as long as I can remember. No one's ever called me anything but that. I won the parent lottery and I'm well aware of it. And both my parents modeled for me a behavior of generosity, community leadership. But it's very easy in the day-to-day to get stuck in the noise in our head and to think that, you know, the world has amnesia. It has no idea who you are, right?

Every time I've tried to fight that by wanting to say to somebody, don't you know, I have regretted it either by taking action on that and speaking up or by not taking action and acting like somebody should know who I am.

The fact is, My bestselling book was not read by 99% of the people in the United States. To a rounding error, nobody has read any of my books. To a rounding error, almost no one has read my blog. Less than 1% of the internet population has ever seen my blog.

And life is just so much easier if my assumption is that I have to prove something to this new person today.

Hmm.

About what is possible as opposed to saying, well, I earned the right to be selfish today.

That's a beautiful way to think about it. What do you mean my life is easier?

Well, everyone has a noise in their head.

It's called tsundere. The moment you realize that, that other people have fears and dreams and hopes the way you have fears and dreams and hopes.

Once you realize it, empathy becomes inevitable.

Because suddenly your noise isn't the only noise. And that doesn't forgive the person who cuts you off in traffic or acts selfishly or is a bully or a bore, but it might explain part of what they're doing. And if you've chosen to be in this spot today, in this world, well, the people you chose to be with are playing with the noise in their head. So what are you gonna do about it? You can insist and demand that they adopt your noise, or you can do something that's a lot more useful, which is acknowledge that they have a noise in their heads too.

Mm-hmm. So coming from that point of view is kind of just realize there's a connectedness to other humanity.

There's a connectedness, but I, I'm loath to say that this is all about being some sort of, uh, selfless altruistic do-gooder.

Mm-hmm.

You know, you pointed out that I've written 8,000 blog posts.

I've never had an ad. I've never made a penny from my blog.

And the reason is because early on I said to myself, either I'm going to please the affiliate manager or the advertiser or not.

And if I please the audience, I'm in congruence with them and things are simpler and more likely to work. Whereas if I'm torn, sooner or later I'm going to offend one of the two parties in a way I didn't anticipate. So I'll actually achieve my goals better if I'm very clear about why I'm here and who it's for.

Mm-hmm.

That's so well said. Thank you for sharing that. You know, I wanted to, without going much further, I wanted to really talk about the experience you recently had, which you talked about in the Rich Roll Show, which was a near-death experience. So Glad you're alive. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say glad you're alive. Can you tell us about what happened?

Well, it's probably more interesting to me than most people.

I was swimming in the ocean off San Clemente very early in the morning. I swim most days. I'm a pretty good swimmer, but I'm also in my 60s and I don't have a lot of experience with a riptide. And it became clear to me after a couple minutes that it was very unlikely I was ever going to be back on shore. I was moving faster than I have ever moved in a motorboat. It was astonishing. And I thought about all the people I would miss, my family and others. And then I thought about the fact that I had work left to do. And for whatever reason, I found the focus and the energy to get over that thing that was keeping me out there. And I made it back by the skin of my teeth. But that led to the new book, The Sign of Significance, because It came right out of me. I mean, it only took 2 weeks to write. It took 10 years to think about.

Hmm.

But I realized we don't get many chances to sing our song and we don't get many opportunities to open the door for other people. And sometimes it feels like we're going to live forever, but no one ever has. Um, so let's get real.

Mm-hmm. You did it when you got to shore. I definitely wanna talk about your book. Definitely. And yet I'm wondering when you got to shore, like what was that moment like?

Um, I think that it was probably, uh, driven by a variety of released brain chemicals, but it was mostly a realization that mortality comes with responsibility and that I was eager to not waste the moment I had.

That's so useful for all of us to remember, even, even though we don't have this near-death experience every day, we're all busy dying. So how did that then lead to The Song of Significance? Like, what was there like that day? You're like, I'm going to write it. I'm going to write this book. 'Cause it's inside of me.

I'm super lucky to have written a bunch of books.

And before that, I was a book packager and I did 120 books. But you gotta be insane to make a book now. They don't reach very many people and they take a very long time to bring to the world. Lots of people will say to an author, I love your book, I even finished it. No one says to a movie director, I love the movie, can you believe I made it to the end?

