INBOUND 2013 - Seth Godin Keynote

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Seth Godin. Good morning, one and all. I have to confess, I'm a little intimidated to be here with people like Pistachio and Chuck and John and Mitch and everyone else. I was at the very first inbound summit 15 years ago. And 15 years ago, they said I was delusional and that none of this stuff made any sense whatsoever. And what's extraordinary to me is to see the talent and the passion that the people in this room bring and the tools that have been built for you and by you. And what I want to do today is take you on some thinking, most of which you don't need to hear, but all of which your boss needs to hear and your co workers need to hear, because we are right at the cusp of something huge. I need to start by making an announcement, which is that professional wrestling is fake. Now, some of you knew that, but a lot of you didn't. Well, okay, that guy didn't, but now he does. And once you learn that it's fake, everything about it seems different. You notice people pulling their punches. You notice the blood pack. Suddenly, the way you see the world is transformed. And learning how to see and understanding the opportunity is essential and can be really expensive if you don't get it. On my desk back in New York, I keep this box. And inside this box is a T shirt that at one point was worth $40 billion. And I keep it there as a reminder to myself about what happens when you don't see. In 1991 and 1992, I had access to the Internet. There was no web in those days. A lot of people didn't. But I was in the book business, and I was using it to work on cover stories for magazines and other things. And I saw this Internet thing bubbling up, and I decided that that was a great reason to write a book. So I put together a team of people, and this was the T shirt we made for the publisher. And we made a few tens of thousands of dollars. And the book went on to sell about 1,300 copies. During that same period of time, with the same resources I had, two guys in California saw something different, and Jerry and David turned around and built a company called Yahoo. And I figure my share, my half, would have been worth $40 billion at one point. But because I didn't want to see what was out there because I had a hammer and it looked like a book, I did the wrong thing. Well, look around the room today and understand we are at a similar crossroads and what it means to make a difference. What it means to see is to view the world with a blank slate. To ask yourself, what could we do with these tools? As opposed to what can I make that I'm already good at? That we get so hung up on, what can we do that we're already good at, that we forget to ask the question, what should I do next? So I came today. I was asked to bring. What's your number one marketing shortcut? What's the number one thing that someone in this room ought to do to transform their inbound marketing? But before I tell you that, I need to give you a little bit of history about how we got here. This is Henry Ford, the most important person of the 20th century. He made us all rich. And the way he made us all rich was he polished and perfected the idea of productivity. He went to the workers of Detroit and he said to them, if you're making 50 cents a day, I will pay you $5 a day to come work for me. A 10x raise in one day. How could he afford to do that? He could afford to do it because he put you on the assembly line. And he said, do what you are told and make it faster and faster and faster. And so being on that assembly line, whether you're making cars or making chocolates, the idea is the same. The factory, the model that made us all rich, is really simple. You come in, you have a role, you do your role, and the factory makes so much money from that that we can't help but make enough money to pay you handsomely. And it led, of course, to the idea not just interchangeable parts and mass production, but interchangeable people. So if Marlo doesn't show up for work at the Trader Dose, they don't shut it down. They just put someone else in her slot. They have org charts where you work with the big boxes on it. You. You know why there are boxes? Because if someone doesn't show up, they can put someone else in that slot. That the Johnson Wax Company, Frank Lloyd Wright's brilliant building. The entire first floor was dedicated to the secretarial pool interchangeable people. For 100 years, our culture, our economy has been based on this idea that we can swap somebody in and swap somebody out. The second thing you have to understand about how we got here is this. I don't know if you've ever seen one of these before. It's a record album. The record business in 1969, 1972. It was perfect. It was perfect for a whole bunch of reasons. I'll give you a few. If I had a record and I liked it a lot, I'd wear it out and have to buy another one. Or I'd loan it to you and I wouldn't have it anymore and I'd have to buy another one and I'd go to the store where they sold them and there would be all these other records to choose from. And I'd listen to the radio on my way to the store. And the radio spectrum that should belong to all of us was doing nothing but promoting the record industry. All of these things lined up to make it a multi billion dollar profitable edifice. One with marketing departments and people like you doing their job. And we all know what happened. In less than five years, it went from perfect to impossible. Every record ever recorded available to anyone who wants it. If all they have is a smartphone, you don't need any money. What we've got now is this era where there's more music than ever before. More people listening to more bands, making more music. But the record industry is toast. That's what revolutions do. They enable the impossible. They enable a charity to turn around and raise millions of dollars without doing it the old way. They enable a small company in Seattle or Cleveland or Detroit to have customers all over the world. It's upside down. And so the people who have money, the people who can market with money, look at the world, in this world that we're in and we say, this is really bad news. They say, wait a minute. All those things we used to depend on don't work anymore. Who's in charge here? Where do I file my