Episode 272: The Song of Significance with Seth Godin

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Cummins Skew.

Welcome to a very special episode of the SkewCast. Our good friend Seth Godin released a new book today, May 30th, and in concert with his new book, Seth joined myself and Mark Graham, Cummins Skew's president and chief brand officer, to prerecord today's conversation so that we could publish it simultaneously when the book dropped. The new book is called The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams, and it's a management book for a new era. Work, as we all know, has radically changed, and the change is no longer simply about virtual or hybrid. It's much larger than that. Seth asks it this way: What would happen if this became the best job you ever had? Or for employers, what if you could create the best job that someone ever had? Bigger changes are coming down the road with new technologies and AI, and we should expect even more disruption. All the more reason to tune into Seth's book about how to create significant work. For today's conversation, we took questions from you, the community, and we weave those into our dialogue. Includes topics like how we identify significance in our work, how to avoid burnout, working within a team, and more. Among the insights Seth shares are the results from his poll of over 10,000 people about what they want from work Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commscue. Now, as you know, we bring these episodes to you ad-free. The most successful podcast shows are full of ads, but we've preferred to avoid that, save one exception, and that is to share an event we're promoting or share a brief insight with you about Commscue. Now, since today's topic with Seth is all about teams, what I want to share is that over 750 of the leading distributor brands in this industry have come to trust Commscue. Primarily for one reason: we make working together as a team simple. Distributor brands like Genuine, Leader Promos, Touchstone, Score, Vanguard, and Brand Fuel use Commenscue not only as an order management system, but as a way to keep their high-functioning, high-powered sales teams connected and super efficient. Carrie Cowden with Connect the Dots Promos said it well, quote, we're more connected than we've ever been as a team Everything's in one spot. It's such a time saver, end quote. Your sales growth shouldn't come at the expense of you and your team's sanity. Check out an easier way at commonskew.com. Now on to our chat with the one and only Seth Godin.

So Seth, the Song of Significance. Can you tell us what this book is about and who you wrote it for?

I think a really good business book makes it impossible to go back to work. It changes us. That when I think about Crossing the Chasm or The Long Tail or so many of the books that have had an impact on me, the purpose of a book is to have a conversation and to have a new map for the territory that you're in. And what I'm hoping will happen with "The Song of Significance" is we will realize that the trauma we're feeling, the discomfort we're feeling about work, it's not our fault, that the industrial age has come to its conclusion and that work isn't working and we could do something better. We have made a mess of the world that we live in But it is not too late for us to bring humanity back to what we do. And ironically and amazingly, that in this moment, the economy demands that, and you'll actually make more money doing so as well. And so, "The Song of Significance" is this urgent personal rant of what we could bring to work and how we can make it better.

Seth, you kind of answered the question there, why this topic and why now? Why this particular moment with this book? Is this a post-pandemic, I love the fact that you brought up the post-industrial age, because I think we still live somewhat in an industrial age thinking. So why this particular moment in time?

Well, if you think about what happened for the last, for the first 30 years of this century of industrialism, we figured out how to make a car cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, how to make machines work, and then how to get people to be machines. And in the last 30 years, we really polished up the idea of surveillance, and incremental productivity by treating people more like machines. And the end result is that you can go on Amazon and buy an appliance that should cost $1,000 for $80. But you can't get from $80 to $8. That there's no more orders of magnitude to be created by this race. Add to that the pandemic, add to that the long overdue focus on caste and social injustice, add to that billionaires publicly bullying people, firing them online in front of everyone while harassing them and getting applauded for doing so. Add to that that the data I have from Amazon is that people who were hired in 2021 lasted on average 90 days before they quit. Because when you squeeze people too tight, they squeal. And so what we are facing with all of those things, and so many people around us have gotten ill or passed away, it's people are taking a deep breath and saying, what is this even for? And this is not a book about being softer or doing less. It's actually about raising standards and doing more, but not doing it as a machine, doing it as a person.

Seth, can we get deeper into this statement that you've made a few times so far about what you mean by work is no longer working. And then a second part of this question is, what do you think the difference is between work, say, 5 years ago, pre-pandemic, versus work post-pandemic in 2023?