I even finished it.

And, uh, so true.

So I only write a book as a last resort.

And what will happen is I will see things in the real world and decide that there's a blog post there, or maybe a slide in a presentation. But I will only decide something is a book if it will not let me go. And I think what happened when I got out of the water is it didn't take very long for me to say, this isn't a blog post, this is a book.

Hmm.

So let's talk about the book. I want to hear, I want to hear about it and I want to hear, you know, what does it mean to be significant and why is it a song?

Okay.

So around, uh, in the fall of 2022, it was fascinating to watch a billionaire bully take over a company and publicly humiliate and fire the people who were loyal to that company. And also really weird to see people cheer him on. That's how deep the indoctrination of industrialism goes. That the indoctrination, indoctrination of industrialism is the people with the money make the rules, and somehow they got the money because they deserved it, and they deserve obedience and respect simply because they're walking in with this other currency.

And we invented all of that just recently. The kings always got that, but not anybody but kings or maybe popes. We invented it because industrialism paid so many benefits to so many people. Once you put a machine in place and that machine is productive, it makes a lot of money and it makes a lot of stuff. That stuff gets cheaper. People get more stuff.

So the typical person today has more power and stuff than the King of France did the last time there was a King of France.

So it was a pretty interesting deal. Change the public schools, change the healthcare system, change the way we spend our days, change the way we spend our nights, change entertainment, change culture, and you'll get all these toys.

But what is happening right now with AI, with outsourcing, with, um, organizations shrinking in size and everything else? Is the industrialists are breaking their end of the bargain and people are starting to notice. And so the reason it's called The Song of Significance is because I became obsessed with beehives, bee colonies. And what I write about in the book is what Jacqueline Friedman calls the song of increase. And that is when a feral beehive will leap from where it was and take an extraordinary risk, risking the lives of every bee in the hive to get to the next thing, to become something it is capable of becoming. The Song of Increase is a miracle to see and to watch and to be part of. Um, and as soon as they do it, they then form a tight ball and sing the Song of Safety, which is if their body temperature changes much above Or below 98, they die. So they have to maintain this tight cohesion in order to stay at the right temperature.

But we're not bees.

And what occurred to me is that what people really want is to be significant. And so I polled my blog readers, 90 countries, 10,000 people responded.

And I said, what's the best job you ever had and why? And I give them all these choices, like you didn't have to work very hard, you got to travel, you got paid a lot.

No one picked those.

No one.

It was, I worked with people who I respected. I accomplished more than I thought I could. And I did something that mattered.

Well then why isn't every day like that?

Hmm.

Why do you want to give that up for toys?

So if you are lucky enough to have a roof over your head, lucky enough to have access to healthcare, Why exactly are you waiting for someone to tell you what to do as they race to use a stopwatch and a computer to replace you?

Yeah, that's about the individuals and their choices. And I also think about kind of the systems that we create in the workplaces that create the system that, where that unfortunately flourishes, right? That people are not feeling significant. They're feeling You know, um, ill-used or burned out. That's what, you know, a lot of the burnout and the quiet quitting and all that resignation stuff. I think that maybe your point about industrialism, it's like it forces workplaces to be a certain way. So I worry that one person can make a choice about significance, but that the overall system is still dampening feelings of the ability to have significance.

Right. So I've been thinking about systems a lot.

I spent a year as a volunteer organizing the Carbon Almanac. So I worked, you know, 15 hours a day, 7 days a week for a year to build this book with 300 other people in 40 countries. And we created a 97,000-word illustrated footnote fact-checked charted graphed typeset almanac, 300 pages long in less than 5 months and didn't make a single mistake., and we handed it in at a schedule. Everyone was a volunteer and no one had ever made an almanac before except for me.

And how did that happen? Organized without an organizer, led without a manager, right?

Well, the efficient markets are starting to pay attention to the fact that it is more productive, more efficient, and more magical given the power of the internet and the shifts in our world to run a company the way Automattic is run, not to run a company the way, say, Google is run. That Matt Mullenweg has 2,000 employees, they don't have an office, and they don't have email. And he is the leader. He created the conditions for magic to happen, but he doesn't tell anybody what to do.