complaint? And so we have a crisis. And you guys are on the point of the crisis, which is the bosses and the investors and the people with money want it to be like it was. And they want the Internet to be television with free ads in it. And they want to figure out how to push ever more stuff to ever more people. So I gotta take just one more minute and give you the one minute brief history of marketing. It works like this. 400 years ago, Josiah Wedgwood figured out how to mass produce pottery. The very first brand, the very first mass marketed product, the very first product that used direct mail. It worked. It made him rich. His great grandson, Charles Darwin, went on to change the world again. But this idea that we could make something at mass and sell it was grabbed by people like David Ogilvy who said, okay, I know how to polish that and put a story on it. And then his successor figured out how to sell ever more of it. And he invented the Jolly Green Giant and the Golly Green Giant and other talking mascots. Don't eat me, eat my brother. Show up and say we're going to dance and sing and interrupt, but please buy what we make. And there are still people who think this is a good idea, this product. They spent more money marketing and advertising this product than they made in the total number of that they made of this product. You cannot interrupt yourself to winning. That is the one minute history of marketing. But I got to thorn a few more, which is you should use babies whenever possible. You should use babies. Wrap them in Saran Wrap if you need to. And if you can't get a baby, get a doctor, right? Or a celebrity who's pretending to be a doctor. Sometimes all of this yelling leads to unfortunate juxtapositions. But what we understand is that we are fighting a hundred year battle. A hundred years this has been going on of people who say, I figured out how to make the factory work. I figured out how to have the system work. I've got interchangeable parts, I've got mass production. I've got interchangeable people. Here is some money, Mr. Marketer. Bring me some more. Because that is what capitalism is based on. Bring me some more, Ms. Marketer. Here's your budget. Go bring it home. It led to the TV industrial complex, right? That what you do is you buy ads. That gets you distribution, right? Revlon buys ads in 1947. Suddenly Revlon cosmetics are everywhere. That distribution helps you sell more stuff. And then if you're smart and diligent, you buy more ads. And around and around and around it goes. It leads to average products for average people. Except for maybe Pop Tarts. But everything else carefully chosen because the masses will like it. Because you know what mass marketing means? Mass marketing means we can use mass media, which by the way was invented to make mass marketers happy, not the other way around. It means you're going to appeal to the masses. And mass means average, right? Do not hesitate for a minute to understand that. We invented TV so we would have a place to run TV ads. We invented radio so there would be a place to put radio ads. And for sure we invented magazines so it would be a place to run magazine ads. But the Internet is the first medium ever that wasn't invented with marketers in mind. That's not who it was for. So it changes everything. This picture is really fuzzy. I'm sorry, I had a bad cold when I took it. But I show it to you because of that yellow box in the center. The brand marketer for that product spent $100 million on coupons and shelving allowances and TV ads and magazine ads and spiffs, so that when I was sick. Because that's the only time you buy pain reliever. When I was sick, if I went to the deli to buy pain reliever, I'd pick her product, the one in the center. But the thing is, I ignored all of those ads because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I solved my pain reliever problem 30 years ago by buying the stuff in the yellow box or the generic. I'm not going to buy the stuff in the blue box. Why should I? It's all the same. And the reason we know it's all the same is marketers keep telling us it's all the same. So here's a picture I took last night. This is the inside of room 1212 at the Westin Hotel. At 3 o' clock in the morning, I think it's quiet and it's dark. All decent hotel rooms are quiet and dark at 3 o' clock in the morning. The product is the same if you define the product as the thing I need it to be when I decide to buy it. So we're in this quandary right now as marketers. Which is a typical supermarket is 30,000 items with 17,000 new ones every year. Constant, constant new products. If one of those products disappear, would we miss it? And so we have this challenge, which is that mass marketing, pushing it out there through every available force we have, doesn't get the response we need. That that poor schmo, the one who was so easy to sell to yesterday, is broken. He's not ready to have us sell to him again. They have erected signs in front of consumers. Not just people buying consumer products, but B2B products, too. Mike doesn't want you to cold call him. He said it right here, that what we've done is we've given everybody a remote control. We've said to everybody, you don't have to listen if you don't want to. That is brand new and just in time, because we have branded ourselves to death. Now, the other thing that's hard to remember is this. At least when I was growing up in Buffalo, New York, there were only three TV channels. 