August 29, 2018 • 44 mins
Creative guru Seth Godin tells us how to live through a You Turn, and make it into a Your Turn.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
He was willing to listen to his ego to become
the musician he wanted to become on behalf of the
people who would ultimately be served, even if his reception
at concert number one kind of booed off stage, and
getting booed off stage is one of the hallmarks the
great contributor, the Monkey's never got booed off stage. Hello,
(00:40):
and welcome to you. Turns because shift happens. I Ami
Lisa Oz and I'm with Jill Hersey, and we are
talking about change today and making change a little bit
easier and how to realize maybe when it's time for
us to change, get us out of that rut, overcoming
the obstacles that to start keep us from being our
(01:00):
best selves. And we have an amazing guest who's going
to help us with that. We do. We are here
and we feel so lucky to be with Seth Godin.
He is the author of eighteen books. He got famous
as a marketer, but is so so much more his blog.
All you have to do is type the words Seth
in there and his blog, which is simply called Seth's Blog,
(01:21):
comes up. And that's because it is one of the
most read blogs in the worlds on the planet pretty scary.
It's not scary at all. I find it so fascinating.
I am so not a marketer. But one of the
appeals of it is that it just each entry you
blog every single day without fail, that dicipline that takes
(01:42):
I definitely want to discuss, but you also just deliver
these tiny, short, little nuggets of wisdom that take me
sometimes days to unpack. I mean, I just there's there's
so much intelligence in every single one. I don't write
it for a lot of people. I write it for you,
and that makes it easier. Thank you. I feel very special.
So I want to start the conversation with a quote
(02:05):
you had in your book Your Turns, which is Your Turn,
which is very funny because it fits in with you
Turns just felt like serendipitous that you were here with
us today. But you have a quote from caricter Guard
that blew me away, and it felt like it's just
like a little just a little poke right in my soul,
and it was to dare is to lose one's footing. Momentarily,
(02:26):
to not dare is to lose oneself. Can you talk
about that a little bit? The impostor syndrome was coined
a few decades ago, and a lot of people say
they suffer from it feeling like a fraud. And there's
also a problem where people think they know how to
(02:46):
be a manager, but they can't figure out why they
can't lead. And they're both related to the same thing,
which is you can't do something important, something new, something
meaningful if you're sure it's going to work, because is
if you're sure it's going to work, it's not important, new,
or meaningful. If you're not sure it's going to work,
then of course you're an impostor because you're not sure.
(03:09):
And if you're not sure it's going to work, of
course you're afraid because it might not work. And as
a result, we walk around with this narrative in our
head that says, I better not do something that involves leadership,
doing something important, something new, something that matters, because if
I do that, I'll be afraid. So are you saying
that impostor syndrome is an okay thing to feel, because
(03:31):
I think a lot of women, particularly I got over
that impostor syndrome. And you can't get rid of impostor syndrome.
You can't get rid of fear. Fear is not the enemy.
The enemy is fear of fear. Fear of fear paralyzes us,
but fear tells us we're on the right track. If
there is no fear, you're not about to do something honest,
(03:51):
not about to be real, you're not about to be present.
You can avoid all of that by hiding. That's fear
of fear. But for me, if I'm not a little
bit afraid, then I know I'm not working hard enough.
Okay are you talking about feeling this way every day?
Every day? My god, Okay, every day we have to
be afraid least I am already. So for me, it's
(04:14):
not that it's I am the what you describe the
problem is that inertia that comes with that fear and
getting past. So it was one thing if it were
just like stopping being afraid, it's actually doing something else.
How do you well, we'd like because we believe that
(04:37):
make believe stories of movies and the media to imagine
that one day we wake up and we're Oprah. One
day we wake up and day exactly, no one does that.
What happens is we learn, you know, if you if
you talk to someone that finishes the marathon, You say,
(05:00):
did you get tired? And the answer is yes. You
can't run a marathon without getting tired. So what's the
difference between someone who runs a marathon and someone who
finishes a marathon? And the difference is the finisher figures
out where to put the tired. That's the secret, not
how do I not get tired. You don't go to
a trainer and say, please train me so I can
(05:20):
run a marathon and not get tired. You say, I
get tired. What should I do with it? Where do
I put it? Well, the same thing is true with fear,
or think about hunger. If you've got a five year
old in the house, when he or she gets hungry,
there's a tantrum until they're fed. But when we become
an adult, we can live with being hungry because in fact,
it makes dinner more enjoyable to eat when we're hungry. Well,
(05:43):
the same thing is true with this work. That we
don't do a giant leap. We don't say I used to,
you know, be a street sweeper. Now I run a
public corporation. It doesn't happen like that. What happens is
tiny little steps where each step is dealing with the
fear again, so I don't feel the overwhelming fear before
(06:06):
I publish a blog post that I used to because
it hasn't been fatal yet. But when I started and
I only had a hundred readers, it was really scary
because there were a hundred people in the world, so
I didn't know who were about to read what I wrote.
What if they didn't understand it? But if they posted
a nasty comment, what if they took it out of context?
So I would rewrite and rewrite and it got terrible.
So then I said, all right, look, there's only a
hundred people. It's gonna feel scary, but just right, just
(06:31):
merely be here it is. I made this, And then
the next morning, when I had to do it again,
I realized I didn't die yesterday. So I did it again.
It I did it again, and over time the fear
doesn't go away, but you realize the fear is not fatal.
Are you self critical? Do you sometimes like look back
on a post you did and think, oh my god,
(06:51):
what was I even saying there? Well, what I've trained
myself to do is something that a lot of people
are trained not to do, which is go out of
my way to be self congratulatory when I read my
old work. Not all the time, because there's lots of
stuff I would fix if I decided to fix it,
But when I do see something that's good, I said, Wow,
(07:12):
that sounds really good, Glad I wrote that, And we
forget to say that to ourselves, and because we're always
picking the other stuff. You know what, one thing that's
interesting about the way men and women approach clothing. Before
you go to a cocktail party or some stressful social situation,
you're just totally down on yourself. These shoelaces, I can't
(07:32):
believe I usual, And you go on and on and
on about it in your head for forty five minutes.
Then you go to the event, and once you go
on and onto your husband. If I surveyed every single
person who was there an hour afterwards and asked them
what you were wearing, no clue. There's only one person
who knows what you were wearing, and it's you. And
(07:54):
the same thing is true. You know, if you talked
to Liz Gilbert about Eat Pray Love, there are parts
of Eat Pray Love that she would change fixed. Just
if you talked to anybody who's read the book. They
don't even remember those things. So that's the challenge of
doing this creative work is we have to tell ourselves
a story that lets us do creative work. It's interesting
(08:15):
because when I was an editor of magazines, and that's
the transition I'm in right now where I'm looking for
my next new industry. But when I was first starting out,
I worked for this legendary editor and she had us
sit down and do a postmortem on every single issue,
where you know, we would really pick it apart. And
(08:35):
of course there it was in front of us, immutable, unchangeable,
and I did. I found it. When I became an
editor in chief myself was the first thing I did
away with. I just thought, what is the point? This
is the this is the most feel bad meeting of
the month, and we do twelve of them a year
and it's just well, so maybe so maybe that wasn't
(08:56):
such a bad instinct. Maybe it's a little bit of both.
So there's some they do in the Armed forces called
hot wash, which is an after action review. What happens
is after the exercises, they put the leaders in the
room and they do what this editor did, which is,
let's take it apart. But there are very specific rules,
and one of the rules is no personalities, no shame,
(09:19):
no you should have known better. It's if we had
watched somebody else do all these things, what would we
say to each other as if the person who did
these things isn't in the room. Because we're not here
to criticize the human for being a bad human. We're
here to say that action right, that the curning on
that headline, It doesn't matter who did the curning. The
(09:40):
curning on that headline, we can learn from right. And
so the way you respond, as opposed to react in
an after action meeting in a hot wash is thank you,
no explanations, no rationale. Know well what I was thinking
was because it's not about you. We're just talking about kearning,
We're just talking about truth movement. We're just talking about
(10:03):
something that happened. And if someone cares enough to say that,
the answer is thank you. And once we realize that
as professionals, that's what we need to do, we can
get better. And this is one of the things that
Nemon understands about surgery is that after surgery, if you
want to be a professional, you've got to say to
(10:25):
the people who were in the operating room that move
could have cost us. Let's not make that move again,
and the other person has to say thank you, because
it's about being a professional. I think a lot of us,
myself included to a certain extent, are actually better with
external criticism, even though we think in our heads that
(10:46):
that's what we fear, is like the nasty comment or
because genuine criticism is looking for improvement. Right when you
do that, either your postmortem or your hot wash, it's
because you care about something bigger and the project as
a whole, and it's never personal. So the external criticism
has a function. I think a lot of us recognize
(11:06):
that devastating and crippling is the internal crisis because that's
all personal, has nothing to do with a bigger picture,
and the performance is all I suck and that's the
bottom line. Oh my gosh, And you can just circle
the drain with yeah, So how do we deal with that?
