"Why SPENDING MORE Time & Energy WON'T Make You SUCCESSFUL!" | Seth Godin & Lewis Howes

Almost nobody is talented. Talent is completely overrated. Talent is a betrayal. It is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill. Don't call someone skillful talented because they're not. They're skillful. I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness. Really?

Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness.

I'm so excited. We've got my friend Seth Godin in the house. I'm so grateful you're here. Thank you for coming on.

It's been way too long. It's good to see you.

Way too long. We connected, I think, I don't know, 2010, 2011. I came into your office when you were running another company at that time, and you kind of were doing this experiment with a group of entrepreneurs and people coming in to help launch a book publishing company you had and did some teaching about webinars with you back then. And it's been amazing to stay connected and hopefully we do many more of these in the future. But we were talking right beforehand about how now is kind of a crazy time where it's easy to put out short content on social media, but it seems like people are more and more afraid of putting out deep, meaningful work. Why do you think it's harder for people emotionally to sit down, hunker down, and create a piece of art, whether that's a book, that's a painting, that's a project that has some deep meaning to it and put it out there. Why is it harder now more than ever?

Yeah, I don't think we should under rate excuses. Excuses are good for peace of mind. And so the excuse 20 years ago was a magazine won't feature my writing. I can't get a gallery to have my art. They won't put my show on cable TV. So because they won't pick me, I'm off the hook. And we called your bluff. Because now you can start a project and put it on Kickstarter and you can make whatever art you call art and you can lead if you want to lead and you can connect if you want to connect or you can go on social media and say ditto and troll and just do what everyone else is doing right now. Well, that's safer because then you're off the hook and my whole mantra for 30 years has been I'd like to be on the hook please.

What does that mean to be on the hook?

Well, the expression might come from fish, but I think it probably comes from a generous tradition in Turkey. Whereas if you have a couple extra bucks in your pocket, when you go to a bakery, you could buy two loaves of bread instead of one. And you put the second loaf on a hook on the wall. And if someone who's hungry comes in, they can have a loaf of bread. It's a form of sharing and it's a form of responsibility, because I can do it. I will do it. I'm on the hook. And so what it means to be on the hook is to make a promise, is to show up and say, I have a podcast and it's going to be here next week too, or to show up and say, I think I can figure out how to make this system better. I'm going to try. No guarantees, but put me on the hook because I'd like to try.

Yeah. And right now it feels like people are concerned with so many other things beyond finding their passion. They want to find their passion, but they're so overwhelmed and stressed with just the noise or the stress or the unrest of the political situation, the pandemic, everything that's happening. It's hard for them to focus on finding their passion and it may not even be a priority to them right now. Your book, the Practice, is showing us how to find our passion. And I wanted to ask you, what is the difference between passion and purpose? And how do we find both of them? and how do they work together?

So what would happen if you didn't have to find it? What would happen if you could simply summon it? And I think that that changes everything for people. If you believe that there is one thing that you were ordained to do, to be not just a helicopter pilot, but a pilot of jet helicopters, or not, you know, pick your ever specific thing. Well, then you're always going to be dissatisfied as you bounce from one thing to another, arms folded, saying, nope. That's not it. That's not it. What if instead we could simply say, I am choosing to be passionate about what I do. And my purpose is whatever I am doing. I'm going to be here for it. I'm present for it. I'm merely going to do it. So, you know, I decided a long time ago that my passion and my purpose was a certain kind of teaching to a certain kind of audience in a certain kind of way. But I could have just as easily ended up being a game designer. I mean, like, I was only a one week decision away from that. Or a producer of Broadway plays. Aaron Sorkin asked me to produce a few good men. I mean, I could have been a totally different thing, and I would have been passionate about that, too. So I don't believe that some angel blessed me when I was four years old and put me on this path. I think we get to make a choice. And yes, the world is upside down, and all the trauma. It's so painful. And if you want to go revisit it and it's helping you, please go revisit it. But if it's not helping you to simmer in it anymore, go make things better and decide to be passionate about making things better.

Yeah. How can we find fulfillment and deep meaning in our work or in our life, even if we're not fully passionate about it? Is it, I'm hearing you say you just got to make a decision that Whatever you're doing, you're going to be passionate about it and then you are passionate.

So here's the first question then. How much are you attached to the outcome? If you went to school like I did, like most people did, 12, 16 years, you may have heard the expression, will this be on the test? If you are asking that question, it means you're part of an educational system. And the system says the following, trade us your heart and soul for a couple minutes, your attention, And in exchange, we'll give you an A. That's the deal. And most people, if the A isn't available, aren't going to bother learning whatever it is that they're supposed to, quote, learn in the educational system. So we're completely trained on the outcome. If there is no outcome, not worth the effort. So a bunch of years ago, my friends, Alan and Bill, started a magazine called Fast Company. And they had this thing they called in advance. It was like a retreat, but in reverse. and they got 75 of us to go to Jackson Hole off season to just hang out for three days. And then they took notes so they would know what stories to write for the next year. And as one of the perks, they got us all up at five o'clock in the morning and they took us fly fishing for a fly fishing lesson, which I'd never done. And on my way in the van with nine other people, I say to the organizer, do you have any flies that don't have hooks on them. And he looked at me like I was a nut. And I was like, well, here's the deal. We're throwing the fish back anyway. And I have no desire to spear a fish and throw it back in. I'd rather just not catch the fish at all. So he found me one. And I gotta tell you, within an hour or two, I was casting better and more happily than almost anyone else. 'Cause I wasn't trying to catch a fish. I was simply trying to cast. and they were busy measuring their performance based on whether a primeval creature whose brain is smaller than a walnut was biting a hook. And I was saying, what's it like to be here on this beautiful day with my friends, learning to cast? And there's where passion is. 'Cause if you say, I can't be passionate unless there's a prize, you've just given up your life to the outside world who gets to decide if you have a prize or not. Why not ignore the scorekeeping of social media, ignore all the stuff that the outside world is doing that you can't control, and simply say, I have a practice. My practice is I do this work and I do it the best I can. I learn from what works and what doesn't, but I don't judge myself and my day based on what it worked, whether it worked, because all I have control over is the practice.