2, 4, and 7. Channel 29 for Ultraman. But that was it. Right now, how many channels? A billion. Every YouTube video is its own channel. Every blog is its own channel. Every email account is its own channel. You cannot buy Your way to share a voice. So if you're an old school marketer, this is really bad news. If you're an old school marketer who thinks that your job is to buy attention, we need to take a moment and mourn that. But you guys already know this. Here's what you might not be getting your arms around. Because there's so much pressure on you to take the place of the TV budget and so much pressure on you to take the place of all the systems that kept the thing going. We all grew up with the normal distribution, with mass marketing. They call it the normal distribution statisticians because that's where you want to be. The normal people. The weird stuff doesn't really sell. And normal, the end cap at Walmart, the stuff that the masses want to buy, Will everyone be interested in this? That's when you win. But in the last eight years, here's what's happening. The curve is melting and more and more and more attention and money and interest is spreading outside of normal to weird. And now there's more weird than there is normal. So let me help you understand this. This young lady right here gets a tattoo and she thinks she's really hip, but then she meets him and she realizes she needs three tattoos. So she does. But then she goes online and sees that you need 45 tattoos before your hip. So now you're all the way over here. And then that guy over there goes fly fishing with his friend and it's really fun. So he goes to Dick's Sporting Goods and Dick sells two fly fishing rods. But he's a big spender so he buys the expensive one. And he's really proud of himself. Until he meets someone who's into fly fishing who realizes that online there's 450 fly fishing rods to choose from, including the ultralight left handed bamboo made by monks in Belgium, fly fishing rod. And so he has to buy that one. So he's all the way over here. And so in every market where people care, they're out of the middle, the normal people are ignoring you, and the weird people have chosen to go to the edges. So back to the tools. We've given you these tools. Mike and his team have given you these tools. What are you going to do with them? Well, look at some of these companies. You've heard of all of them. They've all grown like crazy. They haven't grown by being in the middle. Every one of them has grown by being on the edge. Everyone has made a choice to use the tools to Reach people who care and to ignore the people who don't. Shun the non believers. This goes against everything you were taught, which is a belief deep down that what human beings are supposed to do is follow the herd. That what we're supposed to do, like anchovies at the Monterey Aquarium, is follow in. Look around. Everyone's dressed almost the same. No one's in a tuxedo. No one's in a prom dress. Was there a memo? Right. We like that idea of fitting in. Here's the thing. I live near this building in New York, and sometimes it's so crowded, it's like Grand Central Station in there. And what you notice is that no one bumps into anyone else. We're actually really quite good at figuring out our own path. We're actually really quite good at being weird when we need to be. No, I don't think what humans are good at is following instructions. I think what we are good at is connecting. That we are better than any other species, except maybe the bee, at connecting. So Matt Ridley talks about this. There isn't a human being on Earth who knows how to make a computer mouse. Not one person who could make a mouse. You need a metallurgist, a plastics person, software people, hardware people, supply chain, et cetera. Only by working together, by integrating into communities that connect, can we create value. Now, it's not like it used to be that we are leaving the industrial economy and entering the connection economy. And once you understand that you are in the business of connection, then never again will you spam your email list on the last day of the quarter because you got to make the numbers go up. Because why would you burn the most valuable thing you own in order to do something that's going to last for three days? Now, I came to tell you the number one shortcut, and you've already guessed what it is. The number one shortcut in the connection economy is that there is no shortcut. And if someone comes to you and says, where is the shortcut? They have asked the wrong question. If we're going to build connection, if that is the asset of the future and name your successful company and you'll see it is, then we have to understand what it's built on. Which are these ideas? One, Coordination. It's Tuesday. You're all here. You weren't here last week, you won't be here next week. Value was created by coordinating a group of people. That, number two is trust. There are people in this room you can talk to about what you do without wondering who they are or what their intent is, that human beings are good at figuring out how to do that. Number three is permission. I'll take a little credit here. The idea of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Here's the simple definition. That email you're going to send next week, if you didn't send it, how many people would complain and wonder where it is? Because if they're not complaining when you don't show up, you don't really have permission. And the fourth one is the exchange of ideas. You will learn more at this conference from each other than you will learn from the people on stage. That what happens when we create an environment of connection, we create enormous value by combining all four of these things into a network of people who want to pay attention to one another. And the surprising, amazing, scary thing for anyone with an MBA from that school up the river is this. It's based on two fundamental principles. Generosity and art. Generosity, because no one wants to trust or connect with a selfish person. And art, not necessarily painting, but art, because we don't want to connect to someone who's going to do just what they did yesterday. Art is the work of a human being doing something personal and real that matters, that might not work. And so when I prattle on about what it means to be a marketer today, this is the underpinning of all of it. You gain connection by earning it. And you earn it not with a discount. You earn it not with a clever line of copy. You earn it by being generous and being an artist. So what's the most prosaic example I can think of? In Brooklyn, guy decided to open a brisket restaurant. Daniel Delaney. Now, the old way to do it is you risk everything on real estate, which is a form of interrupting people as they walk by and hope that enough of them will shop by with you. Which is how all restaurants fail. That. That's not what he did. Dan went online and sold his brisket a pound at a time through secret pop up rendezvous, until he had thousands of people who trusted him, who connected with him, who were rooting for him. And then he opened the restaurant. Of course it worked because he had