And so you are right.

Every system, whether it's the climate carbon system we live in or the company you work for is a system, but systems always change. They just don't change that fast and they don't change on demand, but they always change. And the question is, what forces will make them change?

Hmm.

If you have skill and vision and you only go to work at places that treat you with respect, then the marketplace for companies will become more clear and they'll realize they can't bribe their way into hiring skilled people who comply. They'll have to treat you with respect.

So the system will change.

We've seen the system change. It took too long, but in 60 years as women have entered the workplace, the system has changed. Not enough, but it's changed. And long overdue, our conversations about social justice and caste is causing the system to change. So my argument is not that this book is going to change a system, but it could start a conversation. And that's why it needs to be a book. Because if you hand 3 books to 3 people and say, let's talk about this on Monday, it's hard to do that with a blog post. It makes sense to do that with a book.

Yeah. I, I, right. That makes sense because then it's like, it's, it sort of has weight and form and that people really want to gather around it. And so is I, I'm gonna read the book. I can't wait for it to come out. And also, do you have sort of one or two specific pieces of advice for people who want to be significant right now? And I think even more importantly, for managers who haven't been trained— by the way, that's another thing we haven't done. We haven't trained our managers and the company runs on the backs of managers. And there's some good managers that care about their people and naturally do the things that caring about people looks like, and then sadly not, right? 'Cause they haven't been trained or motivated or even like guided in that direction. So like what advice do you have for managers who wanna create something that can be like that system inside of their workplaces?

Yeah, it's a great question.

So first I need to highlight that managers and leaders are not the same. Some managers should just manage.

McDonald's needs managers.

The fry machine has to have someone on it at 2 o'clock. And some leaders are not managers. They don't have anyone reporting to them. They're just creating the conditions for growth. And the second thing I need to say is a beehive isn't soft.

There's nothing soft about working inside a colony of bees.

I'm not proposing softness.

What I am proposing is dignity and respect, which are different.

So there's a story that's not in the book that I'll tell you.

10 or 15 years ago, I spoke at a fancy investment bank in New York City. Friend asked me to come in and talk to their 20 summer interns.

20 years ago, 15 years ago, to get a summer internship like that, you need your fancy parents who could pull strings. So there are 15 or 20 people who are used to having strings pulled and they were sitting there in their fancy blue suits.

Men and women, and they'd been there for 6 weeks. They had 3 weeks left. And I walk in and on my way in, there was a stack of index cards and I grabbed them and I handed out these 15 blue cards and I said, okay, here's what I want you to do.

Take a pencil. Don't worry. I'm not going to put you on the spot socially. Just take a pencil and answer the 5 questions. As I was coming here, the phone rang and it was Bill Gates or maybe Warren Buffett, somebody like that. And they said to me, I got a huge amount of money for a project. It's an 8-week sprint.

And, uh, the people who work on the sprint are going to get paid $150,000 each. By the way, the person you're meeting with, they're going to run it, but they get to pick any 3 people to be on their team with them who get paid the same amount.

I said, so now you're on the spot. This is the thing that's going to make your career. And you got to write down the names of 3 people around this table out of the other 15. I said, so please go ahead and write down 3 names.

And that made people really uncomfortable.

Sure. I said, don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to read them to me.

They wrote down 3 names.

I said, okay, question number 1, how many of you think the same names came up over and over again?

Everyone agreed.

Mm-hmm.

I said, question number 2, how many of you think your name came up over and over again?

And a few people were honest enough to say yes. I said, so question 3 is, Do you think, if you've only known each other for 6 weeks, do you think those people showed up here 6 weeks ago acting in a way consistently that would make them the kind of person that's on this list? Which leads to the last question, why aren't you that person? This has nothing to do with not working hard or taking personal days. This has to do with, did you offer other people dignity and connection? And possibility and success in a way that makes them want you to be on their team. That's a choice.

Mm-hmm.

And if you keep the blue card in mind, you realize every single day we're surrounded by blue card moments. Every day somebody on your team is making a choice about who to talk to, who to connect with, who to whatever. So if that's what we do now, as opposed to what we used to do, which is run the punch press, Why aren't you acting that way?