Why does it exist? Why did we why did we
evolve to have that voice in our head? Because there's
(11:27):
it turns out there's an answer, and it's not an
access there's a really good reason why we have that
out our head. It turns out that if you're a
caveman sitting around the fire and you speak up and
you offend the chief, the chief is going to throw
you out of the tribe, and you're going to be
lunch for somebody tomorrow, and so you're not going to
(11:50):
have any grandchildren to pass your jeans onto. So we evolved,
like most wild animals, to listen to the chemical impulses
of our big DEALO, which is right back here, and
their brains them that wants safety and uh stability and
maybe revenge now in this but those are the three
things that focuses on. And Steve Pressfield has written a
(12:12):
magnificent book called The War of Art that everyone should read,
and what he in that book he names it resistance.
And the resistance is the front of our brain narrating
all of those chemicals. Because the front of your brain
knows you better than anyone on earth, and it knows
what to say to get you to not leave the house.
It knows what to say to get you to stand down,
(12:33):
because it wants to survive. And the problem is it's confused.
It thinks we're living in the year two hundred. We're
not living in the year and the year. The way
to survive is to leave the house. The way to
survive is to raise your hand, is to make a rucus,
is to do something interesting. But it feels to our
primordial brain like we're risking everything when we do that.
(12:56):
So if you want to be a professional, you can't
then not the resistance, but you can acknowledge the resistance,
say oh, thanks for the clue. I'm going to go
do the very thing you told me not to do.
And that use of it as a compass. If you
look at the great artists, the great musicians, the great politicians,
that's what they do. They use it as a compass.
Every time that voice in my head because it sounds
(13:18):
a very particular way, right, every time that voice shows up,
it's giving you a clue as to what the culture
actually wants for this. So it's kind of like the
hot wash thing. You thank that voice exactly, then you
move on, right, because you can't make it go away.
All right, We're going to take a quick break and
then we'll come right back, Lisa. We were just talking
(13:45):
about the critical voice in your head that stops you
from actually doing what you need to do. There are
also external forces that sometimes frees us in our tracks,
and you have a great analogy of how we can
get stuck sometimes in life doesn't turn out exactly the
way we planned it. Can you share that with us.
I've actually seen it in real life, but it was
(14:07):
first I saw it in a funny YouTube video that's
a commercial, and it's a bunch of fancy business executives
on an escalator going up to a meeting and the
escalator breaks and they're panicked and they take out their
cell phones and they're calling people back home. I'm trapped
on an escalator. What should I do? Well, of course,
you could just walk up the stairs. And I saw
(14:28):
this happening about a year after I saw the video
in Boston. These people were trapped on an escalator and
I just walked right past them. Use the risk of
walking on that dangerous escalator. Most of what we are
stuck on, if we live in this privilege developed world
(14:52):
that we live in, is not a matter of life
or death or survival. Most of what we're stuck in
is a narrative about it good escalator that we haven't
been picked, we haven't been recognized, we haven't been given permission,
we haven't been put into the spot where we have authority,
and so therefore we just wait where we whine about it.
(15:14):
Maybe maybe we even get off the escalator in the
wrong direction, when in fact, if you track who is
making an impact in our world, most of them are
just walking up the escalator. They weren't picked, they weren't authorized.
They simply showed up, not for themselves, but as generous actors.
They say I have something I want to share with
(15:34):
people that they will want, and it works and they
do it again, or it doesn't work and they do
it again, but they create this cycle of generosity. It's
a contribution. You don't get to change people against their will.
You get to turn on lights for people, open doors
for people, And it turns out if you do that
for a few people, you might get the chance to
do it for more people. You You know, we were
(15:57):
talking in the last segment about resistance and the that
inability to actually do the kind of things we know
that we want to do, and you just touched on
something I think that makes a huge difference is when
when it's all we're all invested in our ego and
it's all about us, there is much more of that
resistance that disappears. That's right when you are taking care
(16:20):
of someone else, when it's all when so I am
wretched at marketing myself. It's just not happening. I can
stomp from here to tomorrow from my husband. Um, but
it's not it's it's different when it's when it's not
about your ego. Yeah. I I try to avoid the
word ego because I think that there's plenty of good
things about ego. But let's set that well when it's
(16:41):
not selfishly about helping someone else, because you're giving, not taking.
So when you read about heroics, lifeguards who save people's life,
the thing that's always in common is they didn't think
about the water was cold, they didn't think about what
might happen. They just saved someone's life, no resistance, and
that ability to bring it to the people who wanted
(17:05):
is transformative. So if you if you track Bob Dylan's career,
a lot of the stories in his autobiography probably aren't true,
but if you look at the decisions he made after
his motorcycle accident and stuff, he said to his promoter,
I'm going on this tour, I want you to book
me in the same city three years in a row,
(17:26):
and the promoter said, why would you do that. That's
just you got to go to people who haven't heard
from you in a while. Now I want to go
for three years in a row. And the reason is
the first year, a lot of the people who are
coming hearing hoping I'll play acoustic hits for them will
be disappointed. The second year, the people who weren't disappointed
will come back. It is the third year that they
(17:48):
will bring their friends, and then I will have the
audience I want to serve. And so he was willing
to listen to his ego to become the musician he
wanted to become on behalf of the people who would
ultimately be served, even if his reception at concert number
one kind of off stage and getting booed off stage
(18:09):
is one of the hallmarks of a great contributor. The
monkeys never got booed off stage. You don't want the monkey,
but the monkey. Then I would take Daydream of Believer
any day theme song. I like it. If you're out there,
I apology. So, you know, a lot of this comes
(18:31):
back to this concept that you talk about about how
we fear freedom. You know, we like to say that
that is what we desperately crave and it's going to
be so great. And you know this is we the
confines of our life are the things that are keeping
us from from being what we could be if only
we were afraid. But you say, actually, we're sort of petrified.
(18:54):
People hate it. People hate it because it means you
have to make a choice. If you have to make
a choice, it means you're responsible. And if you're responsible,
it means you might get blamed. If you get blamed,
you might die. And so when we say that, so
you have freedom, they go, I might die. Is that
that primitive part of the Exactly, it's the same thing
(19:15):
that puts us on alert when we see we have
a text from our boss. Right when you get a
text from your boss, and oh good, they saw how
good I was. And now it's like, oh my god,
they found out I'm a fraud. And so, yes, we
talk about how much we value freedom, but go look
at the placement office at college and all the kids
are lined up to get a job where they got picked.
(19:35):
And look at how hard it is to take a
gap year in the United States compared to saying I'm
going straight to college. Look at all the You know,
when I was running my startup years ago, we struggled
to get great employees. And I was a meeting with
a guy at Disney and he had a hundred and
fifty resumes on his desk for one job. It was
(19:57):
like a hundred and fifty people applying for a not
very good job Disney, and I couldn't even get three
people to apply for the company. That was going like crazy,
because getting a great job at Disney apparently a great job.
You've given up freedom. But in exchange, you've gotten the
comfort of saying, I'm in a slot. It's not my fault.
The corporation is in charge, the brand is in charge.
(20:18):
I'm just doing my job that feels really safe to people.
And what the Internet has done, among many other things,
is given everybody these new degrees of freedom that you know,
I started blogging years ago, but you can still start
now and it's free. Every single day. You could do it,
and almost no one does because no one picked you,
(20:39):
no one hired you. You have to pick yourself. But
you also have other responsibilities, right if you have to
pay off student loans. I mean, there are logical reasons
not to start a blog. Also you know, it's harder
to monetize now you have to pursue the clutter. There
are a lot of all of those good, sensible reasons
not to like give up your job at Disney and
(20:59):
start a well. I need to distinguish a few things here.
First of all, the what we're what we've seen in
the last ten years is sort of a ProAm revolution,
which is a lot of people are making an impact
with something that used to be a hobby. And the
passionate way that you can write or edit or create
(21:20):
is a hobby. Right. No one got paid to make
music in eighteen fifty and people aren't going to get
paid to make music going forward the way they used to.
Van Morrison has left the building. It's not gonna be
like that. But if you're not watching any TV and
you're not spending any time on Facebook, then I have
sympathy for the fact that you don't have any time.
