Best-Selling Author Seth Godin On Discovering Your Practice & Embracing The Resistance

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You've got to show up for the right people in the right way with language and a story and tension and connection that causes action to happen and then the ripples happen. So seeing how that is possible is what marketing actually is. Marketing is not hype or hustle or spamming people.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I have a guest that has been on my dream guest list since I started this podcast. Didn't really ever know if it would happen, but man, did I put some effort in and did we ever like just dream of making this happen. This was a team effort you guys. And before I tell you who it is, I want you to text the word daily to 310-496-8363. I literally sit down every month and write out quotes, thoughts, all the things that I need to hear to kick my butt in gear, to pull me back up when I'm feeling down, to remember how important it is to go after our dreams. Because there is a cost for not going after our dreams. There's a cost for not being you. And that's really what I sit down and think about when I write these text messages. So you guys make sure you go sign up by texting the word daily to 310-496-8363. And now that you've joined the text list, I am going to tell you who's on the show today. You guys, it is so Seth Godin. This human has rocked my world mostly with his writing and just his massive consistency. I don't know if I've met another person who can consistently put out so much good content. He says he's been trying to turn on lights and inspire people and teach them how to level up for the past 30 years. You guys. He has published 20 best selling books. One of my favorite books right now is this is Marketing. And he also has a new book out called the Practice, which I literally cannot wait to read. He has had 60,000 people take his online courses. He's in the Guerrilla Marketing hall of Fame, the Direct Marketing hall of Fame, and just recently the plain old no modifier Marketing hall of Fame, which he says is pretty darn cool. And I think that's really freaking co as well. He also has five TED Talks. You guys, that is absolutely nuts. If you do not know who this human is, you are about to get rocked. Not just because this podcast is so freaking epic, but I sign up for his blog every single day. He has sent out a blog post that is interesting, that adds value to my life for the past 10 years. And this is something that we talk about on the show is like, how in the world are you so consistent? How do you create so much good content in the world? And he even challenged me a little bit on this podcast, which was a really cool moment for me. So this man is amazing. I was so impressed with the fact that, like, he was so real. He was so down to earth. How he writes is exactly how he is. He's just like the real deal, you guys. So let's get started on the show. Seth, I'm so excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on.

Well, thanks for doing it week after week, day after day. It's a lot of work.

It's all about that consistency that I'm so grateful for, which I was. I literally was thinking so much about that as I was in the Seth rabbit hole of just all of the work that you've done. You know, I've read so many of your books, but I really dug into just your blogs and your social and your books and all of the things.

That you have shown up for consistently.

And it kind of blew my mind thinking about what your day to day life must look like.

It's way less involved than you think because I don't go to meetings and I don't use social media and I don't watch television. So I got seven or eight hours that most people don't have every day.

Okay, I love this. I think this is a great spot to start because I think for people who have seen your blog and all of the output that you put out into the world, I think my very first question would be, what do you do for all of your input to have all of that content in your brain? How much are you consuming? Where are you getting your creative ideas? What is the practice around that for you?

So this is tricky because my practice is completely irrelevant and I have no magical talents. I wasn't born. My high school English teacher wrote in my yearbook that I was the bane of her existence and I never learned anything. That's an exact quote. I wrote an entire book called the Practice about the fact that you need a practice. And where your practice begins is by refusing to acknowledge that you are insufficient, and by refusing to say that other person has a thing I will never have. You can do that in basketball. I will never be able to dunk a basketball. But if you have fingers, you can type. If you have a mouth, you can talk. And if you can talk, you can write down what you say. And you can learn to get better at it. So the question is, what practice will you develop in your generous posture of helping other people? Because if you're just hustling other people, they can tell. If you're just in it for the payday, they can tell. But if you actually want to help somebody, you can get better at it.

So I read that you don't think that people have, like, writer's block or creator's block. What do you think that is then, that they have?

Oh, I'm sure. I am sure there is no such thing as writer's block, and I can prove it. Before 1870, the term didn't even exist. And it came into heavy use in the 1920s and 30s because of the whole drama around people like Ernest Hemingway. What people have is a fear of bad writing. And if you have a fear of bad writing, I totally understand you're unwilling to write because you're afraid of bad writing. But if you have enough bad writing, sooner or later, some good writing is going to slip through whether you want it to or not. If you say, I have no good ideas, I say, show me your bad ideas. If you show me enough bad ideas, I bet there's a pony in there somewhere.

