Entrepreneurship with Helene & Seth Godin | A Bit of Optimism (Podcast): Episode 6

Most people know Seth Godin as a marketing guru. He has one of the most popular business blogs and popular books in the history of business blogs and business books. Seth is known for his opinions about entrepreneurship as well. He's a huge champion for the entrepreneur. So I wanted to ask him if entrepreneurship has changed in this modern day, but also given the times that we're living in. Seth's wife Helene is also an entrepreneur. She quit her high powered legal job to start the by the Way Bakery, a gluten free and dairy free bakery in New York City. So we got them together to talk about what it means to be an entrepreneur in this modern day. And here's what they had to say. This is a bit of optimism.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to invite you to say hello to the grand gluten free baker of America. Lean Godin is in the house.

Helene, just so you know, you're not late.

I, I, I am.

Seth is early. You are not late. It is not relative.

He is my relative.

And he can't stand the fact, with good reason, that I am chronically late.

That you're chronically on time. He's early. I'm so glad we're doing this. And I thought what a wonderful thing that we could talk about is entrepreneurship, what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Because both of you entrepreneurs, Seth, a long time ago you quit your job to start your own business. And Helene, you are a high powered corporate attorney who also decided to take the plunge. And I'm very curious to know because you've both been on very separate entrepreneurial journeys, what does it take to be an entrepreneur today?

You go first.

I'll go first. Entrepreneurship is not simply a job. It is a posture of possibility. And there are social entrepreneurs who are building important ventures that don't make any money. And what it means, I think to be an entrepreneur is to say I have something to contribute. There is no roadmap. I might have a compass, but I want to show up and try to make things better in a way that a public that has a choice could either choose or not choose. And entrepreneurs haven't changed every corner of the world, but a lot of what we see in our built world, in our modern world, that's better is better because a human being showed up and built something.

And I think you have to come to entrepreneurship from a place of generosity, of saying, what can I do to make someone's life better? And in my case, I loved being a lawyer and I think most of my clients really liked me. But I wanted to go on a journey where I could bring something tangible and sweet to people and get tremendous joy every day out of doing that. And I have a tiny little niche of people who happen to be gluten free or dairy free, but within my niche, I make them happy, and that makes me happy.

I've always thought it was interesting. I think the term entrepreneur or entrepreneurship is thrown about a little too loosely. It's used interchangeably very often with a small business owner. And small business owners own small businesses. But entrepreneurs solve problems, and you have entrepreneurs in corporations. They don't all own small businesses, and not all small business owners are entrepreneurs. So I love your definition, Seth, because I think that we have to recognize that especially now, there are entrepreneurs trying to affect social change. They're trying to solve problems in unique and novel ways.

You are correct. And I bend over backwards to talk about freelancers not being entrepreneurs, and they should be proud of it, that being a freelancer is a job without a boss and you can get better at it, and that's important. And a small business owner is a job without a boss, and it's also important. But it is different than the posture of the entrepreneur internally. If you work for a big company. I'm not quite ready to say you're an entrepreneur as much as I might say you're an independent thinking problem solver. Because part of the theory of the firm is that the corporation has given you a platform and a safety net and that changes the way you can approach things. Yeah, I guess what I don't want to give up is that fear in the pit of your stomach because you know you are bringing something to a marketplace that could just say no. And having had that happen to me so many times, it's not the fuel, but it's definitely the scary guardrail on the edge of the cliff.

And I really love this idea of the balance, which is the pit in your stomach, which is everybody wants the glory that an entrepreneur may experience, but nobody wants the pain. And I think entrepreneurs live balanced lives. Like people who have corporate stability live balanced lives. Like if you work in a corporation, your highs are never that high, but your lows are never that low. Where if you're an entrepreneur, your highs are amazingly high, but holy cow, your lows are so low. Like both are balanced in both equations. You're going to live a balanced life. The question is, how do you want your balance?

Right? And I think that gets us to the core idea of optimism. Because unless you're completely insane, the only way to do this is to expect that good things are going to happen.