And that is, that story, which I forgot to put in the book, is the story that I would point people to and say, do you see the choice here?

And do you see that the people whose names are mentioned a lot actually have a better day at work than the people who aren't? Same system, they work at the same place.

I love that story. It's so true. And I, you know, I would just say for myself also, Personal responsibility is one of my religions, right? The idea that you can generate it yourself and be that person every day, be one of the blue card people every single day. And I, you know, I think it's interesting, like not everybody comes to that understanding. How did you come to that understanding? Like when did that aha moment come for you that you realized, 'cause a lot of your work is about purposefulness and making a difference and being intentional about it. How did that come to you?

So people who are under 50 need a little bit of, uh, history to understand this. There used to not be voicemail.

There used to not be email. And there were these little slips of paper that happened to be pink.

And they said, while you were out.

And if someone called, they, the receptionist, they used to be receptionists, would write down on the pink slip who called you, what their phone number was. So at my very first job, 1983, I'm a summer intern.

I'm the 30th employee of a company that grew to a couple hundred., and I walk in after lunch on the second day, and on the receptionist's desk is a plastic carousel with 40 slots in it. It's about the size of a very small pizza. And what you would do when you came back from any meeting is you would spin this carousel until you got to your name.

The names were in order of hiring, not alphabetical, so you had to spin and spin to find your name. You'd pull out your pink slips and go back to your office. And I walked in, I thought, I'm going to be here for 2 months.

I don't want to spin this thing over and over again looking for my name.

So I reached over to the receptionist's desk and I took a paperclip and I put it next to my name because I thought this is going to hurt no one and let's save me some time. Within an hour, the entire thing was festooned with different arrangements of paperclips. Each person had just been waiting for somebody who didn't know better to go first. And now I saved everybody in the company 3 minutes a day. And I looked at that and I said, that's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to be the guy who puts paperclips in things.

That's amazing. You had that insight for the paperclip.

Wow. I did actually.

Wow. That is so cool. And so then you set on a trajectory to be the paperclip guy, to make a difference for other people, to show people the way.

It's so easy to just say, oh, well, that's some sort of Boy Scout thing. That's not what I'm saying.

So right after that, Steve and some people at Apple asked me to beta test the original Mac before it came out because we were a software company in Boston.

So I had Ready, Set, Go version 0.9, and I was one of the first desktop publishers in the world. And I had nobody working for me, but I had a line of computer games that I did with Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. And it was a pretty cool gig for a 23-year-old.

Sounds like it.

But if the engineers didn't work on my software, it was never going to ship because they had other things. So I started a desktop published newsletter every single day, two columns on yellow paper. I printed out the name of any person in the organization that had worked on my stuff in any generous way. And then I put it in every single mail slot in the company. And after a couple days, you noticed people looking to see if they were in the newsletter. And within 2 weeks, I had 40 people working for me. None of them worked for me, but all of them were like, what do we need done next? Because I created the conditions for them to do what they were there to do in the first place. And that's what's missing is that the selfish manager says, you are here to get my job done. The leader says, I'm here to create the conditions, including hiring the right people to help you get your job done. That's more productive.

I love that. And I love the way that's framed and also that, you know, you have these creative ideas about how to make that happen.

Well, but lots of people do. This is not me. I am certain. That every person listening to this has at least once told a joke, has at least once done a watercolor that no one done with finger paints or whatever. Everyone comes up with things that haven't been done before. They just don't write them down. And the magic of my blog, I write it if no one read it because I know that tomorrow I need to have a blog post. So that means I spend all day today noticing things and then feel the risk of sharing them tomorrow. Who's keeping anyone from doing that? And that's why when you showed up on my radar and the generosity and insight of your work, I'm like, here's someone who gets it, who's doing the real thing. And it's not that you're special. I'm sorry, you're not. And neither am I. It's just a choice. Just like juggling is a choice.

You can learn to juggle if you want to put in the time.

Thank you for saying that about my work, because that is, my drive is to make a difference. And I think what gets in people's way is a lot— you point out risk, right? Ego risk, fear of failure, all the chatter in your head. You yourself experienced failure. You had 800 rejection letters in a row and you didn't quit. And you've said that you probably should have quit. And I'm just curious, why didn't you quit?

