Why You've Been Lied to About Where to Put Your Time, Energy, & Focus | Seth Godin on Impact Th

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. I'm here with the legend Seth Godin. Seth, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for inviting me. The last interview is still with me. You worked so hard and prepared so deeply. It was fun. Incredible man. Well, I'm honored by that and I'm very excited to talk about the new book today. I worked just as hard on this one and I think this book is incredibly important for anyone who wants to do something profound with their life and when I first did it. In researching you for the latest episode, I came across an idea that's something I repeat to myself, it's something I mention to people all the

time

, and it seems to be the central theme of this book, which is show me

your

bad writing. , so please anyone who says: you know I can't write or that I'm a bad writer, whatever it is, that question is so deep that what you see as a central idea behind the practice or is it something else, well, The practice involves several things all intertwined, one of them. it's definitely show me

your

bad video show me your bad public speaking show me your bad advice show me your bed therapy show me your bad engineering designs because we have

been

trained to stick to the result and there is a belief that effort is the process practice doesn't matter and if the result is not going to be great, don't even bother, but the only way to get great results is to show up with this practice and get better, so that's one of the key things in the second one.

One is that we can get out of our own heads by stopping this mentality of pressuring people for more than our fair share of attention and instead approach it generously because the purpose of submitting work is not so you can get ahead. . to submit work is to make things better, so we'll definitely get to the principle of generosity that appears a lot in the book, but there was another concept that also appears a lot that I think is important in framing the book. I wrote it and what the end result will be and that is the idea of ​​us being brainwashed, how exactly have we

been

brainwashed?

So let's say I had a secret committee and I came to the government of the United States or any

where

in the West in 1850 and I said this is what I want to do I want to spend over a billion dollars a year in

time

and money I want every child from age five spend six to eight hours a day with me for 10 to 15 years straight and then I want to incorporate the cultural mindset of consumption and compliance. Well, no one would accept that plan and that's exactly what we did. When you and I spoke previously, we talked about the education versus learning mentality, but the brainwashing runs very deep. because the industrial system needs us to acquire status by looking for gears in its system because the factories are so efficient that they keep making more things and what I am trying to reflect on people is that you can choose yourself and you can show up and do work that improves the things that you're proud of and you don't need anyone's permission now this is a period of pretty profound disruption and I'm curious if that was the reason you wrote this book now or it was a long time coming. in development before all this came along, yes, I've been working directly on this book for three years, so I think it's been a moment of disruption in our culture for at least 20.

The Internet did some incredible things and many of us were there at the beginning he forgot to

focus

on the things that weren't going to be so surprising and one of the things he did was give everyone a microphone and that's good because voices that weren't heard before weren't heard before and now they are. It helped

focus

a long-awaited lens on racial injustice, for example, but the other problem was that it created these noise chambers

where

you moved forward and the media companies moved forward by dividing us by creating breaking news that isn't breaking news. and that is not news. calling people who are not friends friends and hitting like who are not, so we cannot discount how hard the media worked against all our peace of mind and well-being for the last 15 or 20 years and it took a toll and we are feeling that toll in politics, but we also feel that toll deep in our soul, so a few years ago I decided to do a workshop for creatives and it was a full year as if I could normally do a workshop. in a few weeks because it's based on years of my life, but this was a year of really digging deep to understand how you can teach someone to be a creative professional to do important work and then we did the workshop for 500 people and it changed lives. deeply and as I watched people engage in that work, I said I have no choice, even though it involves so much effort, I have to make a book, so what is it about all of that that is changing so profoundly for people?

Is there a key idea? or a key idea that unlocks something for someone, it seems really trivial, it seems like inside the creator workshop people wrote every day for 100 days without missing a day and the writing is not the point, none of these people are professional writers, Hey. One person who was in the workshop just got a major record deal with a famous record label because he made his lyrics, he made his music, he shared it and the average person gave and received 500 comments a month and I was asking people who It's not part of something like that, when was the last time you gave and received 500 useful comments?

We're not supposed to do that at work, we're not supposed to do that with friends, where are we supposed to do that? It turns out that if you can make a circle of five people you can do it among them. This practice says I don't have to be in the mood, it's my job and I don't have to be motivated and I don't have to have the muse talk to me, I just do this work, I cut the wood. I carry the water and then maybe it resonates with people or if I don't learn something and do it again there is a quote from the book I wrote Note that I want to read verbatim what it talks about exactly what you are talking about now, which is that practice does not It is the means to obtain the result, practice is the result, because practice is all we can control.