So let's change tack very slightly. And can you talk about the importance in what entrepreneurship looks like in a social setting? Especially now, there is a spotlight on to create necessary change. And so are the entrepreneurs, the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement? Are they buried within the Black Lives Matter movement? Like, where are the entrepreneurs, and how do we support them and get them to come out and do their thing?

Okay, we are talking to each other during a time of real pain, real unrest, a renewed, overdue focus on injustice, and that Black Lives Matter and that the feeling that so many people are wrestling with is real. What we know is that culture is the result of millions of little things, not what the media announces is happening in any given moment. And cultural change sometimes happens really fast and sometimes it takes way too long, but it happens not from the bottom. That's the wrong word. But from the roots, from the grassroots, from people. And the question is, where do the seeds get planted? And then what grows around them? And an example I'll give you is last year, more than a billion dollars went into organizations that were building enterprises to help the poorest people in the world. People make three or four dollars a day. Well, that only happened because 20 years ago, acumen started doing something insane. And the social entrepreneurship of investing a million dollars in daylight solar lanterns was on nobody's lips. No one was talking about it. It wasn't in the newspaper. And then overnight, suddenly, it's a thing. Well, it wasn't overnight, right? And so social entrepreneurs say, I can't fix everything, but maybe I could open a Craftsman Guild in Pittsburgh. Maybe I could figure out how to change the way this nonprofit functions. And then people steal your idea, and they steal your idea, and they steal your idea. Because after it starts working, a whole group of people can feel safe saying, well, I'm just going to take that and make it a little bit louder.

So does that mean a successful entrepreneur is someone who affects the change or creates a marketplace? You know, steal your idea, steal your idea. Copy. Copy. Copy is what is producing the change. Because people perceive that there is a marketplace like that is valuable, that's worth doing, whether it's for financial gain or social gain.

Right. So the people who invented the Internet are not the people who run any company you've ever heard of. And Facebook wasn't the first social network, and neither was Friendster and all the way back. So entrepreneurs with bad timing usually go first. And.

If they succeed, corporations that have different agendas can Scale. And I congratulate the entrepreneurs, even if they're not the ones who are on the COVID of the magazine.

It's so funny because there is, there's, there's. I was going to say there's books and books filled with names, but there's actually not a single book written with the names of the ones who went first, who were complete failures. But were the, the ignition, were the spark that somebody else ran with from their vision, their, their invention, whatever it was. And I know some of those people and they're very frustrated and angry. Helene, do you think you would have taken the entrepreneurial plunge if you had never known Seth?

No, but I was always very in the box in my drive. Like in college. I want to be a lawyer because that's a defined thing. And I want to get really good grades because there's an easy metric. And I want to take every course that has and the law in it because maybe that will help me get in. But through osmosis, through having the joy of being with this man for so many years, we just actually three days ago celebrated our 34th anniversary.

Happy anniversary.

But I have to disagree with you on this. I think that Helene was destined to be a entrepreneur of some sort. I don't think she'd be running the largest gluten free craft bakery in the world. But I do think that Helene has always looked at situations where she could contribute and even if there wasn't a engraved invitation, decided to show up and make it a little bit better. And that's just something that people find and they can't get rid of. And Helena's had that.

I have the good fortune, that I have a safety net, that I've always had the drive and the ambition. But when you have a partner who's there cheering you on and when you have a high celebrating with you and you have a low picking you up, that makes a huge difference.

So though Seth disagrees with you, what is it about the marriage that you think gave you the courage to jump?

Knowing that he had my back. And I think that you don't need that to be a successful entrepreneur, but it certainly makes it a sweeter journey.

But I would argue that you do need that to be a successful entrepreneur. I've always held this belief that courage is not an internal fortitude. You need to dig down deep and find the courage. You know that courage is an external thing. The reason you have people have the courage to jump out of the plane is because of the parachute on their back. It's the parachute that gave them the courage. Or a world famous trapeze artist would never try a brand new death defying act for the first time without a net. It was the net that gave them the courage. And I've had the chance to meet men and women in uniform who have actually risked their lives to save the lives of others. They were not ordered to. They would not have been faulted if they didn't. They risk their lives with the belief that they will probably die in doing this action. But they didn't. And I had the chance to ask them, why did you do it? And almost to a T they all say, because they would have done it for me. It was the belief that someone had their back that gave them the courage to act.