So how do we separate the judgment of not achieving the result we set out to do or the expectation that we have or other people have? How do we remove the judgment but also make adjustments as we go to improve the practice and the art so that we can hopefully get a result and survive and live and thrive and be socially accepted and all the things that most human beings want?

Yeah, it's a perfect question. So if you're going to try to please the masses, you can't do that. You have to please the smallest viable audience. Now smallest might be a big number, but the smallest viable audience. So, you know, this is my 20th book. Most of them have been bestsellers. 99% of the people in America have never read a word I have written. 99%. It's not for them. You got to figure out who it's not for. And so you find your smallest viable audience. You know, I want the 18 yoga moms in this zip code to trust me. If they don't get the joke, you just learn something really important. You better adjust because now you know who it's for. But if in the whole world, someone says, well, that's sort of dumb and you feel bad about yourself. No, it wasn't for them. But we're afraid to say who it's for because if we say who it's for, we're on the hook. 'Cause if we say, I'm building this for people who are powder skiers and the powder skiers don't show up, you don't have any weasel room. And so that's why being specific helps you find your voice.

So should we, I love this. So we figure out what our specific audience is, who it's for, who it's not for and eliminate that. Okay, we figure that out and then we create the work for them. But what if they don't like it? What if it's not useful or helpful or value to that audience? Then do we judge ourselves and beat ourselves up and analyze it? Or do we just say, okay, I'm not going to judge myself based on the result. I'm just going to continue to improve and get better every day.

I will assert that most people, including me, aren't as good as we think we are and that the work probably can be improved. But I will also say That beating yourself up, as far as I can tell, serves no function. Right. So if you get locked out of your house and you call a locksmith, the locksmith shows up with 18 keys that the lock company made that are the 18 masters. And they put the first key in, and if it doesn't open it, they go to the second key. At no point does the locksmith say, I'm a bad locksmith. The locksmith just works their way through the 18 keys until something opens the door. And so our opportunity, you know, my first year as a book packager, I sold my first book the first day for $5,000. Chip Conley and I split the money, so we made $2,500 each, Warner Books. I said, this is great. If I could sell 20 books a year, I can make a living. And then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. I didn't sell one book for a year. 800 times someone in the book industry cared enough to buy a stamp send me a letter telling me they hated my idea. No. 800 times.

Wow.

And what I was able to do, I'm not sure where I found it, was to say that project had a problem. Not I had a problem, but that project had a problem. What did I learn? Because as long as each project is getting closer, right? Because about 400 in, I started getting maybes instead of nos. So I knew I was on my way to getting the joke, but it wasn't that I was a bad person. It was that my typing, that my writing, that my idea didn't work. And distinguishing between those two is really important.

How do we separate ourselves from like, man, I put all this effort and all this love and this time and energy into this thing, and it got rejected a million times, but I'm not going to take it personally because it's not me. I'm going to separate myself from the thing. How do we separate ourselves from our babies? Which what a lot of people say, this is my baby, this is my work, this is my life mission here. And then how do we separate my thing from owning it to saying something I created?

Yeah. So three parts to this. The first is authenticity is a crock. No one wants you to be authentic and you're not being authentic. Everyone's wearing a mask all the time. Everyone's being judged on the slightest bit of information. Nobody knows what it's like to be you. So number two, people don't want authenticity. They want consistency. They want you to make a promise and keep it. They want you to be the best version of yourself. People don't want to tune into this podcast and hear for an hour that you're having a bad day and that you're grumpy. They want the very best version of Lewis. That's why they're here, right? And so whatever is getting rejected isn't truly you, because no one can know you. And then the third part, I made these on my laser cutter. They're maple blocks. They're called writer's blocks. And one of the sides says all criticism is not the same. And acknowledging to yourself, that there's different kinds of criticism, some to be ignored, some to be listened to, is really important. So a bunch of years ago, I was on the Upper West side of Manhattan, I was walking past this little pocket playground, and I hear inside the playground, this five-year-old taunting someone, like making fun of them in the playground way that boys do. And then I realize he's taunting me. He's calling me names, he's making fun of my glasses and my haircut, And I gotta tell you, if I was seven years old, that would have crushed me. I remember when I was seven, that would have crushed me. But now, I'm like, you,'re six, go screw yourself. You can't lay a hand on me. All criticism is not the same. And so when my editor at Penguin says, you know, you should change the title of the book, because the title used to be Trust Yourself, And she was right because her criticism is priceless. Her criticism, I'd pay anything for it because she knows what she's talking about. So we've got to be really clear. Did we pick the wrong part of the market? Did we show up for the part of the market on the wrong day? Or is the person we're talking to good at giving criticism and we're learning something here because learning something is different than taking it personally. It's very hard to do both at the same time.

You mentioned timing for a second. Did we pick the wrong day? How important is it to time shipping your work with whatever is happening in the season? Is it tone deaf to put something out right now? Is it the right time? Should I hold this a year or two? How do we know when it's the right time to share our creative work?