I'm laughing because I'm writing my second book right now, and I literally. Some days I'm like, wow, I sure can write a lot of crap. But it was the allowing that. The first book, I was like, wow, I have nothing to write. And the second one, I'm allowing, I'm like, just let it all come out. Cause I learned this theory of, like.

You know, well, there is no lack of writing anymore.

Now we just need to go back.

Through it and sift through it.

But it really is a practice. It's like, I am going to sit down and write words today no matter what those words are. So for you, you said you have, like, seven extra hours per day. I kind of want to know what that practice looks like for you. Is it always in the same spot, or are you kind of like, I can just turn that on and I know what's happening tomorrow.

So I was serious when I said it was a trap and I'm going to protect you by not letting you fall into the trap. Okay, I will tell you that a key part of the discipline is that I decided 20 years ago that tomorrow, which is a Friday, as you and I are talking, tomorrow there's going to be a blog post from me. I decided that 20 years ago. So I don't have to worry about whether or not I have something good enough to make a blog post. I just have to worry about if it's tomorrow. Because if it's tomorrow, there's going to be a blog post. That commitment to a practice, that's the hard part. If you've ever met a two or three year old, they call them toddlers for a reason, because they toddle and they're terrible at walking. I don't know if you ever noticed that they fall down all the time, but none of them say, I give up. They say is, I'll be better at this tomorrow if I persist. Well, my first hundred blog posts had 10 readers each and they weren't very good. So after you've made 50 podcasts or written 200 blog posts in a row, then you can come and speak up and say, I'm not good at this. But first you should show up.

When you write. Are there moments where you're like, oh, that's really good. And then do you get that response from other people and has it been like vice versa? Where you've been like, that's really bad. And you get a great response all the time.

I don't spend a lot of time looking at the responses because I've already written it and I can't learn from them. I haven't read, haven't read my Amazon reviews in eight years. Never met, never once met an author who said they read all their one star reviews and now they're a better writer. It doesn't make you a better writer. It just tells you which people didn't like your book. Because if you had any five star reviews, you know, some people liked it. So it's just about who liked it, not is it good. And in my case, you know, the blog post I wrote word for word that got the most response is, you don't need more time, you just need to decide. That's the whole blog. But I wrote that blog post in less than 12 seconds. And there are other blog posts that I've worked on for months, months, Crickets. So I don't know. I have no idea.

You just. And the only way to know is to keep putting stuff out there consistently.

Yeah, I need to make sure it sounds like me. There are things I like, sound like me. I don't publish those. But if it sounds like me and I'm proud of it, I'll publish it. But then I will be wrong about what's going to be popular or not. Like, I just wrote a blog post about mixing orange juice and milk, which was a metaphor, but I heard from four people who insisted that mixing orange juice and milk is a fine thing to do. It wasn't about orange juice and milk. But you never, you know, like people are going to take what they're going to take.

Yeah, that's a really big lesson too. It's just like no matter what you do, no matter how much context you give, it's still not going to be enough for some people. So you might as well just put it out there. What would you feel like right now if you were never able to create again? Like if someone said, you cannot write another word?

Well, if we're breathing, we're creating. So, you know, if I was in a weird gamma ray experiment and all 10 of my fingers fell off so I couldn't type anymore, then I would find some other thing to do to give me the experience of generously creating something. And you know, I used to be a game designer. I had to stop doing that because I didn't work at a game company anymore. I missed it, but I put the energy to something else. There isn't something you were born to do that's nonsense. Right? Van Gogh wasn't born to paint in oils. If he had been born 100 years later or earlier, he would have done something totally different. Steve Jobs wasn't born to be in the computer business. So you develop cycles and you apply them wherever it's going to be the most use.

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Do you think that people maybe thinking of yourself or just looking at people? Do you think that staying in one thing is a good thing for people or do you think that we are like evolving and creators and that we should be looking for new things.