already done the hard part, which isn't making brisket. It's finding people who trust you to make brisket. Quick question for you. First person who had a fax machine, what exactly did he do with it? Bob Metcalfe, who coined Metcalfe's Law, says the power of any network is the square of the number of nodes. The More people who use a network, the more valuable the network is. So if you look at the London subway map, you can guess where are the best locations for you to set up your shop. The place where lots of lines cross. And if you look at the Internet subway map, exactly the same thing is true. Where are the places where value is created? It's where connection occurs. But still, back to my original point. If you go to music school, music school, like I spoke at Juilliard last year, which is basically a sweatshop to train underpaid classical musicians for the future. And from the time you're four years old, they say, please play it as written. Play the music as written. And all of you have to go to bosses and clients and think to yourselves, how do I play it as written? Here's the thing. This is Beethoven's Fifth. And if you look right there in the center, there is this symbol called the fermata. And the fermata means play it the way you feel it. The fermata says, you are a musician, not a machine. Play what's in your heart. So my friend Ben Zander, who lives in Boston, flies all over the world to conduct. Why do people go out of their way and pay him a premium to come play his version of Beethoven? Because it's from him. It's his version. You hear the Ben Zander version, and you understand that Ben Zander has a point of view. He is not the whole flock. He's the odd bird, the one on the edge, the one with a point of view. So when we think about what you can do next week when you get back, a key question is, are you coming back with a point of view, or are you going back saying, yes, I agree with everyone. What do you want me to do? Because if you're asking the question, what do you want me to do? What you're signing up is to be one of the pack, to be the freelancer waiting for instructions. Your boss is sitting there saying, you know what? Maybe we need to lower our price to $98, because if we're the cheapest, we'll grow. This is a race to the bottom. And the problem with a race to the bottom is you might just win. The other alternative is to say, we're going to raise our price because it would be better to charge more. But since you've trained every consumer out there to look for the lowest price, this isn't going to work either, because we're not stupid. No, the only path forward is to be the only one, one of a Kind. The one that I can't live without. The one that's worth crossing the street for. And again, you can't get there by bragging about it. You have to get there by owning it and living it. So back to the idea of connection. Who made more money last year? American Airlines, which owns fleets and fleets of planes or TripAdvisor. Right. It's a no brainer. The one that gives you information and connection about travel is profitable. The other one is basically a bus company. And that distinction is the choice that's in front of you about the rush to be average. These are JPEGs, averaged up photos from around the world of what the average person looks like. The thing about being average is it doesn't mean you're beautiful. It just means you're average. It just means you filed off all the rough edges. We will not cross the street for average. No. What we are looking for is something that is alive, something that is bubbling. Right? Something that the Japanese call kamiwaza, godlike, full out. This cheetah is running through the jungle. Right? Do you think the cheetah is saying to herself, hmm, I wonder if I'm holding my head straight. My left leg's really bothering me today. There's none of that going on. The cheetah is running full cheetah the same way Amanda Palmer, my friend from Boston, when she did her Kickstarter, Amanda didn't say, hmm, I wonder what the critics will say if I do it like this. And maybe I should follow off that edge and not do it like this and change this thing. No. She flew as close to the sun as she dared. She did what her heart told her to. Because by being remarkable, by being genuine, by being Amanda, she could be worth connecting with. This is a real sign. Who else's risk am I supposed to play at? Exactly? You know, we say to our kids here, here's a bubble and another bubble around it. Just sit there until you're old. As opposed to saying, grit is what we're actually looking for. The grit of being able to have that point of view and stand for something. Here's the downside. You will fall down, you will skin your knee. You will be wrong. It will not work right. I named the last Giant book I did. This might not work for a reason, because that's what it means to make art. If you're afraid of flying, you should avert your eyes. This is actual sped up footage of planes 747s coming in for a landing. And what you'll notice is they are dramatically, dangerously, erratically off course until the last possible moment when they land safely. The pilot doesn't come on, and she doesn't say, oh, we're going to turn back and go back to Dallas and start over. She adjusts because you can adjust. And what the Internet does that's magical is it makes it cheaper than ever to adjust. These people are still having trouble. I'll leave it up for a little longer. So you all came from this world of scarcity, scarce money to spend on media, scarce shelf space, scarce choices. The Internet is not about scarcity. The Internet is about abundance. Unlimited choice, unlimited number of people to follow on Twitter, unlimited free media if people will listen to it. So when we come at the world from abundance, we have to make a completely different set of choices, right? Different choices about what's scarce and what's valuable. So one of the things that underlies that is this idea of tribes. Tribes are groups of people who have a lot in common. Maybe they share a uniform, maybe they share a culture, maybe they share an industry like you do. We grew up with only three, right? A religious tribe, a work tribe, and a community tribe. But again, thanks to the Internet and the fracturing of culture, it's everywhere. So the red hat ladies in 500 cities around the world