So the first question, I guess I would say, is the purpose of culture, the world we live in, to enable capitalism and profit. Or is the purpose of capitalism and profit to enable culture? And if we're going to race to the bottom, why are we doing that? Who is going to benefit? If you are going to spend 90,000 hours at work in your lifetime, why did you do that? We need a roof over our head. We need healthcare. If you're in Canada, good for you. But we need to be able to take care of our families. But beyond that, what we really seek is meaning. Right? Logotherapy, the need to search for and find a way to do work that matters. So when I think about your industry, many people in your industry got into it because if they were, had good taste and they were personable, they could take a catalog and figure out how to bring it to people and make a thing that those people wanted to buy, even though they didn't have a factory that did the stuff. The problem with easy in, easy out is while it was easy to join that industry, so did a lot of other people. And you ended up with a race to the bottom selling a commodity product. So my work for 20 years has been, don't do that because that's not profitable enough to be worthy of your effort. And what this book is saying is we've all done it. And human resources, just that phrase means that the boss is treating humans like a resource. And I like people. And what I believe is possible is a new covenant, a new deal. Let's get real or let's not play. Let's figure out how to come together with a distributed asynchronous team, perhaps, to do project work that's transformative to the market and to us. And you can still do your business. You can still make a profit, but you will do it in a totally different way.

It feels like your book is addressing the uprising that's in all of us that doesn't want to be treated like a button or a lever leaving the industrial age. And so you use these words like significance and the song of increase, and you use the word that I love called kokoro. And it's one of the few domains I own, Amari no Kokoro. But I want to hear you talk about it. How does this apply, this whole increase, significance, kokoro?

What does it mean?

And what does that mean to the work that we do?

Well, you know more about it than me, so I hope you'll amplify what I understand. Started in the Chinese ideograms and then went into Japanese. If it's a heart with a box around it, a heart in a home. And the idea is with that feeling we get when we can bring ourselves to something, our heart to it, that kokoro is a difficult word to explain in English precisely because we've evolved a different way of saying, do you fit in a box? Have you done what you were told? And a lot of people are still stuck in the brainwashing of 20 years of school. School is narrated by the sentence, will this be on the test? And as soon as you say, will this be on the test, you've given away everything that we need to know. Which is it was invented by bosses so that when you graduated from school, you could say to the boss, "What do I have to do today?" And that undermines and undervalues our humanity because what we really want is to be able to say to the boss, "This is what I can contribute today. This is a problem I can solve. I did more than I thought I could." That is where kokoro was.

It feels like your whole book addresses this kind Tokoro in the sense that you want the significance of your work to extend beyond the work itself.

I was curious, Seth, and just listening to your answer about work not working and this, this notion of being able to create these great organizations potentially asynchronously, does this cater more towards small business, medium-sized business, or large global businesses? Are there certain, um, business sizes that seem to do better with your argument, or does it apply across all sizes of businesses?

It definitely doesn't apply everywhere. You can't— if you're a baker, you can't work from home. You got to go to where the ovens are. Um, it doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with the scale of the company. That Automatic, which powers 40% of the internet, doesn't have an office with more than 2,000 employees. They're quite profitable. And the people there aren't leaving in droves like some other internet companies. So what I think matters is first, let's acknowledge whether you're in the industrial mindset or not. Airlines have to be industrialized. We need surveillance. We need them not to say to the pilot, do whatever you think is right and take off whenever you're ready, because it doesn't work. So if you go to work for a fast food restaurant or an airline, please expect to be in a regimented, surveilled system, 'cause that's what the customer needs. But if there's an industry that's changing, the very nature of making change happen is next to the idea of making decisions. And so I think what I'm arguing is that if you do for a living something that creates value by making decisions, you'll benefit by creating a culture that's different than one that echoes what happened at Ford Motor Company in 1920.

Sounds like there's a significance or a demarcation between those, the knowledge workers, the creativity, the more we're in that area, the more this book speaks to.