But the average person in this country spends seven hours
(21:42):
a day watching TV or using social media. That's seven
hours a day they could be doing something generous instead
of feeding the resistance in their head. And in those
seven hours, if you could, for example, organize twenty entrepreneurs
in your town, twenty entrepreneurs who feel isolated, if you
could be the organ an either of them for free,
for fun once a week, coming together, organizing a private
(22:04):
Facebook group for them, figuring out how to help this
group of twenty we've together a community. You'll make a
living doing that one day, maybe not tomorrow, but one
day that partly because it's a generous it's you're doing
it to weave, you're doing it to create possibility. But
(22:24):
one day soon one of those twenty people, she's going
to say to you, do you want to be my
chief of staff? She's going to say to you, this
is because you've proven that you are a member of
this group, this tribe, right or moving sideways degrees? What
else in your physical community needs doing. Let's say you're
(22:45):
a real estate broker. There's two million real estate brokers
in the United States. Every time property values go up,
there's more of them, and so it's really difficult to
make a good living because as soon as you start
making a good living, more competition. Well, what if you
bent a third of your time as a real estate
broker not trying to hustle somebody into giving you a
(23:05):
listing but actually becoming the volunteer mayor of your community,
not an elected mayor, but the person who has the
girl scouts twice a week in the office because you
have extra room, the person who's organizing this, and the
person is organizing this not because you hope that you'll
get a listing, but because you can, because if you
did that, you actually would get listings. But that's not
(23:27):
why you're doing it. You're doing it because you can.
And so my argument isn't that people should have a blog.
My argument is we should reconsider the story we're telling
ourselves about money, about sufficiency, about abundance, about scarcity, and
realize that what's really missing here is brave, generous people
(23:48):
who are willing to dance with the fear to do
work that matters. And if you become one of those people,
even if you don't get paid for it, you'll get
paid for it. And so, yeah, you should keep your
day job. I'm not telling you to lose your house.
I'm just saying we shouldn't fall into the seduction that
the industrial economy sold us that we have to do
that or else we're a failure. Because I guess what,
(24:12):
people lost their jobs at Ford Motor Company one day
a few years ago. Wasn't their fault. It's just that
assembly line didn't work anymore. So all those obedient people
got punished, and I think that's a shame. Yeah, you know,
there's also a word missing from what you just described,
which is it's it's doing what you love. It's doing
things that nourish you and and you know, in the moment,
(24:36):
just make you feel. I think that's what I'm mad
when he says work that matters. I think part of
what mattering isn't just like you know, putting out for
as fires. It's also something. I think that's part of
mattering is that you love it. Yeah right, I would
think it definitely is. And loving what you do is
just as good as doing what you love. Oh wow, Okay,
(24:57):
let's unpack that for a second yet, because that is profound.
It's it's true, and it's not always easy. None of
this is easy. Did I say once it was easy?
And that's actually one of my favorite things about you
is that you never make any of these steps sound
like they're simple or easy, or if you just did this,
(25:19):
doors with swing might open. It's it's never easy with you,
it would be a lot easier to sell stuff if
I said it was easy, but I'm not interesting. Yeah,
do you have any tips for shifting the way we
see what we do so that we can start loving it.
So in case you're sitting in this room going, oh,
I have to sit next to Lisa again. I know.
(25:42):
So we were supposed to tell her that, let's attend
that she's like really bored, how does she shift it?
Or someone listening out there isn't a job that really
isn't challenging them. How do they learn to love it
if they can't love what they do. One of our
enemies is entitlement. And if you had offered your job,
(26:02):
whatever your job is, if you're listening to this to
someone in N seven with the pay you get in,
the freedom you get in, the leverage you get in,
the free snacks you get, they would like knock you
over on their way to go get that job. Or
if you went to Cabira um, where I've been lucky
enough to visit, and offered somebody in Cabarra your job,
(26:23):
they would knock you over to get it too. Um.
In fact, the only person who hates your job as
much as you do, right, now is pretty much you
because you've got this whole narrative in your head about
you're entitled to more respect, more dignity, more leverage, more
pay more of this, more of this um. So part
of undoing this is beginning by creating a cycle of
(26:46):
reminding yourself and reminding your peers just how much freedom
and leverage you actually have. I get your boss is
a jerk and that he's mean to you, and there
for half an hour a day he's undercutting your work. Okay, fine,
we'd like to pick step, But what about the other
eight hours or nine hours a day when you actually
have all of this freedom to decide what you're going
(27:07):
to do next, whether you leave there or not. That
that's a choice on your part. There are a lot
of people the world who don't have that choice. So
by coming back to that again and again, we start
to build this foundation. But then we get back to
the fear and the fear of fear of thing, which
is this. It's super safe to say I don't have
the freedom to quit my job because now you don't
(27:29):
have to decide a new job. It's been done to you,
it's not your responsibility, and it's super easy to deal
with the frustration and grind of what you have now
compared to the fear that you have to dance with well,
what would happen next? So an example, there are people
who work it. I don't even have to tell you
(27:51):
the name of any particular company where people are super
happy with their job, and any percent of people hate it,
but it's the same job, so clearly their narrative that's
kicking in. Some of those people who love it are
doing things like starting a lunch book club. Once a
week over lunch, they sit with other people and they
read a book together and they talk about it. Some
(28:12):
of those people are figuring out how to be generous
within the organization, so they are seen as Lynchpin's indispensables
who will be the last to get thrown out because
the place can't run without them. The magic of that
is if you tell yourself the right story, it's also
a better job than the person who's just doing the minimum.
So again we're entering this post industrial world. In the
(28:35):
industrial world in Manchester, England, in many many people were
alcoholics because shifting from farm work to being in a city,
dirty factory working by candlelight for twelve hours a day
was so stressful. They didn't have coffee carts like we
have here. They had gin carts, people going up in
(28:55):
down street with jin just so you could survive the day.
And that industrial mindset, it still exists. There's still too
many people who have to, you know, shovel coal or
or do exactly what they're told of, backbreaking work for
minimum wage. But if you're not one of those people,
you have way more freedom than you think. And if
you embrace that freedom and figure out, even for ten
(29:18):
minutes a day, how to do something that's generous, that's
a contribution that matters that they would miss if you
didn't do it, I think your day gets better, not worse.
And so it's again a gradual process, not a dramatic one.
You don't walk in and slap down your badge and quit.
You become a different kind of person, the kind of
(29:38):
person who's seen as a contribution. Little steps, little steps,
all right, we'll return to that in just a minute.
Thinks I wanted to touch on the idea of certainty.
(29:58):
You mentioned it early. You're on, but I think part
of why we stay small and we don't make the
changes you're talking about in work um, being more generous,
being more active, is because of that reptilian part of
our brain that craves certainty, because if uncertainty equals death,
(30:21):
as you mentioned, why do you insist that we embrace uncertainty. Well,
if you don't want to, that's fine, it's totally fine.
I just don't think we say, I just don't think
you should whine about it. Right, And each comes with
a different bundle of pluses and minuses, And it is
(30:44):
entirely possible to live a super safe life as seen
from the outside, where there is more certainty and less
chances you're going to one start YELP review, But in
exchange it's sort of dull. You're not going to get
the treats and the surprises and the contributions that somebody
(31:05):
who's doing a different kind of work can do. And
so pick they go together, and so the life of
somebody who is creating things worth talking about, creating things
that make change happen. You get the thrill of the
contribution you just made, the thrill of turning on the
lights for somebody, the thrill of knowing that you made
(31:27):
a difference. But in exchange you have to deal with
dancing with the fear that comes with that. And there
you know, it's when you listen to I don't listen
to sports radio, but I'm guessing on sports radio the
kinds of people that they're interviewing sports stars, they don't
ask them. Yeah, but how could I be a famous
sports star without getting sore? How can I be a
(31:49):
favorite sports star without the training, without the bruises? You
can't they go together? Same deal? Yeah? All right, So
I'm I'm getting the sense that you are very careful
with how you spend your time and you're kind of
down on Facebook, sucking hours out of our day, television,
sports radio for you. Correct, So it sounds like you
(32:09):
are pretty good about time. It's different things good, Okay,
did it take you a while to get there? A
bunch of years ago, I realized I read an Amazon
review of one of my books and it ruined my day.
And I said, wait a minute, I'm never going to
write this book again. So this review isn't helping me.
And so I stopped, and I haven't read an Amazon
(32:31):
review since then, not one. And then I was in
a meeting and I was like, yeah, I'm squircheting around here.
Why are we having a meeting? So I don't go
to meetings. And I got rid of my television after Steinfeld.
One after year, we don't have a television, um, and
I don't use Facebook or Twitter. Ah, So I have
(32:52):
like eight three hours a day and which writes seventeen
bucks and me every single day of time to just
do nothing thing because doing nothing is one of the
ways I noticed things, and noticing things is how we
do my word, do you do you recommend that to people?
I mean, should we all just decide, like, these are
seven things I'm going to say no to because they're
just it's ridiculous. How much of my time they rob
(33:14):
Is it helping? That's the question. But there is I
feel like there are these forces out there that are like,
and you got to do this, and of course, and
you got to promote it and and it's so it's
a little bit difficult to say no to those well,
but the discipline keeps us honest. So here you are
launching this important podcast and people are going to say
(33:36):
you need plenty of reviews on the iTunes store, and
they're gonna say you need to build a Facebook page
and you need to have a big following. Okay, but
let's say you weren't allowed to have a Facebook page.