Yeah, I mean, you've done really important work in understanding the power of uniform and the way the armed services have, you know, the whole leaders eat last mindset, et cetera. It's not the parachute that gets someone to jump out of the plane. It's the fact that, that your brothers and sisters are jumping out of the plane before you and after you. Right. I think, though, we have to distinguish this in the sense of entrepreneurs, because most successful entrepreneurs don't actually think they're taking a risk.

Go on.

So what it means to think you're taking a risk is that you don't have control and you don't have an out. And what successful entrepreneurs do, they don't bet everything on Red32. What they do is they are seeking to control what looks uncontrollable to people in the outside world. And they are finding bets that they have enough resilience to survive. If they're wrong, and they are showing up doing something that feels way less risky than working at Ford Motor Company because Ford Motor Company once laid off 10,000 people in one day. And all 10,000 of those people didn't do one thing wrong except trust the system. And the entrepreneur looks at that, the one who grows up in Detroit and says, not me, maybe I'm just gonna have a little bodega. Doesn't matter, it's mine. And it doesn't feel risky to me to do that.

So this is interesting. So that means then that in this modern day and age, because we talked about the security of the corporation, which because of the overuse of mass layoffs in this modern day, that is actually far riskier to work in a large corporation because it's not a meritocracy if the company misses its arbitrary projection, as you said, the next day, you have no job through no fault of your own. So it's a false sense of security just because the organization happens to be large and have a lot of money. Whereas an entrepreneur is, if I lose my job, first of all, it's totally within my control. And it's unlike a corporate job where one day I'm employed and happy, the next day I didn't even realize I'm unemployed. And whereas as an entrepreneur, it really doesn't happen overnight like that, you can kind of see it petering out. So I want to go back to social entrepreneurship. I want to understand what a social entrepreneur looks like and if it's different than a business entrepreneur.

So one of the keys is scale, because social entrepreneurship that you do in the small is important, but doesn't change the culture enough. So how do you get to scale? You get to scale in a couple ways. One way you can get to scale is you can publish the playbook, meaning you figure out the cure to a disease and you publish it in a journal. And now lots and lots of people can go to work doing it. The other way to do it is to figure out how there's enough surplus created from the intervention you're doing for you to hire more people. And so if I think about the Aravind Eye Hospital, the Aravind Eye Hospital has saved the eyesight of more people in India than there are in la, Chicago and New York put together. Total. And the deal when you get to Aravind is you can either pay $130 to have your cataracts removed or zero. It's up to you, and you get exactly the same doctor. And what Dr. V did in building Aravind was he said, how do I take the methods of McDonald's and apply them to high quality, high throughput cataract surgery? This would never have worked in a nonprofit organized hospital, because your goal there is deniability and stability. And Dr. V is, I'm willing to fail. Not any given patient, but in my process, on my way to figuring out how to deliver this thing at a cost, so that the $130 operations not only pay for themselves, but pay for the free ones. And he got good enough at it that if you've ever had eye surgery in the United States, it was probably done by an ophthalmologist who trained at Aravind in India, because in one day at a New York hospital, you might do two or three. But if you go to Aravind, you get to do 18. And so you get better faster, and you get Better patient feedback. The point is, if you come to the government of India 40 years ago and said, we'd like to solve the cataract problem, what's the best way to get 40 million people their eyesight back? This is probably not what they would have suggested, but because Dr. V had a scaling mindset, he was able to do this thing.

So can you be an entrepreneur without a scaling mindset? What's the definition of scaling?

Right, exactly. That was. The point is, scaling can happen if you are willing to give up ownership and eagerly have people copy what you're doing. And that is what the best social entrepreneurs do. So Acumen, who I've been working with for 20 years, early on started publishing their successes and their failures so that other people who are going to go through this space don't have to repeat their failure.