Well, is a barista a knowledge worker? Because if you say to the barista, and they do this at many places, here's the script you must read, and we have a policy on this and a policy on this and a policy on this, that person's job is going to be different than if you say, use your best judgment and make it so that people will pass 2 Starbucks on their way here. That's not going to be because you gave them something for free. It's going to be because you exerted emotional labor and showed up as a person for someone in a low-stakes interaction that they treasured. And, you know, I like to talk about the Aurobindo Hospital, which was an extraordinary experience I had visiting them. If we add up the population of New York, Chicago, and LA, there are more people than that number who have had their eyesight restored by the Aravind Eye Hospital. There's several of them in India. If you go to Aravind for corneal surgery, they will give you a choice. You can pay $130 or you can pay zero. It's up to you. You get the same surgery. The money goes to support them and also to get you a better recovery room. They do so many surgeries so well that many ophthalmologists from North America train there because they will get a better experience. So here's the interesting thing about it. On one hand, they have very rigorous standards. The chances of getting an infection in your surgery at Aravind are less than they are in London. At the same time, they have said to an enormous number of people who work there, You are not a regimented surgeon doing the same thing over and over again. You are a human being treating human beings with respect. And so the people who walk out who haven't paid a penny don't feel like a charity case. They feel like they had an experience. And the people who work at Aravind will describe it to you as one of the most important things they've ever done. So if we can build an eye hospital that fixes the eyesight of millions and millions and millions of people, often for free, and still makes a profit. And we can have a barista who can say, this job isn't fancy, but this job is for me. I think it's a pretty wide range. Yeah.

There's a related question here, Seth, on this topic from a community member, Kirby Hasselman with Hasselman Marketing. It's related to exactly what you were just talking about. So if you lead people and give them freedom to lead themselves and think this is a small business owner, they will at some point make mistakes. And I'm quoting Kirby's question here. How do you accept those mistakes, help them learn and not want to take back control? How do you, how do you create that kind of environment?

That's a great question. One of the things that we did in building the Carbon Almanac was keep coming back to the idea of criticizing the, criticize the work, do not criticize the worker. There are different kinds of mistakes. Avoidable mistakes means that the person doesn't care enough, hasn't been trained enough, and might not need to work there. The mistakes of discovery are part of what it is to drive somewhere, to lead somewhere, to invent. And of course there are mistakes like that, but small business owners, when we make them, we forgive ourselves. When other people make them, we freak out. And so what we need to do is create the conditions for these useful mistakes to be made early and often, addressed, and reward people for taking responsibility for the mistake, teaching everybody else what they learned so it doesn't happen again. On the other hand, if someone bought 500 hats for the senior prom, they better show up on time. We have standards and we're gonna keep raising the standards, but we're not gonna criticize the person. We're gonna criticize the work.

Seth, continuing on this leadership theme, I wanna ask a question from Andrew from Brandwise, who asked a question, as a solopreneur looking to scale up, What would your advice be on best practices? Find someone locally who you can work with in your local market, or save money and hire a virtual assistant that may be in another market, another country? Can you create a great team atmosphere going the virtual assistant route versus a local route?

Okay, so now I get to do my rant about, uh, solopreneurs. There are freelancers and there are entrepreneurs. I am a freelancer. I have no staff. I get paid when I work. I used to be an entrepreneur building a business bigger than me using outside money that I could sell, which I did, and it outlived me. It's very hard to be both. And most people, when they become successful as a freelancer, decide that the way to grow is to find junior versions of themselves that they can pay a little less than they pay that right, and sell their work as if they did it, and they scale. That is a really good way to have a nervous breakdown. That doesn't mean that you can't have partners or support. It just means call yourself a freelancer and own it because it's a great thing to be. And the way you move up as a freelancer is you get better clients. You don't scale by getting more people to buy cheap stuff from you. You. What you do is you scale by getting a few people who demand more, who pay more, who challenge you, and who talk about the work you do. That's the hard work of working up. So if that's— of scaling up. So if that's what you're trying to do, I would say figure out any job that you can do that could be done by someone else easily to spec, industrialize that, outsource that in whatever form it takes. The same way you don't make your own clothes, the same way you don't put together your own computer, there's lots of things you do at work where a virtual assistant or an in-person assistant, you can say, these are the 20 things I need done. Use your best judgment to get them done. You are still a person, but this is the work. That's different than saying, guess what I am thinking, guess what I want, and do it fast and cheap. That is really hard to pull off.