I think it was a combination of two things.

It was Every time I got really close to being sure it was a dead end, I got just enough of an inkling.

So instead of a rejection letter being, we don't want to publish this book, it was 4 paragraphs long, whereas I had never gotten a 4-paragraph-long rejection letter.

So I knew I wasn't hassling people, that I was learning and they were starting to trust me more so that the progress was a key part.

And the second part was that my uncle took pity on me 'cause I had no money and got me a consulting gig building a spreadsheet, which was hard in those days, for a company that was acquiring 6 nursing homes. And so I had to visit these nursing homes to get the data, and I can still smell it, that cleaning fluid that they used.

And the Proustian power of this is what people who don't make books have to do for a living was enough to get me over the hump.

But that last book, when Michael Cater, I did it with him last night, when Michael Cater said that he wanted to publish my spot and stain removal book and was going to pay me $3,000. I had a lot of money for a year's work and I had a split at 50/50 with Herb Bart. I was like, I think I can do this.

Amazing. Right? That first, that first yes, even though it may not be the most glamorous yes in the world. I'm not sure how well that Spot and Stain book did. How well did it do?

It sold 100,000 copies.

Oh, it did very well.

It's one of the best-selling books I've ever worked on.

I love it.

Michael didn't publish it because another publisher bullied me into having her publish it instead.

Oh, wow.

She failed at it, but then I got the rights back and I called up Michael and he figured out what to do with it.

But I will tell you that what it did fail at was getting out Spatzik's name.

Unfortunately.

Here's a true confession. So I didn't write the book. I used Herb Barnes' notebook.

Herb, I don't know if he's still around.

He was the professor of stain removal at the Philadelphia College of Textiles.

Science.

And he had this hotline that you could call for stains. So I was like, hey Herb, can I use your notebook? Make, cause you could be the on the spot stain guy. He loved it. He was like, he loved being a stain celebrity. So we made this whole stain book and Ladies' Home Journal calls up. And Ladies' Home Journal says, uh, we'd like to do a 2-page spread about the book. And this is a very big magazine at the time.

Um, will you come to the photo shoot in tell us how to do the whole thing.

I'm like, count me in. So I get there and I realize that what we're doing, we're taking a white apron and there's going to be 6 stains on it and then we'll show before and after. And I know this stuff sort of works, but it doesn't work perfectly. So I said, why don't we do this? Take a picture of the white smock. We'll call that after. And now let's just add the 6 stains. We'll call that before and everyone can go home. So I don't know if anyone was harmed by that duplicitous move, but I'm confessing it now that the statute of limitations on—

The headline's going to be Seth Godin apologizes for the stains that didn't come out. I love that. We didn't even try.

Alisa Cohn, we went home after 10 minutes.

That's right. Didn't even try. By the way, it just also goes to show you that a book can be great and not be a bestseller, and a book can literally not work and be a bestseller, right? As you've, as you've told.

I'm pretty sure her things worked. I just think I had some technique issues because I wasn't a stand-in move like that.

I was a book packager.

Book packager. Well, that's a beautiful story. And then, and through that success, that moment, that peak moment, you continued to write. You've now written 20 bestsellers. Is that right? Wow. That's amazing. And, you know, I'm still so interested in this notion of like feedback because what you said, I mean, that failure was feedback, including that you got a better failure letter, you know, a better rejection letter. And then you've also said that in your Alt MBA course, people would get 400 to 600 pieces of feedback per month. And I know in companies people say, I never get feedback. And managers say, They don't want feedback, right? So I'm just curious, how can people give feedback so it's seen as a professional critique and not an attack?

This is a great thing to riff on. Okay.

Criticism and feedback are different. Nobody wants criticism, but it is impossible to drive a car without feedback.

You need the curb, you need to feel the road, you need—

they work. Really hard to make it so when you turn the steering wheel, you can feel the touch. They didn't have to put that in there. They put that in there because you can't drive without it. So feedback is physics. Feedback is the world telling us what's up and what's not.

And so what we did at the Carbon Almanac, we had a couple rules that we followed all the time.