getting uppity over lunch, right? If you're a red hat lady, it's not hard to find another one. Or the red hat guys who pay $10,000 to go to Hawaii for the Ironman triathlon, they don't even like the swimming part. And what, they don't have roads where they live? They have to go to Hawaii to do this? Yes. They have to go to Hawaii to do it because that's where the rest of the tribe is. Or these red hat guys who train all year round for the big day, right, they get more fun in the training part than they do in the big day part because the connection matters. I want to show you how powerful this is and how deeply ingrained it is. I'm going to time you. Go. Okay, stop, stop, stop. Eight seconds on the timer. That's an excellent score for Boston, I want to say. One group took 27 seconds. I was sweating bullets. Every group I've ever done this with 700 times has pulled it off. And every group has clapped at a different rhythm. Some do fast, some do slow. How did you know? I made no eye contact. No one stood up and said, everybody follow me. Right? How did you know you knew? Because we're born to know. We like doing what other people are doing. We like being in sync. The difference now is we don't want to be in sync with everyone. That's impossible. There is no top 40 anymore. There is no New York Times bestseller list anymore. There's 100 New York Times best seller lists, each of which competing with one another to be the one that we notice. We want to be in sync with our tribe. And as you, the leader of the tribe, you have the ability to connect, to build a culture on purpose the way you can see HubSpot doing it, to challenge the status quo of that tribe and push them forward, to communicate to them where they are going, to commit to the future of that tribe with them, and to do it with clarity. Because now you have something that no one before you ever had, which is a cheap, trusted way to keep in contact with your tribe and to connect the tribe to one another. This has never happened before in the history of mankind. In the history of mankind, if you had 150 friends, you were at the Max Dunbar's number. That's it. You can't have any more. Now there are hermits in the woods of Idaho who have more than 150 people in their circle. And so we have these tools. The tools were built not so that we can watch more stupid YouTube videos. No, the tubes. The tubes series of tubes. The tools were built so that we, some of us could step up and say, follow me. Now, the Beatles did not invent teenagers. They just showed up to lead them. Scott Harrison did not invent the connected person who wants to do philanthropy that matters. But he did show up to lead them. Bob Marley did not invent the Rastafarians, but he did show up to lead them. So no one is asking you to peel off a brand new piece of culture. What we're saying is there's an enormous amount of disconnection left in our world. And what real Inbound is about. The next chapter of Inbound is not a replacement for TV yets. The next chapter is a whole new way of walking through the world. You may not know the statistics here. My friend Nathan told them to me. Until recently, every year in the United States, 4 million dogs and cats were killed, usually within 24 hours of being taken off the street. That the humane societies interestingly named. Their charter was to be the dog catcher and to collect dogs and cats and kill them. And Nathan Winograd got to the SPCA in San Francisco a bunch of years ago and discovered this fact. And he was aghast and he would not stand for it. But he was not in charge and he had no budget and, and he went to his boss and his boss said, don't bother. And he went to the city council of San Francisco to get the law changed. And humane societies from around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against his idea of not killing any dogs and cats. So Nathan went directly to some people in San Francisco. Not all people, just a few, just enough. A connected group, a tribe waiting to be formed. And within 90 days, he had raised enough money and support that San Francisco became the first no kill shelter in the world. And you say, well, that's easy. It's San Francisco. So he left there and he went to Tompkins County, New York, a rural county near Ithaca. And he did it again. And then he went to Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina, and he did it again. And then he went to Reno, Nevada, and he did it again. And now in hundreds of cities around the world, these tribes exist because one person with no money and no authority used inbound marketing to stand up and say, follow me. So we say to people, go to school, follow instructions, because we need to train you to work in the factory. We say to people, do what you're told. Let me show you what I mean. Go ahead and raise your right hand just as high as you can, please. Okay, now raise it higher, please. Ah, what's that about? What it's about is that you were taught a really long time ago to hold a little bit back by coaches and parents and bosses, because if you don't hold a little bit back when they ask for more, you're going to be in trouble. So we say to these kids, do what you're told. Fit in. You'll get into a famous college. And after you get into the famous college, you can go to the placement office and companies will be lined up ready to pay you more than you are worth to go work for them. And now we're surprised that it's not working anymore. Right? The rule is really simple. The industrialists invented the educational system because they needed cheap labor, Cheap, obedient labor. People who would sit still and do what they are told. But marketing, amazingly, is unending. The whole thing. Because now that's not how companies are going to make money going forward. For a million years, the only way to feed yourself was to go hunting. Then we invented farming. Only 10,000 years ago did we invent farming. And only 200 years ago did we invent jobs. 200 years jobs. The idea that you would go to work for some guy who would tell you what to do is brand new. In the 1400s, the unemployment rate in Europe was zero. And the reason it was zero is there were no jobs that you worked for your parents or you toiled on the land, or maybe you were the king, but there weren't a lot of in between things. So we're going from hunting to