Yeah, that's great. So let me try to talk about two things here. The first one is this. Nobody wants to get hustled. And too many people on the internet have decided that the hustle lifestyle is the appropriate way forward. To come up with tips and tricks to steal people's attention. To do the, you know, the email three step to go from I've never heard of you to here's my money. All of that stuff. No one wants you to do that. So how do we bring our ideas to the world without feeling like we're hustling people? how do we get out of that mindset that appropriately holds us back? Because we don't want to be selfish and say, me, me, me. Well, my suggestion is that people look at it as an opportunity to be generous. If what you have to offer is something that we would miss if you didn't do it, it's generous. If you were standing by the side of the pool and a kid was drowning, you would rescue them, even if you don't have a water safety instructor card, even if there's a better lifeguard two blocks away. 'Cause it's generous to do so. So is it the wrong time to show up with a message of I can help make things better? Well, it depends. If you show up at a funeral trying to sell, you know, some sort of life insurance re policy, that's probably not a good idea 'cause you're hustling people.

Right.

On the other hand, if you're able to give somebody something, that opens a door for them, that helps them see the world differently, that helps them move forward and they say, thank you, then how dare you hold it back? And then the other half of it about timing is, for some people, it's never the right time. And what we are seeking is not everyone. What we're seeking is enrollment. Who, of all the people you can reach, is eager to go on this journey? Like the cool thing about podcasts, the cool thing about work from generous leaders like you, you don't show up in the middle of the night insisting someone listen, people subscribe. And so since they're subscribing, you can take your time. You can spend an hour. You don't have to say, and we'll be right back. Because they're in it voluntarily. So we earn trust not by stealing people's attention, but by dancing with it.

How do we learn to trust ourselves when we are, I believe most humans are insecure, especially now with social media, there's more and more insecurity. The more time you spend on there, the more you question and compare yourself to someone else in every category. My relationship's not as good as these people. My following and my business is not as good as this person. My health, I don't look as good. Every area, we're insecure as a society in general, I would say. How do creatives learn to completely get rid of insecurity? Or is that the wrong question? Is it good to have some insecurity? But how do we overcome self-doubt from holding us back and believe in ourselves more?

Let's talk about social media for a second, because if you're not paying, then you're not the customer, you're the product. And because you're the product, they are working overtime to make you feel bad. They are basically saying, you should feel bad about yourself until you click this button to see what people are saying about you behind your back. And then about two minutes later, they'll say, oh, now you should feel bad if you press this button. And so it's this endless cycle. At the same time, all you're seeing on certain platforms are greatest hits albums. It's like being a rock group and all you're surrounded by is Billy Joel's greatest hits, Elton John's greatest hits, the Doobie Brothers greatest hits. Well, of course you're stuck. 'Cause that's their life's work on one album, right? So the first thing I'm proposing is that you turn it off and you turn it off for a long period of time, that you can be an informed citizen and you can be connected to your friends in less than 20 minutes a day. And anything you're doing beyond that, you're not doing it because it's additive. You're doing it because you're hooked.

You're addicted. It's not additive, it's addictive.

Right, exactly. And the addiction is it keeps you from the noise in your head. It keeps you from yourself. And so the reason the book was called Trust Yourself is when you are talking to yourself, who is talking and who is listening?

Just you.

It's only one of you, but we act like there's two. And so the one who's talking is the Twitter Facebook one that saying you're inadequate, you're never going to amount to anything, you're not perfect, you need to wait, it's not the right time. My friend Steve Pressfield calls this resistance. It's profound, it's deep. It gets you to change your clothes 20 times before you go on a blind date. You know, all the problems come from resistance. But who is that voice talking to? It's talking to a voice that wants to be trusted. It's talking to a voice that once said something creative, once did something that was funny, once made something better. All of us have done it at least once. And then along the way, resistance in that voice persuaded us not to trust that self. And if we turn off social media and stop checking our email for an hour, two hours a day, the only person left to talk to is the self. And if we can adopt a practice and give the self room, it will surprise us. It won't always be right. It won't always be successful, but it will always be better than your hustling, hacking way of just playing with the system.

This is something I respect about you. I don't think you've ever been on social media yourself, really. I mean, A lot of your pages are managed by your team, at least for as long as I can remember. It's probably been years. Maybe you dabble every now and then, you do a couple tweets. I'm not sure if you still do that. And I think it allows you to write 20 books and launch businesses and be there for your team and be there for your family and continue to show up for yourself without being insecure. Oh, is this going to... Am I going to compare myself to whoever else is putting out a book this year? It allows you to focus. And I remember I did a couple of years ago, I went to Hawaii for five days and I left my phone and computer in LA. And I got on a plane with no phone, no computer and it was terrifying because I had to go old school 1997 and ask for directions at a gas station to figure out where my hotel was. But I tell you what, after two days, I was laying in the ocean looking up and I wasn't thinking about going to check my phone on the beach. or getting back into the room to check something. It was the most freeing, liberating thing that I've ever done. And I highly recommend people figure out a system that works for them. Maybe you're not able to do that for days or years like Seth has done, but something where you can time block periods of the time during the day where you don't check social media. I think that's a huge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know. And I am, I have as much insecurity as the next person. It's just different kind of insecurity.

What type of insecurity do you have right now?

I spend most of my time wrestling with the sin of omission. What didn't I do? Who didn't I respect? Who didn't I give a chance to? What didn't I publish that would have made things better? Where did I hold back? Because it was a little bit more comfortable. Because those errors have compounded and built and built and built. They're so much bigger than the error of naming a book all marketers are liars, which is a really bad name for a book. But I didn't write the Long Tail. Well, it would have been better to write the Long Tail than to give that book a better title. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, when Twitter came along, I was there really early. I saw what was possible and I said, What will I have to give up to be good at Twitter? Because whatever I give up, I'll be less good at that. And the same thing's true with Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. I don't use any of them. And it's not necessary to use them to be a well-functioning adult. Now, maybe if I had a dating life, I'd feel differently about it, but it's hard for me to see who has actually built a legitimate practice of doing creative work who can point to social media as the primary reason they're able to do it. Yeah, it's possible to be a Kardashian and it's possible to be a YouTube star, but then you're looking in the rear view mirror all day, right? You're not spending time saying, how do I become a better version of me? You're spending time saying, what's the trend? I got to get in front of it.