I think it begins with the benefit of the doubt. Two parts of that. Giving yourself the benefit of the doubt, overcoming imposter syndrome and realizing you can do this. And second, the people you serve giving you the benefit of the doubt. And so if you go to a Bob Dylan concert, there's an expectation for what a Bob Dylan concert is, but it's worth noting. In his make believe autobiography, he said that he insisted to his tour manager that he go to the same cities three years in a row. And the tour manager said, that's absurd. No one does that. He said, I need to do that because the first year, fans will come. The second year they might bring their friends, and then the third year, people who didn't know the old me will come. But by coming year after year after year, I will use the benefit of the doubt to build a platform to create music. I want to create, not just play my hits. So once you've earned the benefit of the doubt in our modern world, it is easier to switch formats. And so Bob Dylan can actually sell oil paintings because he's Bob Dylan. Right. And that's different than being a wandering generality, as Zigwit said, which is, you know, doing six tweets, getting bored with it, running over to Facebook, then deciding to have a podcast, then doing this because no one. You never got through the dip. You never got to the point where someone said, oh, I know, Lori, sure, let's give it a try.

At what point did you feel like you had the confidence that you like, I'm looking at all your stuff. And honestly, I love talking about so many things. So this was a challenging thing for me to prep for because you talk about everything, and I'm like, I want to talk about all of these things. Have you always felt like you had something to say on everything, or has that been developed, like, that confidence of. I really feel confident in my thought process around having to say something around this. How did that evolve?

Well, I don't talk about everything. I talk about one thing, which the stories we tell ourselves to build our culture. And so if I have an opinion about gardening or I have an opinion about a novel, I'm only going to talk about it through the lens of the stories we tell to build our culture. And in private, you can hear me pontificate about things that I don't pontificate about when I'm playing the role of Seth Godin. Right. And it is a role. Authenticity is overrated. It's a crock this is my job. And when I'm doing my job as a professional, I show up as a professional and do the thing I do. I think most people have opinions on lots of things and I am not confident that I am right in many of them. I am fairly confident. I am interesting in the sense that I will give someone something to talk about so that they can figure out what they believe. That is different than an engineer saying the tensile strength of carbon steel is 7.4 modulo. Because that's true. It is not true that something that I write about on my blog will always hold up. It's just a paradigm and in a metaphor for how you will choose to see the world.

How did you figure out for people listening? And you're like that put it in perspective for me. That can be your North Star, like what you had just mentioned for you through that lens. Do you have a suggestion for people trying to figure out what their lens is?

Right. Okay. So as we said a couple minutes ago, you're not born with one. And if, if you listen to the origin stories of most rock stars, what you will hear is the stuff they started with wasn't very good and it didn't work. The Billy Joel's demo tapes are terrible and the first music that the Rolling Stones made or Fleetwood Mac made does not sound like them. So in my case, I was a book packager after I stopped being a game designer and I got 800 rejection letters in a row. No one has ever read my book about hypnotizing their friends and acting like chickens. No one has ever read the fortune cookie construction set. I did a whole bunch of novels for young adults, some with Walter Dean Meyer, some based on Nintendo games. I did books on gardening. I did this. I did this. I did this. I did this. I did the Stanley Kaplan test prep books. And so if any of them had worked bigger than they did, I might still be doing that. I just knew I wanted to be of service, but I didn't know how. And you get a chance in this marketplace of ideas to show up. And you need to show up long enough to be sure you tried hard enough. And if you show up and it doesn't work, you get to take a deep breath and say, maybe I should do something different.

Okay, if I were to be a fly on the wall when you're talking to your friends or your wife or your dog, what would some of those conversations that you would be having with them, what would those be around?

Well, I mean, last night I had an hour Long conversation about the genres of jazz, how piano, classical and rock and roll overlap. Yeah, I could probably make a whole podcast about that and talk about it in a cultural context. But I was actually talking about the idea that you probably can't name a living classical music composer, but you can probably, if you're aware of jazz at all, name 10 people who write original jazz. How did that happen? Why did that happen? And why is it hard for my friend Charles to make it as a classical pianist? Right. So I find stuff like that endlessly interesting. But then, you know, also a conversation about why is it that so many people are resistant to the facts and understanding of how our climate is changing and our unwillingness as Americans to face death and think about end of life or just end of our turn? I find those things are filled with pathos and are fascinating. But if I blogged about him every day, I'm pretty sure I would turn off just about everybody.