That to me is one of the most profound takeaways from the book, for sure, and then in terms of those streaks, being consistent, trying hard, and doing these things over and over again is exactly what I've seen in my own life, so That's one of the ideas I always have. trying to communicate to people is not worrying about whether you were born this way or that, it is understanding that the human animal is the ultimate adaptation machine that, as a species, we have literally chosen the improvement strategy of being able to learn something, so that instead of coming out fully prepared, we come out with the ability to be prepared, so to speak, you know, as you go down the path of something, what I want to know and what you cover so interestingly in the book is how Do you go from doing something blindly to doing something with intention?

So intention design, thinking, intentional action, if it's a hobby, do it, it's for you, if it's work, ultimately it's for other people, ultimately it's to cause change to happen if you're not. causing. a change so I'm not sure why you're taking our time but if you're looking to make a change in the world you have to ask three simple questions who is it for who specifically am I looking to change who specifically am I building this What is it for? Can I say what this does and what change I'm looking to make that's related to what it's for?

If I can't say it then I'm just ranting, but if I can be very clear, it's for the people. who believe this is for the people who want this is for the people who are aligned with this and after you engage with my work you will feel differently or act differently, that is the creator's job and we don't mean any of those things. things because it puts us on the spot and being on the spot feels uncomfortable and that's why we run away, but I think being on the spot is the best place to be. Let's talk more about that in the book you give an example.

I had never heard of this ancient Turkish custom of putting a loaf of bread on the hook before, which then led me to look up the etymology of the phrase on the hook and it came from there and I thought the whole idea was very interesting if you can explain to us that Turkish idea of ​​putting a loaf of bread on the hook, which I think is related to their notion of generosity and how that influences art. Let's start there instead of asking eight questions at once, so I guess it's still true. I haven't been to Türkiye in a few years.

If you go to a local bakery and you can afford it, you buy two loaves of bread instead of one and tell the person behind the counter to put that one on the hook and then someone else. whoever is hungry goes by the bakery and says, "see anything on the hook" and they take a loaf of bread, buy one, give another and it's just beautiful in the sense that you know that bread is the sustenance of life, It doesn't cost much to pay for it. go ahead, but that made me think of the phrase on the hook because we usually associate it with fish and fish don't like to be on the hook and it's not a generous act for a fish to be on the hook, it's selfless, but I'm not .

I'm sure the fish will live another day, so I like the idea of ​​putting your work on the hook and saying here, I made this here, here this and it may not be for you, but I made this and that approach allows you I shift gears please judge me please pay me please reward me to oh I had the ability to knit something and I did it here and most of us want to be generous and getting out of our own way is very important so I want to Move on a little , I think there's something really profound in that for the person who is experiencing quote-unquote writer's block and who doesn't have bad writing to start to get out of their internal focus toward this concept that you have of generosity. the story you tell in the book and I don't know if I can't remember if you told this intentionally for this reason, but when you first went fly fishing you didn't want to hook, which I thought was completely fascinating, so you practiced all the things related to it. with fly fishing, but you intentionally did not want to catch a fish, what at the time made that act still useful?

Okay, so let's state for a moment that fly fishing is not generous with the fish and that, um, the other people I was with were throwing the fish back, so we weren't trying to feed our families. We were on this river in Wyoming looking to commune with nature and engage in a process of practice to be aware of what we were doing and I knew instinctively that if there was a hook on that fly, I was going to use all my powers of telekinesis to force the fish to take my bait, that I would be measuring the quality and goodness of my work based on whether a uh, primordial being decided to take the bait and I said that's going to totally get me out of my head, I don't want the fish to be part of my day, that's not why I'm here and it turned out in a few minutes and for several hours afterwards I was casting better than almost anyone on the team because I was just casting I wasn't connected to the result and then there's a paradox here because on the one hand we only do the work to make things happen, we only do the work with this generous mentality, but we must do the work with a practice that ignores the guarantee that it will work and we go back to money laundering. brain from a few minutes ago if you ever said to a teacher or yourself will this be on the exam?