So what do you do to help overcome self-doubt or insecurity for yourself?

So I have a blog. I've written 7,500 posts in a row. And tomorrow morning, which will be a Friday, there will be another post. But it won't be there because it's the best post ever, nor will it be there because I decided to post it tomorrow. It will be there because it's Friday. And I haven't reconsidered that decision in 20 years. So I don't have to have a meeting with myself about whether or not it's time to write a blog post. There will be a blog post. You chop the wood, you carry the water. By getting rid of the debate, then you, I mean, think about how many things you do that were impossible a hundred years ago. That when movies first opened, They had spec, I don't know if you know this, they had special attendance at the movies because they were afraid people would have a heart attack or fate. Because seeing a train coming on the movie screen was so traumatic. And the first few years the cars were available, people broke their arms on a regular basis turning the starter of the car. And early in the days of washing machines and dishwashers, washing machines, they only had one plug in people's houses. And so you had to unplug the light and plug in the washing machine. And the washing machine wasn't balanced, so it would move. Dozens of people died every year 'cause the cord would wrap around their neck and kill them. So there's all this stuff we just do as a matter of course, like driving across town used to be death-defying, but we get used to it. We build a pattern into it. And so what I've tried to do is make it so that writing a blog post for a million people doesn't make me nervous, 'cause I do it every day. And so therefore, I can then focus on, yeah, but I have this chance tomorrow to say something that might help someone. Let me just focus on that, because I've trained myself that it's not that risky.

When do you feel the biggest or the most amount of fear then?

I would say if I've committed to a significant project that's bigger than a blog post. And I am going to pitch it to people who I trust. I'm worried about one or two things. Either they'll all like it right away, in which case I did something sort of trivial and then I have to start over.

Or- and you have to launch that thing and put all this energy and time into it. Yeah.

Or they say, I've completely missed it. And now I've got a real problem because I have trained myself to fall in love with whatever I'm committing to, like we started with, be passionate about what you do. And so now I got to decide, am I willing to be passionate about what I do in the face of all the skepticism? So if you think back to 1989, 1990, I was living here in New York and I started one of the first internet companies. and every single person I know, all of my relatives, said that I was completely delusional. For years, this went on. And it was a hard slog, because it's not like you started something in 1991 before the World Wide Web, and the next thing you know, you won. It took 77 and a half years for it to work. And I was surrounded by people who didn't get the joke. and that's a scary feeling because you've made a promise to people about their livelihood. You've made a promise to your future self about this work you're doing. And sometimes you have to persist and other times you have to say, yeah, I was wrong. And either one of them is really challenging. Yeah.

I have this theory that we're afraid of three main things. We're afraid of failure. We're afraid of success, which is what you just shared, both of those. And kind of the third one is just the fear of judgment. people judging you that know you or that don't know you, just the constant judgment that people have close or not close to you. And, those three fears kind of cripple us and some of us lean more into one of them than others or all of them. For me, it was never fear of failure because as an athlete, I learned early on, you got to make mistakes to learn to improve the shot or to catch the football or whatever it is. You got to fail to learn. and grow. So I welcomed the mistakes. I wasn't afraid of success because I wanted to succeed. I had these goals, you know, we would have team goals. I was like, let's win. But I was deathly afraid of people's opinions and the judgment of people that knew me or didn't know me. And that's what made me feel insecure was caring so much about everyone's opinion. And it made me very unhappy for so long. But would you say that you care about people's opinion or that are close to you or more people opinion that are not close to you?

I love the name of the show, School of Greatness. And I think that greatness is a really cool idea because we can't have such a scarcity mindset that we think that only one person is great. Greatness does not mean you beat everybody else, right? Greatness to me means that you went right to the edge of what you were capable of doing in this moment. And so I think it is possible to be great and come in 400th at the New York Marathon. Because compared to what you would have done if you hadn't shown up the way you showed up, never would have happened. And so for me, A version of greatness for me is reading something a year later and not remembering how I possibly wrote it. That listening to an audiobook I recorded 10 years ago because I need to hear it. Hearing from a past version of me about what might be possible. And one of the things that is a problem for me in social media is I just don't deal well with anonymous criticism.

You don't. You don't. You don't like it.

No, it. It completely reminds me because I want to make things right, and I can't because that person's already gone. Right. And, you know, Zig Ziglar used to talk about that person who cuts you off in traffic and you're honking and angry at them. They don't even know you exist.

They got loud music on. They're gone.

There's God. But you're sitting there living with the toxicity of that. Right, but then the other thing that I love about the name is the word school because you don't mean school in the education sense of and then I'll give you an a you mean school in the learning sense of if you are enrolled in this journey and you're doing it for the right reason here youe might learn something, but you don't have to be poked and prodded. You will self-enroll. You will go forward and so the you know the online workshops that I've been building for the last five years, Dalton MBA, that's all about that. The reason it works so well is because the only people who take it really want to. And that's why books are so cool, because the only person who buys it is no one accidentally buys a book. Right. And so you get to start by saying, this is where I'm going. Do you want to come? And it feels to me like that's one of the critical elements of greatness is being open to only going there with people who want to go with you.

Yeah, I love the word enrollment that you use. I use that word a lot because I'm such a big believer that life is a game of enrollment. We're enrolling people in our vision or we're unenrolling them with every moment. And it doesn't matter if you've been enrolling for 30 years, you could unenroll someone in a moment or lose trust in a moment with your relationship or whatever it may be, and then need to re-enroll for a long time to get that back. Are you a believer that creative people are born with a creative gift or talent more than, let's say, less creative people? Or can any type of creativity be learned over the years?