Right, so using, in your world, Seth, there's no such thing as a mini Seth who is podcasting for you or who is ghostwriting your blog because that's where you bring your experience and everything you bring to your craft. But you'll have a podcast editor that may be in another country that's doing certainly high-value work, but it's work that they could probably do better and more cost-effectively and more efficiently than yourself. And it's not like you're demeaning that person by subbing that out, but it's work that's not generating as much value as you writing your own blog post.

Right, and that puts me on the hook to generate more value. So as soon as you can hire someone at X number of dollars per hour, you've just valued your time, which is scary as a freelancer 'cause now you gotta go actually create more value than that 'cause you just bought the time back. Right. And the re— you know, I have known so many freelancers and been one for such a long time that what almost all of us say is, I wish someone would just go get me the business. I'd love to just do my job. And I'm like, no, no, your job is to go get the business. Right. The other parts are pretty easy.

This sounds like a great place to talk about a topic that you probably have to talk about now every time you get on, which is when we talk about freelancer, entrepreneur, small business, is how AI is impacting our our work today. Generally speaking, how do you see AI impacting this very conversation we're talking about?

Oh, I think it's super simple and we're trying so hard to avoid it. Anything you do that's mediocre, which is another word for average, can now be done for free by an AI. So if you're an average content creator, I don't need you anymore. I can just ask ChatGPT and it can create stuff almost as good as you. If you're an amateur photographer, same thing, right? This is what this, the very same thing that happened when everyone went out and bought a smartphone. All the average photographers in the world freaked out. They said, it's not fair. I'm an average wedding photographer, but these guests are taking their own pictures. Well, so what you're going to have to do is become an extraordinary one or switch. And so when we think about What happened to this industry when search showed up? And I could say, how much do ballpoint pens cost? And I could discover that you're 3 times the price. Well, I can still buy from you, but you better give me a good reason. Well, AI's gonna do the same thing. I have a blog post coming out soon about the price of salt. Salt used to be as much as gold because if you didn't live in a place with freely available salt, You were gonna die unless you bought salt. Well, now unsalted cashews cost more than salted cashews. Salt is free. And the same thing is gonna happen to content that is indistinguishable. If it's average, it's not worth it.

Seth, we had an email exchange a few weeks ago about the New York City school system and their decision to ban ChatGPT in the classroom. And you responded very quickly in an animated tone and said, this is nonsense. And I'm trying to relate your view on new technology and banning new technology to the themes of your work, particularly this book. My guess is that your view is that we as employers and as employees should lean into AI. We should be leaning into ChatGPT, maybe acknowledge that it might replace certain parts of us, but it has the ability to amplify. So the net is positive. Am I right in that assumption?

I think I would say we need to choose on purpose. So let's go to the schools first because I need some context here. An essay by an 11-year-old or a 15-year-old does not exist to solve the essay shortage problem we are all facing because we don't have an essay shortage problem. It exists as an easy way to prove that you did the work. And the reason schools are freaking out about ChatGPT is it can write a mediocre essay way better than a 12-year-old can. So this tool is no longer gonna help them keep all these kids spinning their wheels in an industrial way. So what they should do is just get rid of essays and instead say, your job is to bring me the best ChatGPT essay. And what we're gonna do is in class, write together, because that will actually teach you to write. Homework as a form of, you know, penitence or effort doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So with that said, think about what happened to customer support when the internet showed up. Lots of companies said, oh good, we can reduce our customer service costs. We'll just send them to the FAQ. We'll get one of those stupid chatbots that never knows the answer to your question. Wear them out, and then they'll just give up. Or you could do what an insurance brokerage in the Pacific Northwest told me they did, which is they ripped out their entire telephony system and made it so they had enough people in the insurance agency. It was a big agency that every phone call would be answered within 2 rings by a person. Who would figure out why you were spending the time to call them and get your problem solved. And they told me that it paid for itself in 90 days. Wow. The same way Tony Hsieh pioneered the idea that customer supported Zappos. They'd stay on the phone with you as long as you wanted. They, the record I think is 8 hours and 45 minutes for one call. And that made a shoe store worth a billion dollars. So if you're not going to use AI, you better show up way better than AI could show up. If you're not going to bother doing that, then yeah, you need to use it. Yeah.