You have revealed education, will this be in the exam? says next I'll pay attention and learn this for a while if you promise to give me one that's the trade off, that's not how you learned to ride a bike, that's not how you learned to do anything you really care about, you did those other ones things because you could and then you enjoyed the benefits thereafter, not in some transaction, so practice says that I. I try to make things better for the people I care about, but the only way to do that is not to imagine that they are looking over my shoulder at all times, but to commit to this work now so that you can enter into the idea of ​​generosity. and you start focusing on creating real art that changes people and has this almost interactive approach.

I meet a lot of people and then they get into it, so how can I charge for this? So how do you begin to integrate this into a real life where people have to feed their families and at some point you need a fish, whether it's a literal fish or not, on the hook, how do people reconcile those two ideas? Yeah, so commerce has to show up in our Western culture and I guess I would start with this, please don't quit your day job today just because you heard us talk. You can start with your side hustle.

You can start with your practice because it may take a while to get to the point where you have created something so peculiar. particular, unique and remarkable that people will eagerly pay for it and if you need to paint your masterpiece in the next hour I don't know how to help you, so that's the first place I start, it'syou might have to be a cog in the system for a little bit longer as you develop confidence as you develop a reputation as you develop permission to talk to your followers so, you know, we've been talking about art, art , so we'll start with that.

Abby Ryan Abby Ryan decided I don't know 10 or 15 years ago to paint an oil painting every day and when you say that out loud you realize that's quite unusual and then she started videotaping her work while she was doing it and she started to generously teach people how to do it. do it and over time as he improved and his reputation improved his sales on eBay went from oh this painting was a hundred dollars, man, this painting is eight hundred dollars, but you're making 800 every day doing an oil painting in an hour and Media, that's a job, right? and then it appeared in oprah magazine and then people buy it not because they saw abby painting it but because she's actually really good at it, okay, but it all started with the germ of an idea: i can connect people with my practice, but let's go totally in a different direction, let's say you're a real estate broker, most real estate brokers are going crazy, rightly, because Zillow makes it clear that we don't need them, right, you can see all the houses for sale in Vermont at any time you want from your safety. of their Covid-free living room, so why are they paying them six percent of eight hundred thousand dollars?

This is a problem, except for some real estate agents who know everyone in town, who coach the little league team, who run this organization, who have people who have meetings. in their office all the time they have a point of view and they only sell and buy in a very particular place, whether for a community or according to geography, that person is worth more than what they charge because that person is contributing a level of humanity that is not in the playbook they can't be easily replaced, so one of the things I mentioned in the book is that the origin of the word peculiar and peculiar comes from the Latin for cattle and it means private property, you own the cattle, peculiar means that you are in and of yourself, all the systems in our life push us not to do that, you are a super driver, well, you better be invisible, all their rules are: you can't be a peculiar super driver in particular, you have have to be the standard, so my advice is don't Don't be a super driver, find out what you can do, instead, where you really benefit from being you.

You have a quote in the book and now I'm forgetting who it came from, but it was like the genius was the person who could be the most true. who they are and I found it really interesting and I got into this concept that you talk a lot about in the book and I would love to get your real-time explanation of the alternative title of the book before you end up deciding. In that era it was like being yourself or the power, what was it, trust yourself, trust yourself, so what is this? You end up separating the word I in the book, um, so you put you and I, why what is the distinction, what is the power of I, what?

It was that whole idea, trust yourself when you talk to yourself, who's talking and who's listening properly, this is a fascinating thing that we don't examine very often, someone's talking and someone's listening, and it's still you, so I'm arguing that the voice verbal, fearful, docile, sometimes scared, it is the frontal cortex, the part of our brain that is not particularly good at creativity and then the one that listens, the one that is being closed off, the one that says it wants to be authentic, is the other than one who is willing to push us forward and what I'm saying is that we are a dance of both.

Trusting yourself doesn't mean you just do whatever you feel like and you're guaranteed it will work, it probably won't. You need to hear that voice more often and if you can develop a practice that allows that voice to appear in a way that it can in your work, your life will improve and you can start today if you want to be a runner, you don't. plan a lot, you don't get the runners world magazine and you change your shoes and you sign up for this and you sign up for that if you want to be a runner, you go out and run, it doesn't matter how far and you do it again tomorrow and if you do it for 30 days in a row you are a runner and if you keep doing it you will improve that is the practice the practice says that I am committing to this method and that I am going to have streaks whatever form they take and one day I will improve at this and when I do I will be able to serve people .