What would you do instead? Oh? Right, let's say you
weren't allowed to keep asking people to post reviews on iTunes?
What would you do instead? So, since I have all
(33:56):
these rules that I don't spam people that don't hype stuff,
don't you know whose Facebook to manipulate people? Did you
change the world to make sure that people did less
of that? And so I have to say this is
so what will I do instead? Right? Differently, I'll interact
with people differently, I'll hire a different group of people
and be a much smaller entity. I run a studio
and not a company, right, And so these choices are
(34:20):
boundaries that let you get back to work. And I
view the work I do as a privilege. I don't
do it because I have to do it because I
want to. It's my generous act that I would like
to help people. So I'm going to do that. I'd
like to be a professional about it. And if the
hour you want me to spend in this meeting could
be spent with me reading the memo you wrote for
(34:41):
seven minutes and then spending fifty three minutes doing something
else because I wasn't in the meeting, I think that's
a better trade. So that it comes back to does
it help? And then when I think of the work,
it's who's it for? And what's it for? This thing
I'm building, this podcast I'm going on or the podcast
I run at Kimbo? Who's it for? If it's not
for you, I don't care whether you like it or not,
(35:02):
because I didn't make it for you. I made it
for her, and what's it for? Didn't make the change
I seek to make. If it didn't make the change,
can I do it better? Or should I stop? But
these are the decisions that designers make whatever they're designing.
And if you're designing a life that's fueling a narrative
that making you feel insufficient and dealing with scarcity or
(35:25):
beating yourself up, then why don't you build a different life?
So it's shifting your expectations. There were the reasons, your
reasons for doing what you're doing. So if you're doing
it for the most likes or to get the most
advertising dollars, you will never be satisfied because someone's always
gonna more likes and be getting more money. But if
you're doing it to touch the audience that you do
(35:46):
have in a positive way and to grow yourself. Then
you'll always have fun no matter how many stars you have.
Exactly that's exactly right. And so when we think about
when we're going to do something that feels dangerous, that
feels risky, there's the fear again. So if we get
(36:08):
past the fear of fear, we say, oh, here's the fear.
Why am I afraid? And we ask ourselves the question,
who's it four? What's it for? Is this going to
make things better? The answer is yes. We say, come along, fear,
this was the right thing to do. The answer is no.
You say thank you, fear. You pointed out I was
being inconsistent. I'm not going to do that. But it
gives us a compass, and a compass is worth a
(36:29):
hundred times more than a map. The compass, I think
sets you in the right place, points you in the
right direction. But it's your discipline that allows you to
put one foot in front of the other and make
the movement towards that. We haven't really touched on discipline
in a meaningful way. You've talked about it, but I
have a more did it Um, is this is this
(36:52):
how you've been forever? Is this just a set thing? Well,
there are certain things that I've always been very undisciplined about,
and I don't believe that. First I went through four
years of college with one notebook because I didn't have
the discipline to take notes, and I don't If I
don't remember the concept, it's gone. No patients for bullet
(37:15):
points and things like that. Um. So I'm disciplined about,
you know this the structure of what I'm going to
eat right and the next thing with the next work
I will do. But I'm my desk is a mess,
and I'm undisciplined about He'll create something and then not
work on it when the work itself demands that I
(37:35):
spend more time bringing it into the world. So I'm
not perfect or shiny or anything that I'm a mess
in the way most people are a mess. The difference
is that I've chosen certain places to be disciplined. And
so let me talk about school for a minute, because
I think school is responsible for most of this. We
invented school for a very specific reason. We know who
(37:56):
invented it and how it was invented. Was invented? Uh,
in the late eight hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, so
that factories would have enough compliant workers, people who would
do they what they were told. And the other side
effect is it would create social stress so that teenagers
would buy more stuff because the factories of the time,
we're worried that because the kid had two pairs of pants,
(38:19):
two pairs of shoes, that's all they had. With factories
figuring out how to make stuff, that was a problem.
So we had to create consumer culture and we had
to create compliance culture. So school fuels both of those things.
And so I run this online workshop called the Alt
n b A and it's a thirty day intensive. We've
got people in forty six countries with coaches. And one
(38:41):
of the questions that people ask is will this beyond
the test? And we say there is no test, we're
not accredited, there are no grades, and you're just showing
up for you. That freaks a lot of people. Sure,
a lot of people drop out, right, then yeah, they
don't sign up, right, We have dropped our way close
to zero because we tell all everybody in advance. But
(39:02):
once you realize that you have that freedom, some people
embrace it and say, wow, this is going to teach
me an enormous amount about how to discipline my life,
because it's this intensive three hour day thing while you're
your job for a month, and people get through it,
and then all of a sudden you can't bluff anymore
because now you say, wow, I did that. It's like
(39:23):
monning a marathon. I could do it again if I
had to. So your output goes up because you've learned
to be professionally disciplined at work without there being a grade,
without there being a boss. But for most people who
grew up a school and then grew up with a boss,
as soon as you take that away, they don't know
what to do. And so part of the genius in
(39:44):
the evil genius quotation marks of Facebook and Twitter is
it Facebook and Twitter give you a grade every day,
and so everyone's struggling to get an a because you
can't keep checking. Maybe I got a few more likestre exactly,
And so you know, when I do it Facebook Live,
I do interviews there. They are pretty cool. You're supposed
(40:06):
to see the little things on the screen, all the
people commenting, so that, like in a home shopping way,
you could change what you're saying to get more of.
So we turned the screen away so I can't see that,
because if I saw it, I'd wanted to go up
because I'd like to get an A, and I do
better work without it. The New York Times Bestseller list.
I know how to game it. I've written about how
(40:27):
it's corrupt, so I refused to look at the list.
I refused to want to be on the list because
I know if I wanted to be on the list,
I know how I get an A, and I would
do stuff to get an A, which isn't why I'm
doing my work. So by forcing myself to just not
even have it on the table, I'm way less likely
to be corrupted by it. Mm hmm. That is what
we need to teach our kids in schools apart then,
(40:51):
because are the only way our system works, and we
have a consumption economy and we need a compliant work
for so you're blowing up a system. I'm trying very hard.
I had a friend who was fighting school. His son
was fighting school really hard, and they were fairly privileged
and could afford to work things out, and instead of
(41:15):
figuring out how to pander to him, they said, fine,
take a year off you have to go to this
office every day and do something. And they rented him
a little cube in place that was safe, and the
kid had to go to work every day from nine
o'clock to three o'clock and do something. And within a
day or two the kid figures out, I don't want
to be bored. So he's editing Wikipedia articles and he's
(41:38):
building this, and he's doing this, and he learned more
in a year. And there's plenty of books about how
this is true for almost everybody. Then he would have
learned in school. He just didn't learn the same thing.
He doesn't know what year. The War of eighteen twelve
is fine, you can look it up. But what happens
is if you say to a kid it's better to
explore safely, it's better to dance with your year, then
(42:00):
it is to comply with the teacher. That's what they're
going to grow up to do. Isn't that what we want? Yes? Okay,
So that gets to something you say in your book,
which I loved and really made me perck up my ears.
You said, go get naked. Well, if we're gonna make
a ruckus, the answer is not false vulnerability. There's vulnerability
theater all over the Internet, where we spew our internal
(42:24):
drama and lots of people. It's a great way to
create a crowd, but it's not a great way to
create a difference. It's not a great way to do
anything that matters. Because the people were watching our authentic
meltdown are just spectators. We don't need more of this.
What we need to do is be able to have
(42:44):
the guts to say here, I made this, and if
someone says I don't like it, then we say it's
not for you, and we can offer to someone else.
And if enough people don't like it, then it wasn't
any good. Make something else. But if it does work
for some people, make stuff for them, because the fact
that you can reach a billion people doesn't mean you
(43:06):
should try to please a billion people. One of the
best expressions on the Internet has shunned the nonbelievers. When
you find the nonbelievers, don't try to persuade them that
they're wrong. Just go serve somebody else, because you have
something to offer, something to contribute, And if we can
bring that sense of possibility and abundance to other people,
we might get some of it back, and then we
(43:27):
ratchet up instead of the race to the bottom, because
the problem with the race to the bottom is you
might win. And this is why your blog is one
of the most popular. I could sit here all day
with the two of you. This podcast is going to
rock like you're off to just such off to the
racist thank you for generous and to our listeners. If
(43:47):
you want more of Seth than I think we all
just need more of Seth all the time. Check out
a book that we read specifically for this podcast called
What to Do When It's Your Turn? Because it's always
your turn? Is the sub is the subtimes I'm publishing myself,
it's a your turn dot L I n K. There
you go. And also, um, of course good his blog.