And one of them was relentlessly criticize the work, never criticize the worker. And what that means is, let's you and I sit on the same side of the table and look at this piece of work and give feedback on the work. I don't care who did the work. I don't care what conditions the work were done, was done under, what compromise you had to make. Just on an absolute basis, the same way the blue card people have an absolute basis, the same way the consumer does. Why would someone buy this? They don't care that you worked really hard. Who cares? Who worked on it? This thing, can this thing be improved? And if you can create a culture where we can do that without regard for the status or class or caste of the person who made it and mean it, then you're off to the races. And inevitably that breaks down if you don't work to keep it that way.

Hmm.

Sooner or later it gets personal and people use criticism of the work to criticize the worker.

So every day you gotta keep coming back to this idea of everyone here sooner or later is a volunteer.

Everyone here has a choice.

Everyone here is a human being.

Do we want to say something that will make them more likely to do good work tomorrow or more likely to leave? And It is possible, and I know from, you know, my early software days, when you find a bug, when you find a solution that doesn't work and you celebrate the feedback, the next version's gonna be better.

Yeah, so it's about celebrating that feedback. And also something you said is so compelling, sitting on the same side of the table. Listening, what I tell managers is listening as an ally, right? The idea that you position yourself as an ally and actually you act every day like an ally. Like someone who cares about you, like somebody who's on your side and has your back. And then when there is time to critique the work, because that's normal, then you do that together. I love how you, the idea of together, but the point is you're on the same side.

Right. And the thing is a lot of people don't have good taste.

Hmm.

What is good taste? Good taste is knowing what the customer wants just before they do. And what happens in many fields is people who do have good taste can't explain it, and people who don't have good taste use it, judgment, as a cudgel and a way of expressing power.

So this explains some people in the magazine business, the fashion business. It explains people in the music business, right?

How do you know if it's a hit? It sells a lot of copies.

What makes something sell a lot of copies? It's a hit.

Well, you've told me nothing, right? Right, right. And so I can't get better at making music if you can't tell me what you're looking for. If it's just, I'll know it when I see it. Yeah, well, I'm looking at how many times you failed. You don't know it when you see it. You just have power. So let's be really clear that you putting a stake in the ground, making an equivalence between your taste and what is true isn't helpful. On the other hand, if And we see this all the time in any organization that's changing its logo, 'cause everyone thinks that they're an expert on logos, right? That's true. And you're not allowed to have a say about the logo. You're just not. I know you work here. You might even be the president. You're not allowed to have a say about the logo. What we get to do is put this in front of 40 people and see if it serves its purpose. If it does serve its purpose, we're done. Let's get back to work. If it doesn't serve its purpose, we got feedback. Make a better logo. But making the president happy about our logo, unless that's its purpose, is just a power play.

Yeah. I think power is part of what— power and status is part of what corrupts the whole process, actually, the whole system. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's, um, an interesting point. Like, if you think about every day, that's what you said. Like, if you think about it every day, so every day you come to work and I like to have daily practices, the idea that you have to remind yourself. And when you walk into the workplace or when you get on your Zoom or whatever, if you have a tactile moment to remind yourself what you're about and what your mission is and kind of you as a leader, what you're here to do, I feel like that can be a very centering thing.

Not only is it, it's the entire point, right? I mean, to make it very visceral, going back to the swimming, if you're a lifeguard, it doesn't matter if the chairs are all in a straight row.. It doesn't matter if the ladder is freshly painted. How many people died yesterday? That's your job. No one drowned, right? If you are building a culture at an institution, what emergency is causing you to be a jerk today? Not allowed. You just let someone drown, right? And so this method, so inside the Inside the Carbon Almanac, one thing Louise Karch and I did is every Wednesday, the two of us posted in our discourse.

We've never met in person, all 300 of us. Now it's 1,900. In the discourse, mentioned by name 6 people who had done something really cool that week. And if your name was mentioned, you needed to mention 6 people who had done something really cool that week.

And by the end of Wednesday, 100 people have been mentioned for doing something. If you schedule a meeting on Zoom, you owe it to the people who are invited to that meeting to make it clear why it has to be in real time, to make it fully interactive, 'cause if it can be a memo, it should be a memo, to create the conditions for this interactive event to actually be interactive.