I hope to change one of the most interesting things about the book. I think this is so profound. It's this idea that if you want to change your story if you want to change your own narrative if you want to start shaping your identity you first change your behaviors and not the other way around um why is that like that? How did you get to that? That's pretty counterintuitive. It's true and there is a lot of brain science that addresses this. It has to do with the origin of our narrative. What we do is look at the world around us and then make up a story about it, not the other way around. that uh dan dennett, the great philosophy professor at tufts, has shown that dreams happen the moment we wake up, that throughout the night there is electrical activity in our brain, but it's not until we wake up that we try to make sense of it. , That is interesting.

I've never heard that before, yeah, it's cool and it makes a lot of sense how they showed it was complicated, but it makes a lot of sense to me because the storytelling part is our conscious brain and if you're someone who always goes out of their way to open doors to other people and help them, then you'll start telling yourself a story that that's the kind of behavior you admire and not the other way around, so you just choose a behavior if you want to be a writer, if you want to be a runner, run that will do it. change the way you think about yourself and your work, you talk about passion as a choice, how is that true?

And if it is, how do we make the right decision? So this is a little controversial because a lot of people want to do it. They find their passion they say how I found my calling and I point out that there are plumbers who believe they have found their calling and there are plumbers who wish they could sing opera and there are opera singers who believe they have found their calling and there are other opera singers who think it is just a routine, it turns out it has nothing to do with the profession, it has to do with our narrative about the profession, so to your previous point, doing the work changes our story about the work and I think that's the case.

It is much more reliable and much easier to love what you do than to do what you love. Making the decision to love what you do means that whatever you do, you can be in love and you know I'm very lucky not to. I don't have to dig ditches for a living or work in a toxic waste dump. I'm very grateful for that, but there are also a lot of people who, if you tell them you have to write a free blog post every day, 7,500 times a day. a row I would say it's horrible to me, I love it and that was just a choice, I decided I would love to do it, okay, so we're in that moment, we're Gary Goldman, we know what we're trying to do, what you're talking about.

There's a lot about the book, I think it's really important, how we can improve, how we move down that path, in my experience, the best creators have learned to see, they haven't learned to see using one of those digital ones, please. stay on the phone after this call and rate our service type of survey they learn to see because they understand the genre because they develop good taste good taste is knowing what your audience wants 10 minutes before doing it diane von furstenberg burst onto the scene with her wrap dress in the 1970s revolutionized a corner of women's fashion, how did you know?

And I have told you about this. She doesn't speak at all. She can't explain how she knew that she has nothing, but she knew it because she learned to see. she put herself out there enough she developed pattern matching skills and domain knowledge is so important gender is so important it's not generic it's gender what does this remind us of? what it rhymes with when I play the emotion you are looking for what other emotions are next To do this we develop these things some people are very lucky, they are lucky early and some people take between 10 and 20 years to develop this sensitivity.

The first year I was a book packager. I sold my first book on the first day to Warner Books. Chip Conley and I 5,000. dollars we split the money and then chip went back to doing his job which was hotels and I told him I'm going to be a book packager if I can sell a book a week I'll be fine and I got 800 rejection letters in a row 800 times over the next 12 months someone in the book industry was interested enough to buy a stamp send me a letter saying this is a bad idea leave 800 times and I didn't keep making the same mistake I kept making new mistakes and in proposal to people and it was totally understandable that they responded to me and then something clicked and I learned to see and two years later I had sold 20 books and over the course of 10 years I made 120 books and I could say about half the time that I was right about half the time if I said this is big it was big can you walk us through that process?

I know your story well enough to know when you were trying to get better at writing. You were looking at James Bond. We talked about this in our first interview. That process to me is incredibly important. How did you ask yourself new questions? How did you make sure you made new mistakes and didn't repeat them? that and how do you make sure that you were getting closer and closer so that you were analyzing well, I did this, I got this result and right, great question, the first books were how to hypnotize your friends and make them act like chickens and fortune. cookie building game, so fortune cookie building game was the only book at the time where you could look up a recipe for fortune cookies because fortune cookies don't have their recipes in books American cookbooks and they didn't have the recipe in the Chinese cookbooks and so the first page was the fortune cookie recipe and the next hundred pages were little punched fortunes that you could tear out and put in the 14 like henny youngman fortunes this voice and effort no one wanted to publish that and the other was one of the first, uh not the first, one of the only books that anyone had proposed about hypnotism, how to do stage hypnotism at home and how to hypnotize your friends to act like chickens .