This whole conversation ties to significant work. And Seth, you polled 10,000 people in 90 countries to describe the conditions at the best job they ever had. And these 4 characteristics were the top responses. Number 1, I surprised myself with what I could accomplish. Number 2, I could work independently. Number 3, the team built something important. Number 4, people treat me with respect. What surprised you about that list?

Well, I gave people 14 choices, and I think the biggest takeaway is what were the bottom 2? And the bottom 2 were they paid me a lot and I didn't get fired. And the reason that that's surprising is bosses think those are the top 2 because those are the only 2 things they talk about. How much they're going to pay you when they hire you and reminding you that you could get fired at any time when they want obedience. So there's the mismatch. The mismatch is people will give you their best, their heart and their soul and their passion if you offer them a chance for meaning and dignity and respect. Now you can point to your competition and say, well, they're racing to the bottom. And I would say, well, you can't out-Amazon Amazon. And that shift makes such a difference in the way you organize the company. So David Risher, who you helped build Amazon, is now the CEO of Lyft. And he announced just a little while ago that all people at headquarters have to come to work 3 days a week. And I would say, well, number 1, they have been coming to work. They just haven't been coming to the office. Right. And number 2 is if you're unable to do important work with people you've hired and trust asynchronously distributed, that's your fault, not theirs. That we have this extraordinary magical tool. The three of us are talking now. I don't even know where you guys are. That was impossible to even talk about 20 years ago. And you want to abandon all of this magic and all of these savings because you need to surveil people in the office? I don't get it. I think that that is a failure of imagination.

I want to jump in with a comment as a business owner, Seth. And I'm thinking about our journey at Common Skew. And pre-pandemic, I think that we always thought of ourselves as an enlightened employer, very focused on providing a great work environment, not watching the clock. All this stuff. But I will say, pre-pandemic, when we were hiring people, we always had a bias for, do you live in Toronto? Because we have an incredible, beautiful office that we've invested in that we want you to come in, into work, and so that we can have this great creative collaborative experience. And there was no question about that. And we didn't think of ourselves as being unenlightened. That was just the deal. So what, what What that meant is that if you didn't live in Toronto, you didn't have an opportunity to work at Common Skew unless you were someone with a very specialized skill set, someone like Bobby or a couple of other employees that are, that are outside the main market. What I'll say is that what the pandemic taught us is that we could now hire well outside of Toronto and now half of our team is across North America and that's been really interesting for us because it's demonstrated that we can be that much more efficient working in an asynchronous remote environment. We've polled our whole team, or sorry, I should say our local Toronto team, and said, hey, we still have our office. It's still the same beautiful office that you knew before. Do you want to come back in? And most people have said, well, maybe from time to time, but I kind of prefer what I've got right now. And I think what that's taught us, in a strange way, I would say the pandemic was this incredible gift to Catherine and I when it really demonstrated that we could build a team outside of Toronto as well as inside Toronto, increase our talent pool, and be that much more efficient. It was almost like a triple whammy. So, I just wanted to share that as a comment in terms of how we involved as an employer over the last couple of years and built our company.

Yeah, and but you are soft selling the leadership the two of you had to bring to the table.

Yeah.