You know, I look back at my own journey and sort of I'm replaying some of the decisions I made. And there's lots of people in my space who, when they have their PowerPoint or give their speech, they put a little TM at the end of whatever the word is that they came up with that basically it's all the same thing. And every ad agency is the same thing, like brand essence, brand DNA, you know, whatever it is, it's all the same thing. And they will put a little TM on it, which basically says, don't touch mine. And I made a decision in the very early days that I was never going to put a TM on the concept of the Golden Circle or start with why, or even the concept of why. Because I wanted other people to use it.

Bingo.

And there's a reason it spread is because I didn't tell anybody that they couldn't spread it.

Well, it also was a really good idea. Beautifully presented. Right. And when permission marketing showed up in the Oxford English Dictionary, that was a big win for me because it meant I didn't have to work as hard to get people to understand this idea. And, you know, Helene has done the same thing. The number of people who now believe it is possible to help folks who can't eat wheat has grown dramatically because she showed them how to do it.

What is the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of permission marketing?

I don't know it by heart, but it's something like the concept of the delivering anticipated personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

That must be a source of unbelievable pride that you coined this term that is now part of the vernacular. And the best part is, is the vast majority of people who don't know it or discover it in the dictionary. Because it doesn't say your name in the dictionary.

Yeah.

Because as you said, you're okay with other people stealing it, with giving away.

I prefer it. The reason I prefer it is I didn't set out to corner the market. I set out to change the market. And if I have to deal with the fact that people think it's my fault or it's not working right, then they call me and say, what do you think? Or, can you fix this? It's like, no, I put this idea in the world. You should do with it the best you can. But I'm not owning it, and that means I'm not controlling it either.

Well, and I think there's a certain push if you put it out in the world and you make it possible for others to try and replicate and encourage people to replicate, it forces you to always be on your game, to always be the best you can as a leader and as a colleague in the space.

So going back to social entrepreneurship, the question is, is how does somebody in a social space create something that inspires others to want to steal it and do it and take over it and claim it as their own right? Because social entrepreneurs have the same egos and insecurities as any kind of entrepreneur, which is, we do want to be recognized for the thing we did. It's why we put TM on everything.

So except those who don't.

Except those who don't.

I think the dynamic of one group insisting another group do something isn't often the way change happens at a glacial galactic scale. It's more like in any given situation, any given individual finds that it's better making a new decision with new information. Not saying they were wrong before. It's better to do the other thing. But then what you do is you create this dynamic. And the dynamic is, well, so what made my blog my blog, the very first post that really mattered is called the Provincetown Helmet Insight.

I was waiting for the helmet story.

Helene and I were in Cape Cod 400 years ago, and bike helmets were not that common. And there's a big network of bike paths. And I noticed, because I noticed things. Everyone on the bike path is a couple, and every couple is either both wearing a helmet or neither person's wearing a helmet. Everyone. And I'm like, only two theories could be working here. People are attracted to people who have similar helmet habits. Unlikely. Or something's happening in the bike shop. So we went to the bike shop to watch And I stood there for, like, 10 minutes to figure out what was going on. And here's what was happening. You rent the bikes, you get up to the front of the line to pay, and then the person behind the cash register says, do you want helmets? And the two people look at each other, and every single time, whoever speaks first, that's what they do. First person to speak, that's what they do. So how do you get people to wear helmets? It's super simple. The owner or the person behind the cash register puts two helmets on the counter and says, what helmets? Almost everyone takes them. Done. Done. Because now the person who's going to speak up and say no is taking a huge risk. And the same thing happened with seatbelts. It took 15 or 20 years, but that's exactly why seatbelts caught on. Not because you got a ticket, but because you converted enough people that it was awkward to say to them, I don't want to wear a seatbelt. You're a wuss. It was easier to just put on a seatbelt.

So what's the dynamic, then, between legislation and grassroots?