Yeah, so thank you so much for setting me up for this. Okay, number one, almost nobody is talented. Talent is completely overrated. I would argue that you were born with certain physical talents that enabled you to excel in sports that I could never have acquired no matter how hard I tried. Even that said though, Larry Bird was not born with the kind of talent that Michael Jordan was. Larry Bird just grounded out and shot more practice shots than anybody else. That's a skill.

And hustled.

Yeah. Yeah. But the good kind of hustle.

Yeah, exactly.

And so it feels to me, like talent is a betrayal. It is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill. Don't call someone skillful talented because they're not. They're skillful. So we can agree that playing the piano is a skill in the sense that if you work at it, you get better at it. But I would like to believe that being enthusiastic is a skill and then so is being creative. It's a skill. You can get better at it. You can choose to put in the work in whatever form it takes. We're not talking about graphic art here unless you want it to be graphic art to gain the skill. And if that's true, that's really good news because it means you're not stuck where you are. It means you can go to where you want to go. And it's really good news because skills can be acquired. And that fills me with optimism about so many things in our world. You know, we can point to the human condition and say, people are just doomed to hate each other and to undercut each other. But I can point to a culture where that's not happening. So how did that happen? Well, it's because it's a skill.

What are the three biggest skills you think all human beings should acquire? whether it be creativity or some type of attributes that to just make them better human beings, happier, more successful, richer lives with relationships, health, everything. What are those three skills? Whether you're 20 or 60, what three skills should we acquire to live a better life?

I love this. Okay, how about this? Number one is the skill of possibility, of seeing that things could be better. Number two, the skill of empathy, practical empathy, of understanding people don't know what you know, don't want what you want, don't see what you see, that they have a noise in their head that's different than the noise in your head, and that's okay. And then the third one is, the skill of learning how to learn, of being open to saying, I see possibility, I see people who need to be served who aren't who I am. And I, if I put enough into this, can figure out how to make a contribution. Those I think are three skills.

Yeah, it's really just understanding emotional intelligence and people and stepping into other people's shoes and having compassion. Why did you choose those three skills over copywriting or, you know, personal finance.

There's some next level tactical ones like decision making is a skill. And almost every Western human is terrible at it.

Why? Why are we terrible at it?

Because sunk costs are something that are probably hardwired into us. What a sunk cost means is the harder you worked to have something, the harder it is for you to give it up. And we see this mistake happen all the time. The example I'll give is pre-COVID, you've got two tickets to the movies and they were really hard to get and you told your girlfriend that you were going to go to the movies together. On your way, you bump into a friend who says, I got two front row seats to see Hamilton. Do you want to go? That means your tickets are worthless. And a lot of people go, well, no, no, there's no well. It doesn't matter how much those tickets cost you. They're sunk. You already made that decision. You can't unmake it. And so we stick with the job longer than we should, or we stick to a way of thinking about the world longer than we should, because it costs a lot. We went to law school, so now I have to be a lawyer. No, you don't. The law school degree is a gift from your former self. You don't have to take it. You could say, no, thank you, and go do something that gives you joy instead. So SunCosts is a giant skill-based area. And then what goes right next to that is the skill of saying, that was a good idea, but I have a better one now. Ooh. And that takes practice.

Explain that. So I launched this idea and it started going and I built momentum for a few years, but now this is actually a better idea for the time or for my life or whatever. And so I want to let go of that thing and move into this.

Well, it's not that that's definitely true. That's sunk cost. But then beyond it, okay, I'm the boss and I built this organization and this is how we do our expense reports. But now we're going to do expense reports this way because it's better. But usually what happens is someone says, that problem's solved. I don't have to revisit it. So if I think about the car industry, the car industry said, it took us 90 years to develop the internal combustion engine. That was a lot of cycles, a big sunk cost. And someone shows up and says, why don't we make electric cars? And you go, because internal combustion isn't broken. Because I can show you that if we look at an early electric car compared to a state-of-the-art Lexus, the state-of-the-art Lexus is better, not a problem. Whereas what would have transferred billions and billions of dollars of assets away from Elon Musk is if they had said, nope, you're right. We're just going to copy all the things you're doing that are working and make it even better. Because we have an improvement ratchet in place, a dealer network in place, we're trusted. We could go to the races. But senior executives making seven figures said, nope, nothing could be better than this.

Yeah, I tell you what, I got a Tesla a few years ago and it's hard for me to think I'd ever want to go back for a day-to-day car that's not electric. Personally.

It just, but let's think about Tesla for a minute because Tesla made a whole bunch of decisions a few years ago that they refused to reconsider, right? That the inside of the car should have no cup holders of a certain kind, that the inside of the car should have these things on, the dashboard, but not these things that the service needs. So they're as guilty of the same thing. They took a leap, they hired a thousand people, and now they're stuck on their sunk costs.

Right. That's true. And they'll be stuck until they innovate or continue to open up. Why do we need reassurance? Why does it seem like a lot of people need this reassurance just every day? We need some type of reassurance. And Why should we avoid reassurance?

That's the second side. Reassurance is futile. Reassurance feels really good, right? So we get off this call, the phone's ringing, and Kai comes to you and says, Hey, Louis.

Great job.

It's Oprah. And Oprah was listening. She just wants you to know what a great job you did. So you're flying. for like two hours, maybe three, and then you need to hear it from somebody else. Because what it means to get reassurance is that someone is telling you that the future is going to be okay. And it feels good because we would like the future to be okay, but deep down we know that that person doesn't know that the future is going to be okay. So as soon as reassurance shows up, it reminds us that we are confronting an uncertain world, and we want more of it. We want to be held safely and it doesn't scale, you can't get enough of it. So what's the alternative? The alternative is to refuse reassurance.

So when someone says, you did a great job Seth, it was amazing, that was the best thing I've ever seen in my entire life. How do we refuse that?