So you like having those conversations in.

Private, but how are you.

I know that majority of the things that you talk, you talk a lot about change and just looking at things different. What is something you're trying to change right now? Is that what you're trying to change, that conversation or what does that look like?

Yeah. I spent the last year as a full time volunteer leading the project that made this the carbon Almanac. This is the Dutch edition and this is the free kids book. Digital version is free. And that's, you know, 3,000 hours of my life building something that has changed the conversation. It's the most important project of my life because it's going to affect every person on the planet. And we need to be urgent and patient at the same time because we've known about this problem for 40 years, since Exxon wrote a memo about it in the 80s. But we gotta hurry. And so I spent a fair amount of time working on that and thinking about that.

So you've worked on that. And it brings up an interesting question for me around, because maybe it's not the most popular topic that people are necessarily pining at. How are you rethinking about trying to repackage that or get it out into the world or make it more interesting to people.

Right. So you've got hundreds of thousands of people who listen to your podcast. You don't know hundreds of thousands of people. So how did that happen? I'm guessing your first episode had a hundred people.

Yeah.

Maybe less. And they told somebody else. And they told somebody else. So the thing about the almanac is most of the sales have been four or five or 10 at a time. And if someone buys five, they're going to give them to other people. And when they give them to other people, a conversation is going to take place. That conversation, I'm not at the table. You're not at the table. But it's happening, right? That's what it needs to occur. That's how gay marriage got legalized in the United States. It's not that every single gay person in the United States figured out how to change the world. It's that someone knew someone who knew someone, and it was the moral thing to do, so it happened. Creating conversations based on a mutual understanding of facts and morality is how change happens.

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You know, going into just even thinking about. Because you talk a lot about marketing and let's just use that idea as the idea. When you were making a plan for marketing this, did it feel different than the other plans that you've made? Did it feel harder? Does it feel.

Yeah, it was much harder. It was much harder. In our culture, the easiest two things to sell are convenient and cheap. And the third easiest thing to sell is you will make money from this. And the fourth easiest thing to sell is aren't they cute? And this is none of those things. So we're already now down to number seven. And you've got to show up for the right people in the right way with language and a story and tension and connection that causes action to happen and then the ripples happen. So seeing how that is possible is what marketing actually is. Marketing is not hype or hustle or spamming people.

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What was the pivot point for you that got you so interested in this? Because right before this, what was, like, your main interest? What was your main focus? And Then what was that? Like, whoa, I am going to, like, turn everything over here. What was the feeling?

Where were you at?

What was it?

So, Lori, 16 years ago, I wrote my first blog post about climate. I'm a trained mechanical engineer, so I've been thinking about it for a long time. But my blog post did not solve the climate problem. Go figure. And I sort of put it aside because I didn't know enough to be articulate about what was happening. And like most people on this planet, the last two and a half years have been a health risk and have been heartbreaking in many ways about our culture. And so, like most people, those are the things that were top of mind for me. And then I read a book by Kim Stanley Robinson. I love science fiction. I've actually worked with Isaac Asimov, with Ray Bradbury, and with Michael Crichton when I was 24. Some of the highlights of my career. And Kim, or people call him Stan. Stan wrote a book called Ministry for the Future. And it takes place five years from now. And it begins in a heartbreaking way when 10 or 15 million people die in four days in a heat wave in India. And from there, it gets a lot easier to read. But basically, it describes how when we finally woke up as a planet, what did we do? And the whole book is based in truth. The whole book is based in fact. And I learned all this stuff and I was like, well, if I was this uninformed, I bet other people were, too. If I was this hesitant to speak up, I bet other people are, too. And I know how to make almanacs. I used to make almanacs for a living. I made the business almanac, the People magazine, celebrity almanac. I know how to do that. But I said, if I just make an almanac by myself, that won't be a metaphor for what we need to do. What if I organize hundreds of volunteers and we do it together? But we did. Wow.