Legislation usually follows the culture by five years.

So interesting, because I think so many people try to affect change quickly.

Yep.

At the high level versus in a sticky way at a grassroots level.

Correct.

And I think we see this in companies even. We see this in companies all the time. Which is. This company would be so great if senior leadership would just do this.

Yep.

And I'm just going to sit here and wait for them to do that.

Yeah.

As opposed to me changing my own habits, knowing that this is the thing that I want to do and I could just do it.

Well, it's not just your habits, because if you just change your habits, it's unlikely to stick. So when I was at Spinnaker, we were the first people to do fancy educational computer games for kids. Somehow I backed into having 40 engineers sort of working for me and a product line that if we missed Christmas, the company was in really big trouble. And I was 23 years old. I didn't know how to manage a project. I was doing everything I could figure out, and we only had a short window of time. And I went out and I got a bunch of buttons. There were 45 people in the company. I got 45 red buttons and 45 green buttons. And I show up and it was the oil company meeting. I said, here's what we got to do, because we got no time. I'm not in charge of anyone in this room. I have no employees. But here's what I'd like everyone to do. If you're on the critical path and if your job today requires you working on this software that has to ship, please put on a green button. If you're not but still doing important work, please put on a red button. Here's what I'd like to suggest. If a green person and a red person meet in the hall, the red person should say, how can I help?

I took a big risk. But we normalized a certain behavior for three weeks in the organization. What it meant was the chairman was getting coffee for the junior programmer, and he could tolerate that for three weeks because it was showing his status that he could give up his status. But the point is, if I had been waited for David and Bill to do it, it would have taken too long. But I said, this is what it's like around here. We wear seatbelts and we wear buttons. And you can do that with a small group. You have enough influence to do it for six people. And that is my theory about why your TED Talk was so powerful. Because what you said was, there are five people in your department who, if you just showed them this short TED Talk and had a conversation about the triangle and why things would go better for you and for them. And it was not a difficult ask because everyone had five people in the company that they could do that with. And it didn't work because they put you on the homepage, Ted. It worked because 100 people told 500 people.

Yeah, that's true.

Yep.

What does it take to stay married for 34 years?

I think Seth has an inordinate amount of patience.

I think I know you both, and.

I would say you have an inordinate amount of patience.

Marrying the right person is a good fit.

Well, I mean, duh.

We met when I was. We were both in college. And, you know, over time, people grow together or they grow apart. And I think we work really hard at growing together.

So what does one have to do to grow together? It's not luck. And there's no wheel that you're spinning that says, aha, you guys are going to grow together. Congratulations. There's work that's involved here.

I think that's a really important word that most people who write for magazines don't want to say. If you decide that you're going to be an entrepreneur, you don't give up the first day. It doesn't work well. And you don't spend a lot of time daydreaming about when you're going to work for Unilever. You make a commitment to have the life you set out to have. And when you find somebody special, if you can figure out how to make a commitment to say, when it's hard, that's what's supposed to happen. And now it's a chance to do more work. It's different than what a lot of people get taught, which is, it's not what you need. You should go try something else.

Right. And when I was growing up, I didn't have the role model of, this is something you have to work at. And at first, I wasn't so good at this marriage thing. And it is true that, like being an entrepreneur, it's work.

So this world's colliding here, which is the mentality of being a successful entrepreneur, which is the willingness to keep at it because you believe in it, is the same thing that is required to have a successful relationship. I love that. And I think this goes to the whole idea that, you know, people talk about work life balance as if they're completely separate worlds. Like, you have to find work life balance. You know, the only difference between work and home is, you know, the clothes you wear and the chair you sit on, it's you.

And these days, they're not different.

And these days, they're exactly the same. Exactly. Congratulations. You have work life balance. Same clothes, same chair. It's you. Like, the reason your friends love you is the same reason your colleagues love you or your clients love you. It's you. And if you're showing up differently in one of those two places than in one of those two places, you're lying. Which means all of the stuff that we call upon to affect change and the drive and the ambition and the willingness to suffer through hard times because we're fixated on our vision is. It sounds like all the same stuff we need to bring to our relationships, because it's all us. It's all the same thing. The visions are different, the work is different.