Because If you bring a surveillance mindset, of course it's frustrating because someone's out getting their dry cleaning picked up and they're not answering you on one ring, right? Where are they? I'm paying them. That is selling time to be a cog in the system. On the other hand, if you say our project is to make this change in the world, to seek these numbers, to change this audience, what are the components of that? And how do we pass the ball back and forth in a way that's mutually beneficial? It's extraordinary. The Carbon Almanac changed my life for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them is we're talking the pre-publication, there were 300 of us in 40 countries. And every person, including me, was a volunteer. I probably worked on it more hours than most people, but if someone came for 5 hours, they came for 5 hours. And We made a 97,000-word book with graphs and charts and footnotes and fact checks. We didn't make one significant mistake and we handed it in a week before the deadline. It would have been impossible for any normal group of workers to do this. And what I found was my hard work was creating the conditions for it to happen. That's what I spent almost all my time on, not doing it, but creating the conditions for it to be done.

Seth, do you think we miss the significance? Do you think we end up with a surveillance culture or something like that in a small business, smaller business environment where it's not regulated? It's not like the airlines. Do you think we end up with those, the residue of that post-industrial, of the industrial age thinking because we haven't identified significant work for ourselves? Because we have a related question here. Jen Mitchell with TK Promotions asks, How can we identify significant work? How do we— she asked it this way— how can we identify significant work in each day? What should be at the forefront of our minds when seeking this kind of shift?

Okay, so in small businesses, it has been my experience that the operator-owner of the company thinks of the money as their money, and if they're giving their money to someone else, they have purchased something. That is hard to undo. And that doesn't happen if you're a middle manager at IBM. It's not your money. You pay by the pay grade, blah, blah, blah. So there's this sort of gap between the small business mindset and the other one. But the significant work part, and the reason that the barista thing is important, is you don't have to be doing eye surgery on a nearly blind person in India for it to be significant. That you can be the person at the hospital who clears away the dishes at the end of lunch. You can still do significant work. What you seek is agency. Yeah. So that you get to decide which parts of your day are more important than others, and you get to queue them up. You seek problem solving so that when you have done something for the first time and it works, that is I accomplished more than I thought I could, right? So when we think about, you know, if you are the person who's doing accounts payable or accounts receivable and you come up with the idea of putting a few sticks of gum into every bill that you mail out and you get positive feedback for it from a customer, that goes a really long way to making a day that could have been drudgery into something that was slightly less drudgery. And I know the bank tellers at the local bank, even though I try not to go inside the local bank. And they have figured out ways to subvert Chase's command and control mindset so that every day is just a little different. Human beings want to do that. And so we just need to let them.

I think I was going to make a joke, Seth. I'm glad that you weren't banking with Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic or any of those other ones. But anyways, maybe too soon.

It is very worth noting that in the last 100 years in the United States, not one investor has lost a penny of deposits in a bank run. And the selfish VCs who caused the SVB bank run, shame on them. But what people need to be reminded of is when the corporates lose their investments and their jobs, when a bank shifts, the investors don't, the people with deposits don't. And this is why when the airlines were whining during the pandemic for a bailout, we should have just let the airlines go out of business because the planes weren't going to go away and the airports weren't going to go away. They'd be back. And What would've happened is the whole tier of people who had made a bet on a certain kind of status quo, those people would be impacted, not the people who fly out of the plane.

I was gonna say that whenever we go into the TD Bank, for non-Canadian listeners, it's basically Chase, and you know, big, stodgy, conservative, safe, at least we hope. We always bring our red, our Fox Red Lab Oscar in because, they always feed him a treat. And it seems like the kind of thing that would happen in a small boutique-y bank, but not some huge one. And that's because the employees there have agency. I wanted to ask a question here. I think it was a good one from Stephanie at Red Promotions who asks about being addicted to busy. She says it's a struggle, especially as a remote employee. And what boundaries do you put in place, or do you advise putting in place, to balance work life with home? How do you prevent burnout?

Okay, I'll answer the second part first. Uh, there's no such thing as work-life balance. There's just life.

I agree.