No one wanted to post that either and I just stuck with one. thing after another that I was smart and I was proud of myself for being smart or because I had a master's degree, I had spreadsheets to prove that people would actually buy the book and then what I came up with no one explained it to me, but what I thought What became clear was that the people in the book industry who used to go to famous universities were dramatically underpaid, really underpaid and they weren't in it to sell a lot of books because they didn't know how many books they were selling, it took a year and a half later After buying a book, they bought it so they knew how many copies it had sold and by then they weren't even interested, they had moved on, so no one in the industry had a spreadsheet that cared about spreadsheets or was doing spreadsheet tracking and no one in the industry wanted to reward me for being smart, so I realized that people bought books they were proud of and they bought books they wanted to talk about with their colleagues and if I made books like that one, they would do it. publish them happily, especially if I was the kind of person they wanted to buy books from, not because I was well-liked in the Willy Loman sense, but because I was a professional who was in it for the right reasons, not someone who was trying to rush and get ahead. to be able to make another smart book and that led to a real change on my part about who it is, what it's for, what change I'm looking to make because what I realized is that, first, it has to be quote-unquote good enough to attract the guardian, but in reality he wasn't doing all this effort just to make them happy.

I wanted to make readers change. I wanted to reach readers, but first I had to make a bank break. I had to get it through the editor and then it had a chance to reach the reader and that's one of the reasons my blog has been around for so long because my blog had no middlemen. My blog meant I didn't have to please an editor. I could just write for my reader and that's a big change in our culture, but it also means you're not anointed by an editor like before and you get a guaranteed audience.

The typical failed book in New York. Now New York publishing has gone over 20,000 copies, that's what a decent failed book would do for 200 because before it was 20,000, you'd fill all the barnes and nobles, we'll fill all the local bookstores, you'll sell 20,000. Now that's fine, Amazon does not reorder and we only send them 10.I want to talk about impostor syndrome and the reason I bring it up now is that, while you were going through it, I thought there's really something here about whether Seth Godin is excessively good at that analysis or it's the practice itself. Doing something over and over again is going to get a result and for the person whose self-narrative is I'm not as good as Seth Godin, of course they're going to get into that imposter syndrome and you've already addressed that.

Hey, you're probably not good enough at this, but in the book you talk about so many things that are a process that you either think you're born with or you're not. I'm working on this concept that I call the physics of being human, there are certain things that the brain does, whether you like it or not, they are universal for all of us and one of them that I was thinking about yesterday while I was researching you is this idea that we analyze and you analyze. By default, keeping a journal is powerful because, whether you want it or not, your brain will analyze what you are writing, what you are doing, practicing being a plumber, you will analyze, sending all the book proposals that you are going to make. to analyze, is there a way that we can sharpen our ability to be able to see that gap to recognize?

Oh, what's really going on here is that you know the guy with the Harvard master's degree or whatever, he's underpaid and he's doing this for a completely different reason. I don't think most people verbalize as much as I do and it's okay that some of the most successful people I know are nonverbal in almost every field so I'm looking Look if I can show you yeah here it is so this book was a turning point for me, so I'll give you the background of this book. Cliff Notes used to be big business. Cliff notes used to be the biggest profit. center in many bookstores and the guys at cliff notes because it was reliable, you had 100 titles that sold and sold and sold and the margins were good and the guys at cliff notes at publishers published the list of their 30 best sellers weekly to help the bookstores know which ones to store but they also told me which ones to compete with them on because they revealed their short head and I said well who wants cliff notes who wants cliff notes is a kid who doesn't want to read 30 Page cliff notes they want to read four pages of cliff notes, so why don't I take 35 of the best-selling cliff notes and put them all in one book?

So for the price of two cliff notes, you get all the cliff notes and I need a credential, so I asked college students to write to everyone as Tufts University students and this is a brilliant idea. I can test spreadsheets back and forth that it's a brilliant idea and it wasn't going to sell because I was still hesitating. trying to find out what people wanted and I met a guy named john boswell and john boswell wrote o.j legal in oj legal notebook and created french for cats and had made millions of sellers one after another, a layman guy very nice to me and I went to see him at a mutual presentation and he trashed my proposal and said, I'll help you with this but we're going to split the book, we're going to split it, I'm fine, I have nothing to do and he said the first thing you're doing is printing. your proposals with laser.