farming to jobs, and now what? Because the good jobs have left the building. The chance that you're going to get paid an enormous amount of money to sit at a desk and do what you're told from a manual keeps going down. No, the future belongs to someone who decides to do art. Yeah, Picasso, fine. Or Jackson Pollock. But here's the interesting thing. That's a Pollock, too. Charles Pollock, Jackson's brother, who you never heard of because he painted just like Thomas Hart Benton, his teacher. Jackson Pollock painted just like Jackson Pollock. Joseph Beuys made art out of felt. Bill Shakespeare made art out of words. But Marcel Duchamp helps us understand it. Marcel Duchamp in 1917, did this piece of art. He installed a urinal upside down into an art exhibit. To make a point. He nearly caused a riot. The interesting thing is the second person to install a urinal in an art museum was a plumber. And that's the distinction. In China, there's a village called Dafen where they paint one third of all the oil paintings in the world over and over and over again as fast as they can. Same painting. You can buy the mona Lisa for $29 in Dauphin, but it's not the Mona Lisa. It's a copy of the Mona Lisa. So it's not even worth $29. So the question is, are you making copies? Are you copying Thomas Hart Benton? Are you copying the marketer who came before? Are you copying your boss? Because we're not going to pay extra for that. We're not going to connect to that. We're not going to follow you if you do that. In 1927, an astonishing conference took place in Solvay. These are physicists who were invited. You might recognize Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr. The astonishing thing is, I want to make sure I get the number right. 17 of the people in this photo won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and almost all of them won it after the photo was taken. You didn't get invited because you won the Nobel Prize. You won the Nobel Prize because you were invited. This is your solvay conference, right? 5,000 people coming together in the room who are seeing a fork in the road. Now, some of you still want a map? Some of you are still saying, give me the bullet points. Every time I put bullet points on my blog, the number of social media shares goes through the roof. Tell me how to get from step by step by step. How do we do it? I can't give you a map. I can't even give you a fictional map. Because the minute someone gives you a map is the minute it's not art anymore. The minute they give you a map, it's colored by numbers. We live in a country where this is a real book. I'm ashamed to say that there are people in the world who need instructions on how to raise invisible sheep, which made sense if competence was what we prized. But we don't need competence anymore. There is a McDonald's in California where you pull up to the drive through and you say into the microphone what you want and you see the person behind the bulletproof glass over there and you are not talking to him. You are talking via TCPIP over a satellite to someone in South Dakota who gets paid 6 cents less an hour, who types in your order, and then it goes back over TCPIP to the guy who's only 12ft away from you because it saves 6 cents an hour. Do you understand that radiology is no longer an attractive job option for American medical students because they have discovered that it doesn't matter where the radiologist is standing, and so proximity doesn't create value. If someone can write down what you do for a living, they're going to find someone cheaper than you to do it. And you need to think deeply about that every time you're asking someone for the map. Because you want it to be hard, you want it to be unpredictable, you want it to be not like it was yesterday. You. Because the harder it is, the more likely it is that you can create value. So if we think about the regression analysis of how we create value, it's interesting. Let's say you want to be a great hockey player. One thing you could do is put in all the statistics. Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out. It helps if you're born in January. It turns out that the biggest thing you discover from the regression analysis looking in the rear view mirror is that you should speak French. The but the number one correlation if you want to be a great North American hockey player is you speak French. That's obviously nonsense, right? What it means is that you were born in Canada and that being born in Canada. Being born in Canada means you were surrounded by people who expected you to be good at Hockey. Well, it doesn't matter, because we're not talking about hockey. We're talking about making a ruckus. We're talking about making a difference. We're talking about standing up and leading. And you maybe weren't born with people who expected you to do that, but it's not too late to shift, because the Internet's shifting. Anyway, many of you have seen Mitch Joel's favorite video of the free hugs movement, right? Where these people are showing up and doing funny stuff on the video. Here's the thing. This guy hates it because he worked really hard to be in the expensive hugs business. These people don't care. And the same thing is true for whatever it is you sell. The same thing is true for whatever service you're offering. You worked really hard for this position. You worked really hard to build this thing. And now someone comes along and undercuts you. You can't stop them. Your only choice is to make more art. You know, what are the bottled water guys going to do? Make it cheaper, make it wetter. There's not a lot of options. They tried this, but it didn't work very well. The thing is that if you keep saying to people, we are just like everybody else, but a nickel less, don't be surprised that your customers say, those guys are a nickel less than you, and there's the race to the bottom again. No, I think what we need to do as artists and as marketers is seek out the things that might not work. The essence of Superman is kryptonite. If there wasn't any kryptonite, Superman would be impossibly boring because there would be no risk, no possible downside, no moment when we can't say, ah, this might not work. He's in trouble this time. Kurt Vonnegut said, what we have to do is jump off cliffs and grow wings on our way down. And