Well, that the answer is thank you. I appreciate you being present and giving me that feedback, but it's reassurance if you then say, and your book launch is going to go great. Because that you can't know.

Yeah, right?

That's the second half of that's what's implied is that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow. And what's the alternative? The alternative is to say nobody knows about tomorrow and looking for external validation that I'm going to catch that fish, that that thing I am hoping for is going to work that other people Will get the joke. Not only doesn't it help me, it undermines my trust in myself. It undermines all of the things that I need to merely do the work. So, you know, you've been seduced by like me and everyone else with the just do it thing from Nike. And the problem with the word just is that some people think it means what the hell? Do whatever you want. Doesn't matter. Just do it. and I think it should be changed to merely do it. Do it without commentary. Do it without drama. Simply show up and do the thing. Focus on the practice, not hoping and wishing for the outcome that you need to be reassured by. But the practice, the best you can do it, because what could be better than the best you could do it? Nothing. So do that, learn from what works, and then do it again. But seeking reassurance is distracting you from doing a better job of what you set out to do in the first place.

I saw somewhere, I don't know if it was an article or video about Oprah talking about almost 100% of her guests, not everyone, but I think a lot of them at the end of the show would all say the same thing. I think you know what I'm going to say. It's like, did I do okay? Was that good enough for you?

Yeah.

Did you like that? And it's this kind of reassurance mindset, right? Of like knowing that we got approval from the person who's interviewing us or working with us or our publisher, were the numbers okay for you? Did the sales go okay? How do we gracefully remove that from our way of being moving forward so that we don't have to ask if we did an okay job? and we learned to just say thank you so much for having me or I'm grateful and whatever else. How should we finish a project like that?

Well, I'm really afraid of the word should. I think should and shame go right next to each other. So I will just tell you that there are practices that you can engage in to help you insulate from feedback that isn't going to help. Here's an interesting story. A bunch of years ago, a famous electronics company did a focus group. The way focus groups work is you set up a trailer next to a shopping mall, you pay people some money, they come in for an hour, there's hidden glass windows, and the client can watch people touch the product. They had a clock radio and it had all these gizmos on it and everything else. They got eight people in there and they're all looking at the clock radio and they're all talking about how much they love the clock radio. and at the end, the organizer says, thank you so much. To thank you for being here, either you can get the $20 we promised you or the $100 clock radio, which would you prefer? And every single person took the 20 bucks.

Why?

'Cause that was the truth. That was the moment that they were actually telling the truth.

Oh, so they thought the clock wasn't as worth as much as the $20.

Yeah. And so what I have found is I got an ego as much as anybody, maybe more. I like it when the people around me say, you did a really good job. When Oprah says, that was good, for sure. But I want to see three years later, are people still talking about this idea? Or I just want to see in the afternoon after a blog post, Did someone engage with it in a way that changed them? When they didn't know that I would notice, right? Because it's not a performance in that moment. It's, did you have an impact? So if you go to Dia Beacon in upstate New York and watch what happens when people walk into a Richard Serra sculpture, which weighs two million pounds, I hope Richard has seen that happen because that's genuine service. He made this. The curator doesn't matter. The dealer doesn't matter. This person had their breath taken away. That's what was supposed to happen. And it did. And so we play this game with everybody around us. Do I look fat in this dress, etc. Etc. And some of that is totally legitimate. It, it papers over our momentary insecurities and There's nothing wrong with that. But when it comes down to the practice and the art that we seek to make, I think it makes sense to surround ourselves with people who say, I respect you, you're onto something, you can do even better. And for us to start a cycle of what happened when this went into the world. 'Cause when it's in the world and people had choices, what did I learn? how can I help a different group of people or this group of people make a different choice? And, you know, in the workshops that I do, I get to watch all of it because I'm, like, up here and you can see all the interactions. That's different than looking at the test scores because you're watching how people are, are going back.

Yeah, I think I heard our, our good friend Gary Vee talking about how when he started in his dad's wine business, he would sit and watch people walk through the store and say, okay, what if I move this this way? And what if I put this in the front? Did people go and pick it up? Or did they walk right past it? Observing the results and the impact that you create on people, whether that's an experiential design or a physical design, whatever it may be. I'm curious, I'm gonna try to be mindful of the word should. Is it more powerful for creatives to have goals and deadlines or is that destructive to the creative process?

Right. So deadlines are a weird word because they have the word dead in them.

Finish lines or launch lines, whatever.

I am super disciplined. about deadlines. I have never missed a deadline because I just decided that some people need that tension that comes from being five minutes late. I abhor that. I want to go nowhere near that. So for me, it's fuel. For other people, it might be turbo fuel because they need that five minute over thing. But there are other people who it completely destroys their work. so you've got to figure out how do you engage with that. But goals is a different thing. So I was talking to somebody, I wish I could give them credit, who was explaining to me that goals are externally focused. And this is one of the things that led to me writing about it in the book. Meaning, if you say my goal is to be a millionaire, that isn't up to you. It's only partly for from you and the rest of it is luck. And so if you're going to say, I'm a good person because I'm lucky and I'm a bad person because I'm unlucky, now you're really in trouble. Instead, what we need are practices that we call our thing, that thing we call our goal is, I'm going to be the kind of person that ships this much work each day, that gets out of bed at this time, that manages their expenses so they're always one third of, I mean, you can make a list of things that are completely under your control. Call those your goals and wipe out anything that involves fish, anything that involves something external happening that makes you feel lucky.

So I'm hearing you say focusing more on the things you can control daily, the habits, the practices, the actions, your energy, way of being, your compassion daily as opposed to the end result.