You have life wherever you are, and if you are seeking work-life balance, you're already out of balance because you're trying to hustle through one thing to get to the other thing. Burnout usually comes from stress, which is different than tension. Stress is wanting two things at the same time, stay and go, right? I need to make this project, I need to make this call, but I need to be home. I'm stressed. Tension is knock knock and then waiting for who's there. Tension is pulling the rubber band back before you shoot across the room, shipping something and being not sure it's going to work. Tension is a a good thing. That's why people watch Netflix. If there was no tension, the show would be boring. And so busy is often a way to seduce ourselves away from certain sorts of feelings. But there's not— I mean, the people who run the biggest countries in the world don't spend more time at work than you do. So how did they pull that off, right? And A key part of it is we just expand to fill the available time, which leads to the last part of the trilogy, which is that Zoom is so widely misused as a surveillance tool. If you are going to a meeting where the boss is just talking because they couldn't be bothered to write a cogent memo or record a short video, you should not go to meetings like that anymore. You should figure out how to have conversations so that those meetings become asynchronous interactions, 'cause that's really what they should be. And one of the main things that people don't like about work these days is 4, 6 hours a day of Zoom calls, because they don't have agency and they're not getting anything done, and so they feel like a victim. And we know that they can be eliminated. And if someone cares enough to speak up and say, "You know what? Please send me a memo next time." I'm sure what's happening is important, but I promise to read it. Those sorts of agreements can get us huge progress.

Do you think, Seth, this, these are such crucial points and we're entering this entirely new era about work. We just weren't equipped. We were so steeped in the industrial age thinking that we just weren't equipped for this massive change in the way we're working now. But how refreshing for small businesses in order, because they often feel like they have to hold, they're the glue and they have to hold it all together. That's why they keep people tethered to things things like this, surveillance and Zoom. So what a refreshing moment we have to change course.

It is if you want to be. I mean, when I was in the early on as a book packager, first DVDs came, CD-ROMs, and then the internet came. And a lot of people in book publishing freaked out 'cause they said, we're in the business of chopping down trees and serving internet into independent bookstores. The freakout continues 20 years later. Amazon wasn't their friend. Amazon was the enemy. And I had enough agility to be able to say, I'm not in the cutting down trees business. I'm in the content and teaching business. This is a good thing. This isn't a bad thing. Why didn't Random House start Google? Random House had everything they needed to start Google. Google was only 2 people. It's not like they didn't have 2 people to spare, right? It's 'cause they said, we're not in the business of organizing the world's information, we're in the business of publishing a book. Well, as we've talked about today, we've got AI, we've got distributed work, we've got asynchronous work, we've got the death of false proxies. This is either a threat or it's the chance of a lifetime. And it's why we signed up to be leaders is 'cause this is a chance to lead.

Yeah.

Seth, in our closing minutes here, we'd love to turn the focus on Seth Godin. And ask a couple of questions about you. Here's a good one from our friend Leanne Allen with IMM Marketing in Dallas. If you could go back and tell a 21-year-old Seth Godin one piece of advice, what would it be?

So the thing is, I think it's fair to say I have failed more times than anyone who's listening to this.

Thank you for that.

The failures made me who I am. And I'm pretty happy with who I am right this minute. So all I would say to the 21-year-old Seth is not, oh, better avoid this and don't work with that person. I would just say it's going to be okay. And I can happily say that to every single person here. It's going to be okay. You know why? Because we can define whatever is happening as okay.

Seth, were you as zen as you are now as a 21-year-old, or were you an obnoxious, stressed-out entrepreneurial type that has since learned the error of his ways? Asking for a friend.

I think that because I lived on the edge of bankruptcy for 5 or 10 years, I was holding things very tight. And I don't think most people who worked with me in those days would say I was obnoxious, I probably hustled more than I would approve of today, but I was just holding on very tight. And I think the big lesson that I'm trying to share with people is it turns out you'll do better if you hold on a little less tightly.

So good. Well, let Mark Jackson have the last word. Mark Jackson runs a great business. He said, what's next for the great Seth Godin?

You know, post-pandemic, there are a lot of people who are just happy for today and aren't worrying so much about tomorrow. And I am so lucky to be able to get the benefit of the doubt from a bunch of people. I'm not sure what's next. I know I will be in a canoe in Algonquin Park in July, and you can check in with me after that.

I love it. Seth, thank you so much for spending your time with us once again.

Uh, we're really so great. I really look forward to this. Thank you very much. Go make a—

Seth, what fun this was. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comandsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.