For you.

I think of all of these different. Just books and information that you put out there.

Who is a big.

Maybe an author or a mentor for you that you really love, the way that they think and the way that they write. And I would love to know some of those thoughts, too, if they come to mind, who your favorites are.

Sure. So, first, another thing that's been going around a lot lately is this whole find a mentor thing. Mentors are overrated because they don't scale. They're very hard to find. You want them to care more about you than you care about them. That's an asymmetrical relationship. Heroes, on the other hand, are priceless. Anyone can be your hero because you can just say to yourself, what would Gandhi do? What would Mandela do? And they don't even have to know you exist. They could be dead, but they're still your hero. So I can't believe I am so lucky that I have known many of my heroes, but I've been lucky to do that. There is a maestro, a conductor in Boston named Ben Zander, and Ben's former wife, Roz. Roz wrote a book Ben helped called the Art of Possibility. It will change your life. If you find the audiobook, I suggest it. But the print book is easy to read and fun. The Art of Possibility is about giving yourself an A. It's about telling yourself a different story. And right next to that is a book called the War of Art. Notice both books have the word art in the title. And my friend Steve Pressfield wrote it. He wasn't my favorite.

One of my favorites.

And he's a hero. And the War of Art will change the way you see the world. And then a book by Patti Smith called Just Kids. Patti Smith is not my friend. I've never met Patti Smith. I hope to one day. If she's listening, I hope she'll call me. Let's send this to Patti Smith's book made me cry and cry and cry. It's so beautiful. And it teaches just kids. It teaches us what it's like to be in love. It teaches us what it's like to have loss, but to also feel possibility. I did a bunch of books with Jay Levinson before he passed. Jay Levinson's books are really appropriate for your listeners who are running a small business. They're dated, but still worth reading. The original Guerrilla Marketing and the book we did together, the Guerrilla Marketing Handbook, will help you think about a certain kind of hustle. One that I don't do anymore, but I understand how it can shift somebody's thinking. And then I got like 40 other books like this, ranging from Pemachodran, who's just a wonder, to people like Annie Duke and her new book about quitting. Annie Duke was world poker champion, and her book Thinking in Bets is all about how bad human beings are at making decisions and making predictions. And there's a lot to learn and it doesn't cost very much. Go to the library. You'll leave.

So good. Thanks. I'll be busy. We'll start here. I love, love, love the War of Art. That book rocked my world, changed my life just Taught me so much about, I mean, obviously resistance. It made me almost not excited about resistance, but kind of, because it kind of was like resistance marks the spot. If I'm very resistant there, I know that if I go there, the gift is on the other side of it. And so I just like head. When I feel resistance, I say to myself, I have a mantra around it. I'm like, resistance. Okay, head first. Like, head first into it. And it's been an accelerator for me and just a joy. I don't have to sit in the resistance. I don't have to choose the pain. So that's been. That is. That book, like, rocked my world. I read it in the middle of writing my first book and finally finished my book.

That's why Steve wrote it, so that you would do it in the middle of writing your first book.

Oh, my God. I recommend that book to everyone because I'm just like, look, if you're stuck, this is what you need to do. And so for me, I think my.

Questions for you are, I would love.

To know, when you're faced with resistance, is there anything you think, Is there anything you do? Are you a walker? Do you go move? Like, do you move energy through? What are some of the things that you do?

You're doing it again. Do you know why you do this?

I like trying things.

I don't know.

I like to see if I try them on.

Why? It lets your listeners off the hook.

Oh, interesting. Tell me how. Tell me exactly how.

Because if someone uses my method and it doesn't work, whose fault is that?

It's your fault. I'm going to blame you or me.

Yeah, I mean, the worst example is when someone asks what you eat for breakfast, as if you eat what they eat for breakfast, something good is going to happen to you. But the argument is simple, which is resistance is a law of physics. Resistance exists, like gravity. When resistance arises, as you just said, we welcome it, we don't fight it. It's a symptom. It's a compassion. And so now it's on you to do something with it about it. Not me, not my job. I figured it out for me. I am prolific simply because I know what to do with my resistance. But what you do with your resistance isn't going to be what I do with mine. And so it's not like we're talking about how to get 10 more yards on your golf swing, because that's just. There's only one good way to do that. This is different. It's complicated. It's based on who you are and what you are and where you. Where you see the world and where you want to go. But if you feel stuck now, you know why. Now you have a name for it. And instead of looking for someone to give you the map, just realize someone gave you a compass. What a gift. You have a compass.