that goes against everything you learned when you were 7 and 12 and 15 and in the job interview that got you this job. But that's the only thing you connect with. It's the only brand you talk about. It's all it means to be remarkable is something that might not work. So we gave you the Internet. We said, here, if you want to talk, talk. If you want to have a podcast, have a podcast. If you want to write, write. If you want to start something, start something. And yet most people did. Didn't do a thing. Most people said, I would love to innovate. Love to. But here's the problem. What I'm doing is Too important. I'll innovate. But failure is not an option. If you just said failure is not an option, you have also said neither is success, because all innovation is. Is a repeated series of failures until you figure out something that works. So my friend Melissa gave me this quote, which is, the guy who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck. And I'm intentionally slowing down this moment in my talk because this is the most important thing. I want you to understand that when you worked for a company that was about to spend $7 million on a super bowl campaign, they were correct in telling you, you better do everything perfect. But if you work for an organization that can email a test group of 100 people for free, you better not make it perfect. And yet we're still stuck. You know, BlackBerry, may they rest in peace, conditioned all of us by giving us this device. Your boss gave it to you. Here, take this device and just every hour or two, check on it to make sure everything's still okay. And you go to your kid's soccer game, and you look at, yep, everything's still okay. And then after about six minutes, you go, hmm, I wonder if everything's still okay. Yep. And the next thing you know, the leader of the free world is sitting there looking at his BlackBerry the whole day, wondering if everything is still okay. No one has ever done creative work on a smartphone by email. We just don't. What we're doing is polishing. What we're doing is making sure we're in sync. But we are not taking that big leap. So we need to think deeply about why that is. We need to think deeply about whether it's more important to get one more tweet out or more important, to do something worth tweeting. And the thing is, in the back of our head, we've got this noise, we've got this heckler. We've got someone saying, don't do that. An alligator is going to eat you. You're going to fall off a cliff. A shark is going to land on your house. That voice is pointing out that there are werewolves, that we are flying too close to the sun, that the story of Icarus really gets under our skin. Because it feels true, doesn't it? Your father says to you, I will save us, but obey me. Do not fly too close to the sun. That's hubris. Do not do that. And so we all believe it. But that's not what the Myth said is 1840, and it's not what the myth said. In 1770, they changed it Daedalus also said to Icarus, don't fly too low, because if you fly too low, the salt water will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish. We skip that part because that part is really scary. We'd rather just say, okay, I will obey that. Hubris is somehow the worst possible sin. And the reason we say it is because of the amygdala, the lizard brain, the voice in the back of our head, the one that's prehistoric. It's been around for 50,000, 500,000 years. It's the same voice that every wild animal has. Wild animals are wild because they have a lizard brain, this tiny little piece of brain matter that's in charge of revenge, escape, safety, and horniness. And that's all it worries about. And if it doesn't, that creature is going to be extinct. Well, we still have one. It's right back here near your brain stem. It short circuits everything else in your brain. Steve Pressfield calls it the voice of the Resistance. The Resistance is the one that has you changing your clothes before a blind date. The Resistance is the one that says, oh, it's my boss's boss on caller id, I'm in big trouble, as opposed to saying, oh, good, they finally figured out how good my work is. Right? It's the resistance that has us be nervous on an airplane. We know from aeronautical engineering that turbulence never makes a plane crash. And yet we're up in the air at 50,000ft, or whatever it is, 30,000ft, and the turbulence hits, and we use all of our mental energy to keep the plane aloft. Good thing you were on that plane, to keep it aloft for everybody else. Now, in real life, it pays, you know, if you're at Fenway park and a bat's flying at you in the stands, the amygdala will kick in immediately and protect you from getting your teeth knocked out. I love that guy at the top. You can see the gum in his mouth. But at work, it makes you into a sheep at work. If you've ever been to a meeting, I'm guessing you have. What is a meeting but a group of people sitting around waiting for someone to foolishly take responsibility for what will happen next, Right? Could. Because if someone was willing to take responsibility before the meeting, you wouldn't need the meeting. You're getting together, hoping to get everybody into safe sync so that you can hide. You know, here's the thing about Gene Kelly. At the end of the movie, the rain is the point. He has an umbrella. He's not Using it, the rain is the point. That is where we make our art. This idea of being vulnerable, as Brene Brown has put into the vernacular, of being able to step forward without shame and say, here, I made this. And to say to that critic, oh, it's not for you. Here, I made this. To understand that none of you make something for everyone. None of you. That what we have the ability to do is not to make average stuff for average people, but instead to figure out how to do something different, something bigger, something worth doing. Okay, a couple more commentaries on this as I wrap up. A key part of being generous is the idea of a gift. Now, there's a coffee shop in London called Prufrock. It's one of those fancier than Starbucks kind of places. The guy who runs it loves fine espresso. The thing is, he has one of those loyalty cards where if you get eight punches, you get a free cup. But instead of leading to his place, he lists his eight biggest competitors. He says, go to my