Just just start typing stuff going in there and you'll
(44:09):
get right there. And if you want to connect with us,
you can go to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at You
Turns podcast. Let us know how you're contributing, how you're changing,
how you're becoming fearless. Until next time, ye
He was willing to listen to his ego to become
the musician he wanted to become on behalf of the
people who would ultimately be served, even if his reception
at concert number one kind of booed off stage, and
getting booed off stage is one of the hallmarks the
great contributor, the Monkey's never got booed off stage. Hello,
(00:40):
and welcome to you. Turns because shift happens. I Ami
Lisa Oz and I'm with Jill Hersey, and we are
talking about change today and making change a little bit
easier and how to realize maybe when it's time for
us to change, get us out of that rut, overcoming
the obstacles that to start keep us from being our
(01:00):
best selves. And we have an amazing guest who's going
to help us with that. We do. We are here
and we feel so lucky to be with Seth Godin.
He is the author of eighteen books. He got famous
as a marketer, but is so so much more his blog.
All you have to do is type the words Seth
in there and his blog, which is simply called Seth's Blog,
(01:21):
comes up. And that's because it is one of the
most read blogs in the worlds on the planet pretty scary.
It's not scary at all. I find it so fascinating.
I am so not a marketer. But one of the
appeals of it is that it just each entry you
blog every single day without fail, that dicipline that takes
(01:42):
I definitely want to discuss, but you also just deliver
these tiny, short, little nuggets of wisdom that take me
sometimes days to unpack. I mean, I just there's there's
so much intelligence in every single one. I don't write
it for a lot of people. I write it for you,
and that makes it easier. Thank you. I feel very special.
So I want to start the conversation with a quote
(02:05):
you had in your book Your Turns, which is Your Turn,
which is very funny because it fits in with you
Turns just felt like serendipitous that you were here with
us today. But you have a quote from caricter Guard
that blew me away, and it felt like it's just
like a little just a little poke right in my soul,
and it was to dare is to lose one's footing. Momentarily,
(02:26):
to not dare is to lose oneself. Can you talk
about that a little bit? The impostor syndrome was coined
a few decades ago, and a lot of people say
they suffer from it feeling like a fraud. And there's
also a problem where people think they know how to
(02:46):
be a manager, but they can't figure out why they
can't lead. And they're both related to the same thing,
which is you can't do something important, something new, something
meaningful if you're sure it's going to work, because is
if you're sure it's going to work, it's not important, new,
or meaningful. If you're not sure it's going to work,
then of course you're an impostor because you're not sure.
(03:09):
And if you're not sure it's going to work, of
course you're afraid because it might not work. And as
a result, we walk around with this narrative in our
head that says, I better not do something that involves leadership,
doing something important, something new, something that matters, because if
I do that, I'll be afraid. So are you saying
that impostor syndrome is an okay thing to feel, because
(03:31):
I think a lot of women, particularly I got over
that impostor syndrome. And you can't get rid of impostor syndrome.
You can't get rid of fear. Fear is not the enemy.
The enemy is fear of fear. Fear of fear paralyzes us,
but fear tells us we're on the right track. If
there is no fear, you're not about to do something honest,
(03:51):
not about to be real, you're not about to be present.
You can avoid all of that by hiding. That's fear
of fear. But for me, if I'm not a little
bit afraid, then I know I'm not working hard enough.
Okay are you talking about feeling this way every day?
Every day? My god, Okay, every day we have to
be afraid least I am already. So for me, it's
(04:14):
not that it's I am the what you describe the
problem is that inertia that comes with that fear and
getting past. So it was one thing if it were
just like stopping being afraid, it's actually doing something else.
How do you well, we'd like because we believe that
(04:37):
make believe stories of movies and the media to imagine
that one day we wake up and we're Oprah. One
day we wake up and day exactly, no one does that.
What happens is we learn, you know, if you if
you talk to someone that finishes the marathon, You say,
(05:00):
did you get tired? And the answer is yes. You
can't run a marathon without getting tired. So what's the
difference between someone who runs a marathon and someone who
finishes a marathon? And the difference is the finisher figures
out where to put the tired. That's the secret, not
how do I not get tired. You don't go to
a trainer and say, please train me so I can
(05:20):
run a marathon and not get tired. You say, I
get tired. What should I do with it? Where do
I put it? Well, the same thing is true with fear,
or think about hunger. If you've got a five year
old in the house, when he or she gets hungry,
there's a tantrum until they're fed. But when we become
an adult, we can live with being hungry because in fact,
it makes dinner more enjoyable to eat when we're hungry. Well,
(05:43):
the same thing is true with this work. That we
don't do a giant leap. We don't say I used to,
you know, be a street sweeper. Now I run a
public corporation. It doesn't happen like that. What happens is
tiny little steps where each step is dealing with the
fear again, so I don't feel the overwhelming fear before
(06:06):
I publish a blog post that I used to because
it hasn't been fatal yet. But when I started and
I only had a hundred readers, it was really scary
because there were a hundred people in the world, so
I didn't know who were about to read what I wrote.
What if they didn't understand it? But if they posted
a nasty comment, what if they took it out of context?
So I would rewrite and rewrite and it got terrible.
So then I said, all right, look, there's only a
hundred people. It's gonna feel scary, but just right, just
(06:31):
merely be here it is. I made this, And then
the next morning, when I had to do it again,
I realized I didn't die yesterday. So I did it again.
It I did it again, and over time the fear
doesn't go away, but you realize the fear is not fatal.
Are you self critical? Do you sometimes like look back
on a post you did and think, oh my god,
(06:51):
what was I even saying there? Well, what I've trained
myself to do is something that a lot of people
are trained not to do, which is go out of
my way to be self congratulatory when I read my
old work. Not all the time, because there's lots of
stuff I would fix if I decided to fix it,
But when I do see something that's good, I said, Wow,
(07:12):
that sounds really good, Glad I wrote that, And we
forget to say that to ourselves, and because we're always
picking the other stuff. You know what, one thing that's
interesting about the way men and women approach clothing. Before
you go to a cocktail party or some stressful social situation,
you're just totally down on yourself. These shoelaces, I can't
(07:32):
believe I usual, And you go on and on and
on about it in your head for forty five minutes.
Then you go to the event, and once you go
on and onto your husband. If I surveyed every single
person who was there an hour afterwards and asked them
what you were wearing, no clue. There's only one person
who knows what you were wearing, and it's you. And
(07:54):
the same thing is true. You know, if you talked
to Liz Gilbert about Eat Pray Love, there are parts
of Eat Pray Love that she would change fixed. Just
if you talked to anybody who's read the book. They
don't even remember those things. So that's the challenge of
doing this creative work is we have to tell ourselves
a story that lets us do creative work. It's interesting
(08:15):
because when I was an editor of magazines, and that's
the transition I'm in right now where I'm looking for
my next new industry. But when I was first starting out,
I worked for this legendary editor and she had us
sit down and do a postmortem on every single issue,
where you know, we would really pick it apart. And
(08:35):
of course there it was in front of us, immutable, unchangeable,
and I did. I found it. When I became an
editor in chief myself was the first thing I did
away with. I just thought, what is the point? This
is the this is the most feel bad meeting of
the month, and we do twelve of them a year
and it's just well, so maybe so maybe that wasn't
(08:56):
such a bad instinct. Maybe it's a little bit of both.
So there's some they do in the Armed forces called
hot wash, which is an after action review. What happens
is after the exercises, they put the leaders in the
room and they do what this editor did, which is,
let's take it apart. But there are very specific rules,
and one of the rules is no personalities, no shame,
(09:19):
no you should have known better. It's if we had
watched somebody else do all these things, what would we
say to each other as if the person who did
these things isn't in the room. Because we're not here
to criticize the human for being a bad human. We're
here to say that action right, that the curning on
that headline, It doesn't matter who did the curning. The
(09:40):
curning on that headline, we can learn from right. And
so the way you respond, as opposed to react in
an after action meeting in a hot wash is thank you,
no explanations, no rationale. Know well what I was thinking
was because it's not about you. We're just talking about kearning,
We're just talking about truth movement. We're just talking about
(10:03):
something that happened. And if someone cares enough to say that,
the answer is thank you. And once we realize that
as professionals, that's what we need to do, we can
get better. And this is one of the things that
Nemon understands about surgery is that after surgery, if you
want to be a professional, you've got to say to
(10:25):
the people who were in the operating room that move
could have cost us. Let's not make that move again,
and the other person has to say thank you, because
it's about being a professional. I think a lot of us,
myself included to a certain extent, are actually better with
external criticism, even though we think in our heads that
(10:46):
that's what we fear, is like the nasty comment or
because genuine criticism is looking for improvement. Right when you
do that, either your postmortem or your hot wash, it's
because you care about something bigger and the project as
a whole, and it's never personal. So the external criticism
has a function. I think a lot of us recognize
(11:06):
that devastating and crippling is the internal crisis because that's
all personal, has nothing to do with a bigger picture,
and the performance is all I suck and that's the
bottom line. Oh my gosh, And you can just circle
the drain with yeah, So how do we deal with that?