Okay, so now you have my brain spinning, so I need to ask a follow up question. So have you never taken something and implemented it and been like, oh, that worked for me. I'm glad I learned about it.

Oh, all the time.

Okay, all the time.

And I like. So, for example, you may have noticed that in the time we've been talking, I haven't once said, and sometimes you'll hear people, particularly on the radio, who aren't used to being on the radio, who will say many times in an interview, well, I know how to solve that problem, and I put up a blog post about what to do about it. Now, if you have an actual medical condition, I feel for you and I'm not diminishing that. But for most people, when we're talking about casual placeholders of ums and okays in your nose, the method is really simple, which is you get a tape recorder and you start recording yourself talking. Except you talk as slowly as you need to to make sure you don't have to say um. And now once you've done that part, the slow part, the only job is to slightly go faster because it turns out that is something we say to keep the other person from talking when we're still in the middle of a sentence. So if you can practice talking really slowly and realize that people don't take your spot, now your brain realizes it could speed up if it wants to. So, yeah, that's a hack. I love a useful, generous hack, and I'm happy to share them. But I don't think that the way Isaac Asimov wrote 400 books is a method that most people could use. So my goal here is to create tension on purpose. I'm sorry if I made you feel bad to put you on the spot, but I did it on purpose to. To say the fact that he refuses to answer the question isn't that he's hoarding this wisdom, it's the opposite. I'm being so generous with the wisdom to say, anyone can have it, but you're just gonna have to go find it.

No, what's interesting is I was like, I literally have had all these thoughts when you were saying it. I was like, oh, the old me might have been like, you know, in the past. And I was like, okay, Lord, this is an opportunity.

There's a card game I played just a couple days ago called the Mind. And here's how it works. You and I are playing, and there's a deck of cards. There's just 100 cards. Each one is numbered 1 to 100, and in each round, we get one more card. So the first round is just two cards, and whoever has the lowest card has to put it down first. So if you get a 42 and I get an 86, you play your 42, I play my 86, we get to the next round. Now we have each have two cards, so you can see it gets harder and harder as you go. And the rule is we're not allowed to talk to each other. And so the way the game works is I got my card. You got your card. You ready? Have you imagined your card? Just think of your card. Don't say it out loud.

Okay? Yep.

Okay, we're going to start the game now. What'd you play?

Eighteen.

Good for you. I had 42.

Great.

So we won the first round. The thing about that tension, you didn't know if I had a nine, so you had to think hard. And we're just looking at each other, but we're not talking. People are terrible at this. Terrible at this, because we put the words out there to fill the tension. And what I am trying to help people understand is if you want to shoot a rubber band across the room, you got to pull it backwards first. So the tension is the point. If you are feeling tension about your work, that's resistance. That's good. Don't make it go away too fast or you'll just do something banal designed to get rid of it.

This is so good, because I am in this place right now of trying to welcome in. I can definitely say just like, how I grew up or who I used to be. I was told I was sensitive. I took things personally. And that had not been an easy journey for me in putting myself out there and how much I'm out there now and in. In business and failing publicly and all of those things. And I'm really attempting to do my best. It is not easy to just, like, welcome all of it. And I feel like people even listening right now can even. You can almost like, feel that emotion. Like, when you think of. When they think of themselves either failing or putting themselves out there or just the vulnerable journey that that is, it's just. Yeah. I don't even know I was Gonna ask you a question, but you weren't gonna tell me an answer. So I would say, is there anything that you would say to someone who right now is really at the verge of putting themselves out there? A lot things that they can either think of or do. What does that look like when you are just putting a lot of content out there and you're feeling really vulnerable and you know that you wanna do more, express yourself more out there?