Right. And let's get back to where we started, which is the reason people don't do that It's because they don't want to hear from their other voice. They don't do that because they don't want to be on the hook. It is easier to catastrophize. It is easier to say I'm distracted. It is easier to say, oh, the world is way too, whatever. All of those are external things that let you off the hook. And what I remember is I was born a year and a half before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world is really in trouble in 2020. But the world was 10 minutes away from being gone in 1962. And so the question is, how did we get from that to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon seven years later? We didn't do it by saying, well, we can't because Russia could end everything any minute. We said, well, if Russia is going to end everything in any minute, we might as well send someone to the moon. And my friend, Ross Zander, helped me learn the difference between but and and. So here we go. If you go on a long planned vacation and it's raining, you could say, I'm on vacation but it's raining. Doesn't that suck? Or you could say, I'm on vacation and it's raining. And the and leaves room for you to say, so I can take a cooking lesson, so I can have some quiet time with my spouse, so I can figure out how to work for social justice, All of those things happened because it's raining. And so, yeah, it's raining right now. It's really bad. And you can do something. You can fix everything, but you can make one person better.

What are the habits that you believe would support more creatives if they did these habits on a daily basis? From your 30 plus years of experience of what's worked for you and what you've seen other people you've studied do, what are those few habits you think could really help them further their inner happiness and hopefully accelerate the luck on the outside as well?

Yeah. So we have to not fool ourselves into getting hooked on the external that we'll pretend we're not, but deep down we are. So, you know, Chong Yang, Trumpet Arin Pache said, the bad news is we are falling and falling and falling, and the good news is there's nothing to hang on to. And as soon as you acknowledge that there's nothing to hang on to, it gets so much easier to fall.

You just let go and you don't have to keep trying to grab or something.

Right. And so it's the grabbing is the biggest thing. I write in the book a little bit about Julia Cameron's morning pages. Most people don't really understand how they work. You're not supposed to get up and write three pages of good prose. You're not supposed to write up, get up and write three pages of interesting things. You're simply supposed to get up and write three pages, period. About anything, junk, garbage, cruf, get it off your chest, doesn't matter. Just put it down. Because as soon as you do, for the rest of the day, if you try to bring it up again, your subconscious says, I already wrote that down, I don't need to revisit that. It's taken care of, I wrote it down, I've discharged that. And so part of what it means to have a practice is the practice defines who you are. If you want to be a runner, the best thing to do is go run every day. If you run every day for 30 days, you're a runner. You don't have to subscribe to Runner's World. You don't have to have fancy equipment. You just have to run every day. If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. And you don't have to show it to anybody. You simply have to do it. And not showing it to people, lets you off the hook at some level, but at least you can see yourself as that kind of person. And then the step after that, which I'm a huge fan of, and the internet makes this easier than ever, is publish it anonymously. I think you should have a daily blog, but don't put your name on it. And after you've written 30 or 40 entries of your daily blog or made five or six episodes of your podcast, you're going to want to put your name on it. And then you can. But begin with, and if your name's on it, it's so delicious because there's no upside and there's no downside. So you're simply doing it and that's all you're gonna get out of it, is that you did it. Yeah.

I wanna ask you about money for a second because I think it's a topic that a lot of creatives shy away from. And I think this actually might be some of the most powerful stuff people hear is, around the topic of money. You've been financially successful. You launched a business 30 years ago that you sold and exited. You've had many hits in your books and businesses. You've made money as a creative. It's fair to say that. What should creators be thinking about in terms of what do they want to create great work, but also they want to be rich. They want to make millions. They want to for the heck of it to support their family, their lifestyle. They want to make money. What should they be thinking about in terms of art and money and marrying the both without it feeling bad or icky or I'm selling myself in a bad way to make money? How can they approach it mentally so that it doesn't cripple them but they achieve the results they want?

My answer may surprise some people but here we go. The odds that you will make a lot of money doing exactly what you want are zero to a rounding error, zero. It is possible to make a lot of money. It is easier now for people of privilege to do it than most any other time in history because of the network effect, because of the power software, because of tools that give you reach to millions of people. The way you make a lot of money is you figure out what people with money want to spend that money on to solve their problem now. And you go solve that problem. And then over time, you amplify their need and you let them do it again. That is how everybody, with few exceptions, who has made a lot of money, has done it. Those people don't get to say, oh, but I also have this idea and I need to express it. because I think it's generous. Those are different things. And only in the last 100 years, has it even been conceivable that you could get paid money to do what you love? This is brand new idea. So I am in favor of doing what you love and charging for it if you can, because it holds you responsible, puts you on the hook, creating tension, serving people you wanna serve. and maybe you'll get paid a little bit. But if you want to make a lot of money, listen to the market and show up to the market with something the market wants to buy. 'Cause you don't get to insist that the market is wrong when you're asking the market to pay you something. Right.

You need to become so desirable in the thing that you're creating that is limited quantity or something that there's attention around it and people want it. Like right now, Pokemon cards are going crazy right now for whatever reason and they're selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars because there's a limited amount and people want it, but they've created that desire. Who would have thought that a couple pieces of cardboard would be worth that much money? And baseball cards are going through the roof. I think one sold for $4 million a couple months ago for the record sale of a baseball card. And they've created the desire for it. Who would have thought that that'd be something you could do? What are some personal practices on managing money that you've learned as an artist throughout the years in a creative that you would prescribe for people, whether that you learned the hard way or you had some good advice from someone.