Why does it exist? Why did we why did we
evolve to have that voice in our head? Because there's
(11:27):
it turns out there's an answer, and it's not an
access there's a really good reason why we have that
out our head. It turns out that if you're a
caveman sitting around the fire and you speak up and
you offend the chief, the chief is going to throw
you out of the tribe, and you're going to be
lunch for somebody tomorrow, and so you're not going to
(11:50):
have any grandchildren to pass your jeans onto. So we evolved,
like most wild animals, to listen to the chemical impulses
of our big DEALO, which is right back here, and
their brains them that wants safety and uh stability and
maybe revenge now in this but those are the three
things that focuses on. And Steve Pressfield has written a
(12:12):
magnificent book called The War of Art that everyone should read,
and what he in that book he names it resistance.
And the resistance is the front of our brain narrating
all of those chemicals. Because the front of your brain
knows you better than anyone on earth, and it knows
what to say to get you to not leave the house.
It knows what to say to get you to stand down,
(12:33):
because it wants to survive. And the problem is it's confused.
It thinks we're living in the year two hundred. We're
not living in the year and the year. The way
to survive is to leave the house. The way to
survive is to raise your hand, is to make a rucus,
is to do something interesting. But it feels to our
primordial brain like we're risking everything when we do that.
(12:56):
So if you want to be a professional, you can't
then not the resistance, but you can acknowledge the resistance,
say oh, thanks for the clue. I'm going to go
do the very thing you told me not to do.
And that use of it as a compass. If you
look at the great artists, the great musicians, the great politicians,
that's what they do. They use it as a compass.
Every time that voice in my head because it sounds
(13:18):
a very particular way, right, every time that voice shows up,
it's giving you a clue as to what the culture
actually wants for this. So it's kind of like the
hot wash thing. You thank that voice exactly, then you
move on, right, because you can't make it go away.
All right, We're going to take a quick break and
then we'll come right back, Lisa. We were just talking
(13:45):
about the critical voice in your head that stops you
from actually doing what you need to do. There are
also external forces that sometimes frees us in our tracks,
and you have a great analogy of how we can
get stuck sometimes in life doesn't turn out exactly the
way we planned it. Can you share that with us.
I've actually seen it in real life, but it was
(14:07):
first I saw it in a funny YouTube video that's
a commercial, and it's a bunch of fancy business executives
on an escalator going up to a meeting and the
escalator breaks and they're panicked and they take out their
cell phones and they're calling people back home. I'm trapped
on an escalator. What should I do? Well, of course,
you could just walk up the stairs. And I saw
(14:28):
this happening about a year after I saw the video
in Boston. These people were trapped on an escalator and
I just walked right past them. Use the risk of
walking on that dangerous escalator. Most of what we are
stuck on, if we live in this privilege developed world
(14:52):
that we live in, is not a matter of life
or death or survival. Most of what we're stuck in
is a narrative about it good escalator that we haven't
been picked, we haven't been recognized, we haven't been given permission,
we haven't been put into the spot where we have authority,
and so therefore we just wait where we whine about it.
(15:14):
Maybe maybe we even get off the escalator in the
wrong direction, when in fact, if you track who is
making an impact in our world, most of them are
just walking up the escalator. They weren't picked, they weren't authorized.
They simply showed up, not for themselves, but as generous actors.
They say I have something I want to share with
(15:34):
people that they will want, and it works and they
do it again, or it doesn't work and they do
it again, but they create this cycle of generosity. It's
a contribution. You don't get to change people against their will.
You get to turn on lights for people, open doors
for people, And it turns out if you do that
for a few people, you might get the chance to
do it for more people. You You know, we were
(15:57):
talking in the last segment about resistance and the that
inability to actually do the kind of things we know
that we want to do, and you just touched on
something I think that makes a huge difference is when
when it's all we're all invested in our ego and
it's all about us, there is much more of that
resistance that disappears. That's right when you are taking care
(16:20):
of someone else, when it's all when so I am
wretched at marketing myself. It's just not happening. I can
stomp from here to tomorrow from my husband. Um, but
it's not it's it's different when it's when it's not
about your ego. Yeah. I I try to avoid the
word ego because I think that there's plenty of good
things about ego. But let's set that well when it's
(16:41):
not selfishly about helping someone else, because you're giving, not taking.
So when you read about heroics, lifeguards who save people's life,
the thing that's always in common is they didn't think
about the water was cold, they didn't think about what
might happen. They just saved someone's life, no resistance, and
that ability to bring it to the people who wanted
(17:05):
is transformative. So if you if you track Bob Dylan's career,
a lot of the stories in his autobiography probably aren't true,
but if you look at the decisions he made after
his motorcycle accident and stuff, he said to his promoter,
I'm going on this tour, I want you to book
me in the same city three years in a row,
(17:26):
and the promoter said, why would you do that. That's
just you got to go to people who haven't heard
from you in a while. Now I want to go
for three years in a row. And the reason is
the first year, a lot of the people who are
coming hearing hoping I'll play acoustic hits for them will
be disappointed. The second year, the people who weren't disappointed
will come back. It is the third year that they
(17:48):
will bring their friends, and then I will have the
audience I want to serve. And so he was willing
to listen to his ego to become the musician he
wanted to become on behalf of the people who would
ultimately be served, even if his reception at concert number
one kind of off stage and getting booed off stage
(18:09):
is one of the hallmarks of a great contributor. The
monkeys never got booed off stage. You don't want the monkey,
but the monkey. Then I would take Daydream of Believer
any day theme song. I like it. If you're out there,
I apology. So, you know, a lot of this comes
(18:31):
back to this concept that you talk about about how
we fear freedom. You know, we like to say that
that is what we desperately crave and it's going to
be so great. And you know this is we the
confines of our life are the things that are keeping
us from from being what we could be if only
we were afraid. But you say, actually, we're sort of petrified.
(18:54):
People hate it. People hate it because it means you
have to make a choice. If you have to make
a choice, it means you're responsible. And if you're responsible,
it means you might get blamed. If you get blamed,
you might die. And so when we say that, so
you have freedom, they go, I might die. Is that
that primitive part of the Exactly, it's the same thing
(19:15):
that puts us on alert when we see we have
a text from our boss. Right when you get a
text from your boss, and oh good, they saw how
good I was. And now it's like, oh my god,
they found out I'm a fraud. And so, yes, we
talk about how much we value freedom, but go look
at the placement office at college and all the kids
are lined up to get a job where they got picked.
(19:35):
And look at how hard it is to take a
gap year in the United States compared to saying I'm
going straight to college. Look at all the You know,
when I was running my startup years ago, we struggled
to get great employees. And I was a meeting with
a guy at Disney and he had a hundred and
fifty resumes on his desk for one job. It was
(19:57):
like a hundred and fifty people applying for a not
very good job Disney, and I couldn't even get three
people to apply for the company. That was going like crazy,
because getting a great job at Disney apparently a great job.
You've given up freedom. But in exchange, you've gotten the
comfort of saying, I'm in a slot. It's not my fault.
The corporation is in charge, the brand is in charge.
(20:18):
I'm just doing my job that feels really safe to people.
And what the Internet has done, among many other things,
is given everybody these new degrees of freedom that you know,
I started blogging years ago, but you can still start
now and it's free. Every single day. You could do it,
and almost no one does because no one picked you,
(20:39):
no one hired you. You have to pick yourself. But
you also have other responsibilities, right if you have to
pay off student loans. I mean, there are logical reasons
not to start a blog. Also you know, it's harder
to monetize now you have to pursue the clutter. There
are a lot of all of those good, sensible reasons
not to like give up your job at Disney and
(20:59):
start a well. I need to distinguish a few things here.
First of all, the what we're what we've seen in
the last ten years is sort of a ProAm revolution,
which is a lot of people are making an impact
with something that used to be a hobby. And the
passionate way that you can write or edit or create
(21:20):
is a hobby. Right. No one got paid to make
music in eighteen fifty and people aren't going to get
paid to make music going forward the way they used to.
Van Morrison has left the building. It's not gonna be
like that. But if you're not watching any TV and
you're not spending any time on Facebook, then I have
sympathy for the fact that you don't have any time.