eight biggest competitors, try their coffee, and if you still want to come back, I'll give you a free cup. Do you think Mr. Prufrock called up these other guys and said, I'm going to do this. If you do it for me, I'll do it for you. Or do you think he just did it? The act of showing up with this generous act that cost him nothing sends a signal to everybody in the tribe. A few years ago, before his tragic death, I went to see a Levon Helm concert, and the theater was a quarter the size of this room. I couldn't believe my good fortune. I was right in the front row. And just before Levon Helm comes on, I look up, and there in the front, right in front of me on piano, is Donald Fagan from Steely Dam. Now, I have an mba, so I can do math as well as anybody. I'm thinking to myself, donald Fagan, Steely Dan. The guy must have 50 million bucks in the bank. How much did Levon Helm have to pay Donald Fagan to come to this little rinky dink theater on Saturday night to play the keyboards? And I said, idiot, he didn't have to pay him anything. He didn't have to pay him anything because Donald Fagan is like the farmer at the farmer's market at the end of the day, saying to himself, I'm never going to get this Saturday night again. Saying to himself, when is the next time I'm going to have to play with Levon Helm and that act of bringing his art forward Rather than wasting it is at the essence of why you'd want to go see him, that what we know we can do now is we can grab someone's attention once or we can earn it. Philippe Petit, who walked between the two World Trade Centers in New York, helped us understand, do you think when he did it, risking arrest, certainly risking death, spending more than a year of his life planning this exploit, do you think when he did it, he was saying to himself, and 16 years later, there will be a documentary about me and I will be able to make a little bit of money? That never occurred to him, right, that what Philippe Petit did is he did something because he could, because it was worth doing, because it mattered. Well, this is a little bit too visceral for me because it just happened to me yesterday. I live in New York. Coming to Boston is always a pain in the neck because there used to be a flight from White Plains. There isn't anymore. And if I flew, I would spend the whole time thinking I should have driven because it was delayed. And if I drove, I would spend the whole time thinking I should have flown because there was traffic. Well, you don't need to know what happened to me yesterday. Just, you could avoid Amtrak if you want to, but I took the plane a few years ago and the plane took off and I got to Boston in 29 minutes, a record. I was early for my meeting. It was great. On the way back, I got punished because we took off at 8 o'. Clock. We were supposed to land at 9 o' clock at night, but instead we circled the White Plains airport because of fog until we ran out of gas. And then we had to make an emergency landing in Albany, New York. Now, this gets me in trouble, but I'm not backing off. Albany is a pit, and it's 10 o' clock at night. Land on the ground in Albany. The pilot comes on and he says, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be on the ground for an hour and a half to two, two hours. But sometime around midnight, I think we'll be able to fly back. Well, this is ridiculous. So I go online and Avis has one car left. So I grab it and I pay for it. And I put the computer away and I say to the flight attendant, I need to get off. And she says, you can't get back on. I said, that's perfect. And just before I get off, I turn to the audience on the. I'm sorry, everyone's in audience. I turn to the passengers on the plane and I say, ladies and Gentlemen, I am not a psychopath. I am wearing a tie. There was one car left. I rented it. It's a four seater. I already paid for it. No big deal. My car is in White Plains, an 86 minute drive from here. Your car is too. Who wants a ride? No one raised their hand. As far as I know, they're still in Albany. And I had the whole ride home to think about what happened. Was it something about my delivery? Was it my tie? And then it hit me. If you get off the plane, it's your fault. If you stay on the plane, it's United Airlines fault. And that's what we've been pushed to do, is stay on the plane. David Rakoff, who tragically died last year, wrote a fabulous essay about going to the movies. He's the only person in the theater. He's near the front row. Just before the movie starts, this woman walks down the aisle all the way to where he's sitting and says, excuse me, is this seat taken? And like right there, he has an existential crisis. Is this seat taken? Do you know how many people want your seat? Do you know how many people want the trust you have and the leverage you have and the authority you have and the resources you have to be born, to have won the birth lottery and to won the decade lottery and to be in the right place at the right time? You don't have a job. You have a platform. You have a platform to make art. You have a platform to speak up. You have a platform to connect people, which is what humans are for, to do this work that matters. Some people will look at this moment and say, we are in big trouble. And other people will look at this moment and understand, this is our chance of a lifetime. This is our revolution. We missed the Industrial revolution. This one is for us. And so, yes, if you want to, you can stand up and make art and make a ruckus and give gifts and do work that matters. That you can connect people and you can lead people and you can ship, work out the door, because no one can tell you you can't. So the challenge is, will you choose to fly ever closer to the sun? Because you will not be alone. Look to your left and look to your right. The Hong Kong Cavaliers are here. Right? There are people who are going where you are going, right by way of Planet 10. But they are getting there. And the question is, do you care enough to do that? Do you care enough to stand up and say, this is not about selling more cleaning powder. This is about making a difference. So if I have to put words on a slide, I will. What your tribe is saying to you as clearly as they can is we need you to lead us. I hope you will do that. Thank you for your attention. I appreciate it.