Or to cancel the meeting.

You get to do that 6 times a day. If you're not doing that, you should be fired because you just spat on our culture, the one we're trying to build here. And I could make, I could give you 400 more examples of this, right? The teacher in 4th grade who uses a big red marker to circle mistakes a kid made. Is that really your job? The soccer coach who only puts out the kids who are the oldest, tallest, and most skilled. Is that really your job to win a trophy? No, that's not why we have soccer for 11th graders. We don't have a trophy shortage. Your job is to create the conditions for kids to believe they can get better. You're not doing that when you have a high school musical and only put the people on stage who audition the best. That's not the purpose.

Right. Totally. I just love the phrase create the conditions. Like if you just sort of say create the conditions to, and then you can fill in whatever it is you're supposed to create the conditions for.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

That's powerful.

So to go with the book, I printed 50,000 booklets.

And the purpose of the booklet, if people buy 5, I send them 25 booklets.

People hate to throw booklets out. So you hand the booklets out to people. And basically the booklets say, let's get real or let's have play. Let's talk about what conditions are we trying to create. Let's have phrases that we can say back to each other, right? And if you can't build this culture, well then don't be surprised when Automatic runs circles around you and runs 40% of the web because they created the culture and you forgot.

Right?

That's well said. So well said. You know, when we talk about culture and leadership, a topic that always comes up is authenticity. And I knew you've talked about authenticity before, and I've heard you talk about on the one hand, We don't want authentic surgeons. We don't want surgeons in a bad mood and come in and operate on our knee. We want professional surgeons. But on the other hand, as a creator, there is, and I think even you in your work, you have been striving to be authentic. So how do you kind of tease out the, what I sort of think is this paradox of authenticity?

Yeah, I don't think it's a paradox. I think there might be a semantic problem though. Okay. I think authenticity should be reserved. For the people who love you. Because what it means to love somebody is even if in a moment they're not the person you hope they will be, you will still love them.

For every other human on the planet, I don't think you get to be authentic. I think responsibility beats that. I think consistency beats that. That you might be grumpy, but that doesn't mean you can slam a glass door in the face of a grandmother who's trying to get in to visit her kid. You're being authentic. No, that's the social media excuse for being a jerk, right? And I show up every day, but when I show up, I'm showing up as Seth Godin with a capital S and a capital G. You don't know me and you're not supposed to know me because you don't love me. You just are playing a character who's very closely aligned with who I am. But if I'm not having a good day, I actually say to myself, Try to be more like Seth Godin.

Does that work?

Usually, because I don't want to let Seth Godin down. Right.

Right. That's beautiful. I think that's really well said. We are all playing a role. And so it's another, it's another sort of purpose. It was a moment to be purposeful and intentional. Exactly. That's really good.

Why would you have it any other way? Because to have it any other way means that every single time someone is a jerk, you don't get to take umbrage. You have to just completely dance with that person over and over and over again. Well, that's how we end up with Harvey Weinstein, right? Harvey was completely authentic every time the door was shut. That's not okay.

Right. Totally. Yes. One thing that Seth Godin has talked about, the Seth Godin has talked about, is imposter syndrome. A lot of, for people and how they experience imposter syndrome and even yourself experiencing imposter syndrome. So I talk a lot in this show about imposter syndrome because everybody feels that way. In fact, 95% of high achievers feel that way. So I'm curious if you could riff a little bit about your own experiences when you felt imposter syndrome and how you've overcome them.

Oh, it's super simple. Anytime you're being an achiever, You're an imposter. Anytime you're being a leader, you're an imposter. If you're not feeling like an imposter, you're either a narcissist of some sort or you're not actually leading. Because leading means you're doing something you're not sure is going to work. Well, what it means to do something you're not sure is going to work is you're pretending that you have it more in order than you do. So if you're working on the truffle assembly line, moving chocolate from one box to the other over and over again, You probably shouldn't feel like an imposter because you did it yesterday. But everybody else, it's a symptom you're doing the work. It's a symptom you're on the right track. And so we need to embrace that feeling and say not, "How do I make it go away?" But, "How do I turn it into something productive? Who am I being an imposter for? On behalf of what?" And talking to you, you have a body of work that I respect a lot. You're sitting in my office. I'm an imposter right this minute. Because I'm trying my best to explore and talk about things I haven't talked about at the same level of depth. And maybe I'm gonna say the wrong thing. So yeah, I'm not sure.