But it's still work.

But it's still work.

Exactly.

In this day and age of social media, online dating, it seems that unlike in the past, everyone needs to be really good at marketing themselves.

Mm.

Like, we now all have a product to sell online. We all have to be really good at writing body copy and headlines, and we have to be good art directors so that people will find our product appealing where before you just needed to be your bumbling self, and someone either find that appealing or not. And so does that mean that there's a young generation that are better equipped to be entrepreneurs or, you know, has this idea of self marketing and helped the bigger category of marketing or hurt it.

What a juicy question.

Well, I think that at some point the rubber is going to hit the road that like you may have the best photoshopped photo on Tinder, but at some point you have to meet the person and present in real life. And that's where the true work comes in.

But there are some people who are really good at getting the date.

It's true.

But you don't get the second date.

So you're talking about marketing. So my eyes lit up. But here's the deal. There are two kinds of marketing. The one you just described is hype and hustle and sizzle and the surface. And it's nothing I have truck with in any area. And that's what I keep writing about. The other kind is how many true fans do you have and how many people can't go to bed without talking about how cool the thing you make is. And I'm just going to guess that happier daters and more successful people who are seeking commitment are in the second category. That it is true that social media expands your reach by a factor of 10 or 100. But I think it's also true that circles of people who talk about how irresistible Simon is. It's probably a better way to get a date than having a better Photoshop picture.

But there's risk associated. You know, the hustle is lower risk.

Correct, the hustle is lower risk. But at some point you get found out and you have to be your.

Very best or you hope that if I can just get my foot in the door, it's kind of like a resume, right? It's like I'm going to tell them how wonderful I am and how everybody loved me, my former job, and how I was responsible for all these huge budgets and all these product launches. Because if I can just get the interview, then I'll show them that I'm great.

Yeah. And I don't believe in resumes either. You know, I think you are correct. If Churn is fun for you, this is the best moment in the history of humanity. But it's not clear that Churn leads to long term happiness.

Okay. Did I ever tell you the story about the person who was down on their luck and was trying to raise money in the short run versus how to market Microsoft? Helene, have I told you this story?

I have not heard this story.

Okay, so when you see someone who's down on their luck and trying to raise some money in the short term, they sit there on the side of the street with a piece of advertising. There's a billboard that's a little, you know, a little piece of cardboard. And they attempt to do the same thing as a lot of bad marketing, which is they talk about themselves. I'm homeless, I'm hungry, I'm a veteran. You know, the whole list of things to try and appeal to whatever audience finds that thing appealing, which is no different than Microsoft or any other company taking out a big billboard that says, more memory, more speed, bigger screen, cheaper. It's just all about me, me, me, me, me. And so I found a lovely woman who was down on her luck, who was willing to help me with this experiment. And I found out that what someone's doing when they're sitting on the side of the street with their billboard is they're selling goodwill. There's an exchange of consideration there, which is, if I put money in the cup, I feel good. If I put no money in the cup, I either feel bad or I feel nothing. In other words, I pay for that feeling of goodwill. So what they're actually selling is goodwill, and they're attempting to sell goodwill by talking about themselves. And so I found out she works for 8 to 10 hours sitting on the same street corner, and a good day of selling goodwill, she'll make between 20 and $30.

That's sad. Yeah.

I changed her sign. She agreed to use the sign that I wrote for her, and she made $40 in two hours.

And the sign said.

And the sign said, if you only give once a month, please think of me next time. Because we went and asked people once, why don't you give? And we basically heard two answers, I can't give to everyone. And the second answer was, how do I know they're legitimate? How do I know they're not faking it? So we simply answered the question, if you only give once a month, please think of me next time. Because we went and asked people, why don't you give? And we basically heard two answers, I can't give to everyone. And the second answer was, how do I know they're legitimate? How do I know they're not faking it? So we simply answered the question.