So it's pretty simple. Money is a story. And anybody who's listening to this has more technology than the last King of France did. That we tell ourselves a story of sufficiency or insufficiency that has been amplified by the marketing industrial complex to make us buy more stuff or work more hours. So the first most important thing by far is to get your story straight. And I have worked with and known people, friends who were addicted to debt. They needed debt to go to work. They needed debt to feel like there was a fire under them. I knew other people who I worked with at Yahoo and stuff who no amount of money was going to be enough. And I gotta tell you, after you have $100 million or $200 million, you don't need $400 million. You can't even tell the difference. Right? That didn't matter. They're hooked on it. Every year when Forbes publishes their billionaires list, they make hundreds of people really sad because those people move down. Like, really? You're a billionaire. Why are you sad about that? It's absurd. So getting your story straight is super important. And then the second part is debt is really, really a problem because debt compounds faster than interest does by a lot. And so what you do, if you're serious about living the life of the creator that isn't getting paid well, is you've got to dramatically cut your expenses. Cut them lower than you would think. Brown rice, black beans, sleeping on a friend's couch. Do that for two years until you have enough money in the bank that you will never need to be in debt. Pay those dues early and then you get the freedom to do the work you want to do. I paid those dues for seven years and I wouldn't trade it because what I learned there is I'm not entitled to do any project I want whenever I want. As soon as I didn't owe anybody anything, I had the freedom to say, I'm going to make this. If you owe Chase Manhattan Bank or you owe Goldman Sachs or you owe Wells Fargo a monthly payment and you're paying your student loans and you're paying this, well, then it's really easy to hide from the creative work that you want to do. Yeah, you're a prisoner to that debt. The third thing is there are very few shortcuts with money. If someone says you can get rich.

Quick, you should run away. What's the biggest mistake you've made in your last 30 years as a creative, whether in business or art or a relationship that happened? that ended up being the greatest mistake you made. And because it taught you a lesson, it got you out of something that you, you know, it made you more humble, whatever that might be. What's that big failure, mistake thing that happened that was actually a great blessing for you?

Well, the one that I eat out on a lot is I saw the World Wide Web before anybody and I said it was stupid and it was slow and there was no business model and it was We'll stick with Prodigy and AOL, thank you very much. So that costs like $40 billion. And once you make a $40 billion mistake, you start to forgive yourself about other mistakes that involve money, right? But I don't beat myself up about that at all because it worked out just great for me. And if I owned half a Yahoo, I don't think my life would have been better. I think the mistakes have been when I have had a creative instinct on how I can make things better and I blinked. And I said, I don't trust myself enough to lean into this one. And maybe the journey is too long or maybe it's too fraught or maybe I'm worried that I'll get blamed. And so I didn't contribute in the way I could have when I could have. and it's that thing of omission again. Now maybe that's just a story I tell myself to get me going again, but this moment in time, so fraught, is also going to be a moment when a lot of great stuff is gonna get built. And you can wait it out, but then we won't have your great stuff.

I tell people when I'm coaching people that I'm kind of harsh, but I say you're doing a disservice to the people that need your work. You're doing a disservice to your friends, your family, humanity, If you have a gift that you can share and can help people and pick them off the ground and you're afraid that doing a disservice, you're doing more harm than good by your insecurity of not shipping.

Right, and you're also eating yourself up a lot. And this is where the reassurance cycle is so toxic. If you are seeking reassurance it's because you're trying to put out a fire inside of you that can only be put out by actually making things better. And the creatives that I know, it's interesting, I know 11 billionaires because of the whole Ted World thing. They're not that interesting and they're not that curious. They're just not, they're just proud of the fact that they figured out how to corner the market in something.

And they scaled it.

Yeah. And I know a lot of creatives. I know people who have won Tonys and Grammys and Oscars and people you've never heard of. and some of them have money woes and some of them are bitter about this or that. But when you talk to them about the work, their eyes light up because they are not looking for me or you to reassure them and tell them that they're okay. They just know that they made a piece of work and it's for you or it's not for you. Here, I made this. And that simple sentence here, I made this, for a lot of people, that's what it means to be alive. Yeah.

I've got about four questions left for you to be respectful.

We'll do a speed round.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I love the creative, the writer's block, physical block you have. I'm curious because you got a lot more about this in your book, and I want to make sure people get the book, the Practice Shipping Creative Work, which shares a lot of these things about finding your passion, becoming creative, especially when it's very frightening to do so, trusting yourself and your voice in a time when everyone's comparing you and judging you, all these different things, model being positive in their practice, which I'm constantly trying to live in being positive because I think you attract more. So many other things that are great in the book. So make sure you go get the book. It's called the Practice. You can get it online. You can get it anywhere. But for the people that feel like they're just blocked creatively, whether it's writers block, podcasters block, business block, relationship block, how do we Where is that block coming from? And what are the steps to overcoming the writer's block of our life?

When in doubt, look for the fear. I had an interaction with somebody a couple weeks ago and they were really brutal and difficult. And I was being defensive and also blaming them for not being a good human. And then I figured out this person's boss was kicking their butt on a regular basis. And so they didn't have any problem with me. They were just afraid. They were afraid of what the boss would say. When in doubt, look for the fear. If people are giving you a hard time about forward motion, where's their fear? If you are finding yourself blocked, where's your fear? So there's this old expression which I find completely useless, which is what would if you knew you could not fail, what would you do? It's useless because you should just wish for invisibility and Three more wishes, right? But here's a better question. If you knew you were going to fail, what would you do? That's worth doing. Go do that. Ooh.

That's interesting. If you knew you were going to fail, what would you do? Hey, that's a good one. I like that question. If you knew you were to fail, what would you do?

I'd write this book.

Yeah. That's, I love, you know, then you know you're on the right path and you're following your passion. Okay, this is a question I asked everyone at the end. It's called the three truths. It's a hypothetical question. So imagine it's the last day on earth for you, okay, on this earth. It's as many years as you want to live, you live till it could be a hundred and something, whatever. But you got to turn the lights off for yourself and you got to say, okay, I'm leaving this earth. And you've accomplished every dream that you have, or you've lived intentionally, you've done the practice and the work daily, you've shown up, the things you wanted to create, they were created. Whether they failed or not, it's irrelevant.

You did it.

But for whatever reason, hypothetically, you've got to take all of your work and create.