So I would say two things. Things. The first one is you need to seek the smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible. My books have been bestsellers. I've been very lucky. 20 in a row. And less than 1% of the US population has ever bought one of my books. 99% of the people have never bought one of my books.

Wow.

Fine with me. It's not for them. So you gotta begin with, I know who this is for. And it's not for anyone but those people. People. Because if you keep trying to please the non believers, you're going to melt. And the second thing is don't put yourself out there, but work out there. You are not your work. Oh, that's good, right? Like I don't know you. You and I have never been on a walk together. You and I have never played pickleball together. If you doesn't go well, it's not because Lori or Seth didn't do a good job. Personal connection is because when we showed up to do our job, it didn't work right. It's actually, I think, working great. I'm giving you a 10. I hope I'm doing okay, but I'm not doing it. It's my performance. So if you put something into the world, if you know, I spent a month writing how to hypnotize your friends and get them to act like chickens. And not one person in New York wanted to publish it. Does that mean I'm a bad person or did I have an idea that didn't work? They're different things. And if you're going to take it personally, you're doing it wrong. You've got to figure out how not to put yourself on display. That's why I said authenticity is a crock. No one wants you to be authentic. They want you to be consistent. Figure out who you want to be seen as and be that. But your true self. No one deserves that but you and the people you love.

Oh, that is so freeing. Really, it is so freeing. Just that last line that you gave, that's an incredible way to look at it. And I have to know, do you hypnotize your friends at parties?

Well, one of the reasons I wanted to work on it was there were no books about how to hypnotize your friends. And the second reason was this.

A need for you.

See, you're too young to remember. In the old days, people used to go to bookstores because there was nothing else to do. And the stuff that was on display at the cash register might sell a lot of copies. So just to toot my horn for one second, this is a book you can't buy anymore. It's out of print. I invented emojis, so I didn't really invent emojis, but smileys were the thing that came before. This is a Japanese translation of the book of the smiley dictionary. Right. And it's like if you look at them this way, you can see they're funny, right? Yep. So the point is, this book was designed to sell at the cash register for five bucks, and maybe you'd sell a million of them. It was fun to think these things up. And I thought the whole hypnotism thing was a hoot, and I wanted to learn how to do it. And I would have learned how to do it if someone bought the book, but because no one bought the book, I never learned how to hypnotize people.

Oh, my gosh. All right, well, we're nearing the end. I could talk to you all day long. Is there anything, Seth, that you want that is just top of mind right now? I feel like anything you're thinking is probably the best thing you can leave people with. So is there anything you're thinking that you want to just.

Here's what I would say to the imposters in the room. If you're on Canoe Lake on a swim dock as a lifeguard this summer, and a kid starts drowning 10ft in front of you, you would be correct in saying that you were not first in your class at the water safety school. And you would be correct in saying that other people could swim two laps faster than you. And you would be correct in saying that if a different lifeguard was there, they would be better at saving this person than you are. But they're not there. You're there. And in that moment, you're going to jump in the water and save them. And it doesn't matter that you're not the best in the world at this particular task. It matters that you are there and there is someone who needs your help. And the generous act of creativity is not, please send me money. Please give me likes. I need more traction on social media. Generous act of creativity is you're in the dark. I would like to turn on a light for you. And most of the people who are listening to this are eager to do generous work. So do that. Don't hustle, don't hype, show up and help three people, five people, 10 people in a way that helps them tell others and then everything else will take care of itself.

Thank you so much for being on.

And thank you for your time. This was a bucket list conversation for me. Just so you know. Was so grateful. His latest books are this is marketing and the Practice and you guys, his his blog is awesome. Like I I just love reading even just what's so fun about your blog is even if you don't read the whole thing, which it's short, you still get great stuff from even a couple paragraphs. You guys, this is how good his his writing is and you can learn so much not just from reading. But I really love looking at how you write because you're so entertaining as well. And I do feel like you really get to inject yourself into your stuff and I think that's such a cool like North Star because I can tell it's you even from talking to you now. You are so who you are when you're writing and I think that's really, really cool. Thank you so much for coming on and you guys definitely go follow check out his blog. I will put that all in the show notes. And Seth, thank you so much. Have an awesome day and everyone earn your happy. Talk to you soon.