But the average person in this country spends seven hours
(21:42):
a day watching TV or using social media. That's seven
hours a day they could be doing something generous instead
of feeding the resistance in their head. And in those
seven hours, if you could, for example, organize twenty entrepreneurs
in your town, twenty entrepreneurs who feel isolated, if you
could be the organ an either of them for free,
for fun once a week, coming together, organizing a private
(22:04):
Facebook group for them, figuring out how to help this
group of twenty we've together a community. You'll make a
living doing that one day, maybe not tomorrow, but one
day that partly because it's a generous it's you're doing
it to weave, you're doing it to create possibility. But
(22:24):
one day soon one of those twenty people, she's going
to say to you, do you want to be my
chief of staff? She's going to say to you, this
is because you've proven that you are a member of
this group, this tribe, right or moving sideways degrees? What
else in your physical community needs doing. Let's say you're
(22:45):
a real estate broker. There's two million real estate brokers
in the United States. Every time property values go up,
there's more of them, and so it's really difficult to
make a good living because as soon as you start
making a good living, more competition. Well, what if you
bent a third of your time as a real estate
broker not trying to hustle somebody into giving you a
(23:05):
listing but actually becoming the volunteer mayor of your community,
not an elected mayor, but the person who has the
girl scouts twice a week in the office because you
have extra room, the person who's organizing this, and the
person is organizing this not because you hope that you'll
get a listing, but because you can, because if you
did that, you actually would get listings. But that's not
(23:27):
why you're doing it. You're doing it because you can.
And so my argument isn't that people should have a blog.
My argument is we should reconsider the story we're telling
ourselves about money, about sufficiency, about abundance, about scarcity, and
realize that what's really missing here is brave, generous people
(23:48):
who are willing to dance with the fear to do
work that matters. And if you become one of those people,
even if you don't get paid for it, you'll get
paid for it. And so, yeah, you should keep your
day job. I'm not telling you to lose your house.
I'm just saying we shouldn't fall into the seduction that
the industrial economy sold us that we have to do
that or else we're a failure. Because I guess what,
(24:12):
people lost their jobs at Ford Motor Company one day
a few years ago. Wasn't their fault. It's just that
assembly line didn't work anymore. So all those obedient people
got punished, and I think that's a shame. Yeah, you know,
there's also a word missing from what you just described,
which is it's it's doing what you love. It's doing
things that nourish you and and you know, in the moment,
(24:36):
just make you feel. I think that's what I'm mad
when he says work that matters. I think part of
what mattering isn't just like you know, putting out for
as fires. It's also something. I think that's part of
mattering is that you love it. Yeah right, I would
think it definitely is. And loving what you do is
just as good as doing what you love. Oh wow, Okay,
(24:57):
let's unpack that for a second yet, because that is profound.
It's it's true, and it's not always easy. None of
this is easy. Did I say once it was easy?
And that's actually one of my favorite things about you
is that you never make any of these steps sound
like they're simple or easy, or if you just did this,
(25:19):
doors with swing might open. It's it's never easy with you,
it would be a lot easier to sell stuff if
I said it was easy, but I'm not interesting. Yeah,
do you have any tips for shifting the way we
see what we do so that we can start loving it.
So in case you're sitting in this room going, oh,
I have to sit next to Lisa again. I know.
(25:42):
So we were supposed to tell her that, let's attend
that she's like really bored, how does she shift it?
Or someone listening out there isn't a job that really
isn't challenging them. How do they learn to love it
if they can't love what they do. One of our
enemies is entitlement. And if you had offered your job,
(26:02):
whatever your job is, if you're listening to this to
someone in N seven with the pay you get in,
the freedom you get in, the leverage you get in,
the free snacks you get, they would like knock you
over on their way to go get that job. Or
if you went to Cabira um, where I've been lucky
enough to visit, and offered somebody in Cabarra your job,
(26:23):
they would knock you over to get it too. Um.
In fact, the only person who hates your job as
much as you do, right, now is pretty much you
because you've got this whole narrative in your head about
you're entitled to more respect, more dignity, more leverage, more
pay more of this, more of this um. So part
of undoing this is beginning by creating a cycle of
(26:46):
reminding yourself and reminding your peers just how much freedom
and leverage you actually have. I get your boss is
a jerk and that he's mean to you, and there
for half an hour a day he's undercutting your work. Okay, fine,
we'd like to pick step, But what about the other
eight hours or nine hours a day when you actually
have all of this freedom to decide what you're going
(27:07):
to do next, whether you leave there or not. That
that's a choice on your part. There are a lot
of people the world who don't have that choice. So
by coming back to that again and again, we start
to build this foundation. But then we get back to
the fear and the fear of fear of thing, which
is this. It's super safe to say I don't have
the freedom to quit my job because now you don't
(27:29):
have to decide a new job. It's been done to you,
it's not your responsibility, and it's super easy to deal
with the frustration and grind of what you have now
compared to the fear that you have to dance with well,
what would happen next? So an example, there are people
who work it. I don't even have to tell you
(27:51):
the name of any particular company where people are super
happy with their job, and any percent of people hate it,
but it's the same job, so clearly their narrative that's
kicking in. Some of those people who love it are
doing things like starting a lunch book club. Once a
week over lunch, they sit with other people and they
read a book together and they talk about it. Some
(28:12):
of those people are figuring out how to be generous
within the organization, so they are seen as Lynchpin's indispensables
who will be the last to get thrown out because
the place can't run without them. The magic of that
is if you tell yourself the right story, it's also
a better job than the person who's just doing the minimum.
So again we're entering this post industrial world. In the
(28:35):
industrial world in Manchester, England, in many many people were
alcoholics because shifting from farm work to being in a city,
dirty factory working by candlelight for twelve hours a day
was so stressful. They didn't have coffee carts like we
have here. They had gin carts, people going up in
(28:55):
down street with jin just so you could survive the day.
And that industrial mindset, it still exists. There's still too
many people who have to, you know, shovel coal or
or do exactly what they're told of, backbreaking work for
minimum wage. But if you're not one of those people,
you have way more freedom than you think. And if
you embrace that freedom and figure out, even for ten
(29:18):
minutes a day, how to do something that's generous, that's
a contribution that matters that they would miss if you
didn't do it, I think your day gets better, not worse.
And so it's again a gradual process, not a dramatic one.
You don't walk in and slap down your badge and quit.
You become a different kind of person, the kind of
(29:38):
person who's seen as a contribution. Little steps, little steps,
all right, we'll return to that in just a minute.
Thinks I wanted to touch on the idea of certainty.
(29:58):
You mentioned it early. You're on, but I think part
of why we stay small and we don't make the
changes you're talking about in work um, being more generous,
being more active, is because of that reptilian part of
our brain that craves certainty, because if uncertainty equals death,
(30:21):
as you mentioned, why do you insist that we embrace uncertainty. Well,
if you don't want to, that's fine, it's totally fine.
I just don't think we say, I just don't think
you should whine about it. Right, And each comes with
a different bundle of pluses and minuses, And it is
(30:44):
entirely possible to live a super safe life as seen
from the outside, where there is more certainty and less
chances you're going to one start YELP review, But in
exchange it's sort of dull. You're not going to get
the treats and the surprises and the contributions that somebody
(31:05):
who's doing a different kind of work can do. And
so pick they go together, and so the life of
somebody who is creating things worth talking about, creating things
that make change happen. You get the thrill of the
contribution you just made, the thrill of turning on the
lights for somebody, the thrill of knowing that you made
(31:27):
a difference. But in exchange you have to deal with
dancing with the fear that comes with that. And there
you know, it's when you listen to I don't listen
to sports radio, but I'm guessing on sports radio the
kinds of people that they're interviewing sports stars, they don't
ask them. Yeah, but how could I be a famous
sports star without getting sore? How can I be a
(31:49):
favorite sports star without the training, without the bruises? You
can't they go together? Same deal? Yeah? All right, So
I'm I'm getting the sense that you are very careful
with how you spend your time and you're kind of
down on Facebook, sucking hours out of our day, television,
sports radio for you. Correct, So it sounds like you
(32:09):
are pretty good about time. It's different things good, Okay,
did it take you a while to get there? A
bunch of years ago, I realized I read an Amazon
review of one of my books and it ruined my day.
And I said, wait a minute, I'm never going to
write this book again. So this review isn't helping me.
And so I stopped, and I haven't read an Amazon
(32:31):
review since then, not one. And then I was in
a meeting and I was like, yeah, I'm squircheting around here.
Why are we having a meeting? So I don't go
to meetings. And I got rid of my television after Steinfeld.
One after year, we don't have a television, um, and
I don't use Facebook or Twitter. Ah, So I have
(32:52):
like eight three hours a day and which writes seventeen
bucks and me every single day of time to just
do nothing thing because doing nothing is one of the
ways I noticed things, and noticing things is how we
do my word, do you do you recommend that to people?
I mean, should we all just decide, like, these are
seven things I'm going to say no to because they're
just it's ridiculous. How much of my time they rob
(33:14):
Is it helping? That's the question. But there is I
feel like there are these forces out there that are like,
and you got to do this, and of course, and
you got to promote it and and it's so it's
a little bit difficult to say no to those well,
but the discipline keeps us honest. So here you are
launching this important podcast and people are going to say
(33:36):
you need plenty of reviews on the iTunes store, and
they're gonna say you need to build a Facebook page
and you need to have a big following. Okay, but
let's say you weren't allowed to have a Facebook page.
What would you do instead? Oh? Right, let's say you
weren't allowed to keep asking people to post reviews on iTunes?