Well, when you say you're not sure, I mean, I think what you said, and it's accurate, is to do the work and to show up.

Yeah.

Yeah. And to not let, not let that stop you.

Right.

Yeah. What are some things if you think about your, right now what you're working on, if I'm, of course, one of my religions also is personal development. What would you say is like one strength that you really are proud of, like your superpower? And what is like one weakness development opportunity that you feel like I really need to work on that?

I have an almost countless number of weaknesses that I have no intention of working Fair.

Because I'm just not sure well-rounded is useful. If you need someone to organize your taxes, please don't call me. And I don't want to get better at that. Because if I got better at that, I would get worse at something else. There are people I let down. There are promises I don't keep. I really wish I could do better at that.

And I try every day to do better at that.

In terms of the superpower, I think that I am getting better at creating the conditions for others as opposed to just flying solo.

The Almanac taught me an enormous amount about that.

I did it with a team 'cause I didn't know the answer to what's going on with our climate. That's why we needed to make the book. And Saying something that gets under someone's skin and teaches them, which is another word for autodidactism, meaning they learned, not that I taught them, but that I created the condition for them to teach themselves, that might be the thing I'm best at.

That's beautiful. I guess I would ask what, okay, I'm going to take a minute. Let me get, let me pull myself together. How have you grown, Seth, as a leader in the past few years?

So Roz Zander and Ben Zander tell the story of Rule Number Six, and hearing the story of Rule Number Six sort of opened a path for me. All those years ago, and I keep staying on that path.

And I'll tell the story poorly, but basically there's the prime minister of a small country, and, uh, he's being interviewed, and the Secretary of Commerce runs in screaming and yelling, having a freakout, and the prime minister says, remember Rule 6, and the person calms down and just leaves. And then the Secretary of the Treasury comes in, the world is going to end, There's all these things that have to happen right now.

And the prime minister says, remember rule 6. He can't sound relieved. This happens 4 more times.

Finally, the reporter can't stand it anymore and says, I just gotta ask, what's rule 6? And the prime minister picks up the plaque on their desk that says, remember rule 6. And on the bottom it says in script, don't take yourself so damn seriously. And what I have discovered from so many organizations, unless you're doing surgery, unless you're helping people who are truly at the end of their rope, for the rest of us, we have created this magical world where there are no saber-toothed tigers, where you're not about to fall off a cliff.

And everything goes better if you just do it to make things better, not to avoid some imagined downside.

And every organization that we've seen that had what it needed to succeed but ultimately failed, the Western Unions of the world, the Searses of the world, they got into that jam because they were trying not to fail as opposed to trying for better.

Trying for Better. So great. So just two more questions before we wrap up. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

So sometimes people say, if you could say something to your old self, what would you say?

And I'm grateful for every failure, every dead end, everything that didn't work, every time I was disrespected, every time I doubted, because I wouldn't be me.

And I have sort of like where I ended up. So if I could only say one thing, it would be everything's gonna be okay. Don't change anything. Everything's gonna be okay.

That's beautiful. Yes. And what advice do you have for founders as they embark on their journey to grow into leaders?

So if you're a founder, you're probably not being as honest as you could be about who's it for and what's it for.

Who exactly are you seeking to serve? What change are you seeking to make?

If you read, or I spend too much time when it comes into my feed about the next unicorn and the next person who raised all this money, is that what it's for? Did you do all this so that you could become independently wealthy or respected by a tiny group of people who read TechCrunch? Or is there a change you're trying to make to a constituent that you can identify?

Constituency that you can identify.

If you keep coming back to who's it for and what's it for, it gets so much easier to figure out what the path is.

That's beautiful. Well said. Seth, thank you. Thank you for your generosity to me over here.

Thank you for a great question.

I appreciate that. I appreciate that so much. And thank you for agreeing to do this in person. And it's just been such a joy to spend time with you. So thank you.

Super fun. Thank you.

Great. Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.