What would you do instead? So, since I have all
(33:56):
these rules that I don't spam people that don't hype stuff,
don't you know whose Facebook to manipulate people? Did you
change the world to make sure that people did less
of that? And so I have to say this is
so what will I do instead? Right? Differently, I'll interact
with people differently, I'll hire a different group of people
and be a much smaller entity. I run a studio
and not a company, right, And so these choices are
(34:20):
boundaries that let you get back to work. And I
view the work I do as a privilege. I don't
do it because I have to do it because I
want to. It's my generous act that I would like
to help people. So I'm going to do that. I'd
like to be a professional about it. And if the
hour you want me to spend in this meeting could
be spent with me reading the memo you wrote for
(34:41):
seven minutes and then spending fifty three minutes doing something
else because I wasn't in the meeting, I think that's
a better trade. So that it comes back to does
it help? And then when I think of the work,
it's who's it for? And what's it for? This thing
I'm building, this podcast I'm going on or the podcast
I run at Kimbo? Who's it for? If it's not
for you, I don't care whether you like it or not,
(35:02):
because I didn't make it for you. I made it
for her, and what's it for? Didn't make the change
I seek to make. If it didn't make the change,
can I do it better? Or should I stop? But
these are the decisions that designers make whatever they're designing.
And if you're designing a life that's fueling a narrative
that making you feel insufficient and dealing with scarcity or
(35:25):
beating yourself up, then why don't you build a different life?
So it's shifting your expectations. There were the reasons, your
reasons for doing what you're doing. So if you're doing
it for the most likes or to get the most
advertising dollars, you will never be satisfied because someone's always
gonna more likes and be getting more money. But if
you're doing it to touch the audience that you do
(35:46):
have in a positive way and to grow yourself. Then
you'll always have fun no matter how many stars you have.
Exactly that's exactly right. And so when we think about
when we're going to do something that feels dangerous, that
feels risky, there's the fear again. So if we get
(36:08):
past the fear of fear, we say, oh, here's the fear.
Why am I afraid? And we ask ourselves the question,
who's it four? What's it for? Is this going to
make things better? The answer is yes. We say, come along, fear,
this was the right thing to do. The answer is no.
You say thank you, fear. You pointed out I was
being inconsistent. I'm not going to do that. But it
gives us a compass, and a compass is worth a
(36:29):
hundred times more than a map. The compass, I think
sets you in the right place, points you in the
right direction. But it's your discipline that allows you to
put one foot in front of the other and make
the movement towards that. We haven't really touched on discipline
in a meaningful way. You've talked about it, but I
have a more did it Um, is this is this
(36:52):
how you've been forever? Is this just a set thing? Well,
there are certain things that I've always been very undisciplined about,
and I don't believe that. First I went through four
years of college with one notebook because I didn't have
the discipline to take notes, and I don't If I
don't remember the concept, it's gone. No patients for bullet
(37:15):
points and things like that. Um. So I'm disciplined about,
you know this the structure of what I'm going to
eat right and the next thing with the next work
I will do. But I'm my desk is a mess,
and I'm undisciplined about He'll create something and then not
work on it when the work itself demands that I
(37:35):
spend more time bringing it into the world. So I'm
not perfect or shiny or anything that I'm a mess
in the way most people are a mess. The difference
is that I've chosen certain places to be disciplined. And
so let me talk about school for a minute, because
I think school is responsible for most of this. We
invented school for a very specific reason. We know who
(37:56):
invented it and how it was invented. Was invented? Uh,
in the late eight hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, so
that factories would have enough compliant workers, people who would
do they what they were told. And the other side
effect is it would create social stress so that teenagers
would buy more stuff because the factories of the time,
we're worried that because the kid had two pairs of pants,
(38:19):
two pairs of shoes, that's all they had. With factories
figuring out how to make stuff, that was a problem.
So we had to create consumer culture and we had
to create compliance culture. So school fuels both of those things.
And so I run this online workshop called the Alt
n b A and it's a thirty day intensive. We've
got people in forty six countries with coaches. And one
(38:41):
of the questions that people ask is will this beyond
the test? And we say there is no test, we're
not accredited, there are no grades, and you're just showing
up for you. That freaks a lot of people. Sure,
a lot of people drop out, right, then yeah, they
don't sign up, right, We have dropped our way close
to zero because we tell all everybody in advance. But
(39:02):
once you realize that you have that freedom, some people
embrace it and say, wow, this is going to teach
me an enormous amount about how to discipline my life,
because it's this intensive three hour day thing while you're
your job for a month, and people get through it,
and then all of a sudden you can't bluff anymore
because now you say, wow, I did that. It's like
(39:23):
monning a marathon. I could do it again if I
had to. So your output goes up because you've learned
to be professionally disciplined at work without there being a grade,
without there being a boss. But for most people who
grew up a school and then grew up with a boss,
as soon as you take that away, they don't know
what to do. And so part of the genius in
(39:44):
the evil genius quotation marks of Facebook and Twitter is
it Facebook and Twitter give you a grade every day,
and so everyone's struggling to get an a because you
can't keep checking. Maybe I got a few more likestre exactly,
And so you know, when I do it Facebook Live,
I do interviews there. They are pretty cool. You're supposed
(40:06):
to see the little things on the screen, all the
people commenting, so that, like in a home shopping way,
you could change what you're saying to get more of.
So we turned the screen away so I can't see that,
because if I saw it, I'd wanted to go up
because I'd like to get an A, and I do
better work without it. The New York Times Bestseller list.
I know how to game it. I've written about how
(40:27):
it's corrupt, so I refused to look at the list.
I refused to want to be on the list because
I know if I wanted to be on the list,
I know how I get an A, and I would
do stuff to get an A, which isn't why I'm
doing my work. So by forcing myself to just not
even have it on the table, I'm way less likely
to be corrupted by it. Mm hmm. That is what
we need to teach our kids in schools apart then,
(40:51):
because are the only way our system works, and we
have a consumption economy and we need a compliant work
for so you're blowing up a system. I'm trying very hard.
I had a friend who was fighting school. His son
was fighting school really hard, and they were fairly privileged
and could afford to work things out, and instead of
(41:15):
figuring out how to pander to him, they said, fine,
take a year off you have to go to this
office every day and do something. And they rented him
a little cube in place that was safe, and the
kid had to go to work every day from nine
o'clock to three o'clock and do something. And within a
day or two the kid figures out, I don't want
to be bored. So he's editing Wikipedia articles and he's
(41:38):
building this, and he's doing this, and he learned more
in a year. And there's plenty of books about how
this is true for almost everybody. Then he would have
learned in school. He just didn't learn the same thing.
He doesn't know what year. The War of eighteen twelve
is fine, you can look it up. But what happens
is if you say to a kid it's better to
explore safely, it's better to dance with your year, then
(42:00):
it is to comply with the teacher. That's what they're
going to grow up to do. Isn't that what we want? Yes? Okay,
So that gets to something you say in your book,
which I loved and really made me perck up my ears.
You said, go get naked. Well, if we're gonna make
a ruckus, the answer is not false vulnerability. There's vulnerability
theater all over the Internet, where we spew our internal
(42:24):
drama and lots of people. It's a great way to
create a crowd, but it's not a great way to
create a difference. It's not a great way to do
anything that matters. Because the people were watching our authentic
meltdown are just spectators. We don't need more of this.
What we need to do is be able to have
(42:44):
the guts to say here, I made this, and if
someone says I don't like it, then we say it's
not for you, and we can offer to someone else.
And if enough people don't like it, then it wasn't
any good. Make something else. But if it does work
for some people, make stuff for them, because the fact
that you can reach a billion people doesn't mean you
(43:06):
should try to please a billion people. One of the
best expressions on the Internet has shunned the nonbelievers. When
you find the nonbelievers, don't try to persuade them that
they're wrong. Just go serve somebody else, because you have
something to offer, something to contribute, And if we can
bring that sense of possibility and abundance to other people,
we might get some of it back, and then we
(43:27):
ratchet up instead of the race to the bottom, because
the problem with the race to the bottom is you
might win. And this is why your blog is one
of the most popular. I could sit here all day
with the two of you. This podcast is going to
rock like you're off to just such off to the
racist thank you for generous and to our listeners. If
(43:47):
you want more of Seth than I think we all
just need more of Seth all the time. Check out
a book that we read specifically for this podcast called
What to Do When It's Your Turn? Because it's always
your turn? Is the sub is the subtimes I'm publishing myself,
it's a your turn dot L I n K. There
you go. And also, um, of course good his blog.
Just just start typing stuff going in there and you'll
(44:09):
get right there. And if you want to connect with us,
you can go to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram at You
Turns podcast. Let us know how you're contributing, how you're changing,
how you're becoming fearless. Until next time, ye
Road to Somewhere News
Hosts And Creators
Lisa Oz
Jill Herzig
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