I told him yes, it costs a dollar a page. I have to walk there and print them on the laser printer. He says no, no, no, and calls the secretary and asked her to rewrite my proposal using carbon paper on that onion skin paper and asked her what it was about. He said authors have typewriters and he had no words to explain why you had to act like an author when you weren't, so I figured out some of what I had learned and then found out I saw him interact with editors at who were trying to sell it to them and he was mean to them one after another and I tried to decode this because a lot of the most successful agents in new york at the time were mean to their clients but I realized again that everything is a club and it's a club that people want to be a member of and they only have a few tools that they can use to get them to be members of certain clubs and if this club is considered difficult to get into in the whole Groucho Marx thing, they will try harder to get into it and they like everything and I never did all that bad, but I got the joke right away about him not knowing how to have words for what. he was doing it even though it was a very successful kind of book, he just knew what had worked, how he knew because he went through the process that I went through, he showed up and he showed up and he showed up and we looked, you know, he was talking.

About this the other day, check out the streaming services and you can hear one of Joni Mitchell's early demos. She does a cover for House of the Rising Sun and when I saw it pop up in my browser the other day I got really excited. It's not good, it's not good and if she hadn't done it, she wouldn't have done all the others, so that's what we have to do: we come in, we cut the wood and we cut the water or we collect the water and whatever. You have the idea of ​​​​cutting the wood, carrying the water.

You mentioned Joni Mitchell in the book. It's a really interesting time and I'm curious how you think about this, so one of the things I'm worried about as people go down this path. Well, hey, Seth told me I'm going to have imposter syndrome. I'm not, I'm probably not good enough yet, but I need to get quirky. I need to be myself. then you tell this wonderful story about joni mitchell and joni mitchell realizes that she's overlooking people, but instead of saying oh my god, I feel terrible about that and I kind of simplify it, which was a very lyric. jay-z famous about how he simplified it for his audience and doubled their dollars, she becomes even more intellectual and now we obviously remember her, you know, decades later, is there a danger of leaning into that where you can't actually be being arrogant instead of being precise?

Yes that's fine. The first thing I want to point out is super important. I don't believe in authenticity. I don't think you have any right to do whatever you want and whatever comes to mind as the version of yourself that you think is authentic. one is not correct the public does not want a real you you do not want a real nobody when you hire something when you go to a concert now if you go to a jay-z concert and he is in a bad mood you do not want him to be in a bad mood you want make it the best version of jay-z that's what you paid for consistency consistency is part of being quirky consistently generous showing up constantly rhyming with yourself in a way you're proud of but it's not inauthentic you have no right so That said, Joni Mitchell's story has a key nuance. joni mitchell like most successful musicians as i mentioned with the doobie brothers it was becoming a gimmick she was a legend she could record every record what she was doing was breaking every sales record there was she could have done it for 50 more years, it could have been the rolling stones, that was the past, it wasn't, but to do that you need to play covers of yourself, you need to make sure it sounds like a joni mitchell album what joni mitchell did bob dylan did the same she intentionally alienated her audience she intentionally made them leave she made don juan's reckless daughter break the hearts of her record label because she didn't want to be joni mitchell with a capital j and a capital m she knew her smallest viable audience It was smaller than the audience I had. get rid of people who don't get the joke, make music you want to be proud of, get back to art, stop being art. a hack there's nothing wrong with being a hack because the fact is that Rolling Stones made a billion dollars being a hack, but jordy mitchell said I just want my people who want to go on this journey to be registered with the place I'm going and the middle ground is the The role is, uh, grateful, dead, gravel, dead, sold half a billion dollars worth of tickets, but the promise was you don't know what you're going to get when you come and the promise was that there will be parts of This will be boring and we.

Let's explore the boundaries, that's what we do and so you can earn the right to show up and say I know I'm doing that or I'm doing this, so when permission marketing became a New York Times bestseller I had a great choice to make because I had been in the book world for a long time and now I was finally an author and that book sold so I could have done the permission marketing manual because that book would have been easy to sell to a publisher or to me . I could have started Mailchimp because that business would have been really good and then I would have been the email marketing guy because that was my background.

I had earned the right to come forward and say this and I didn't do it intentionally because I wanted that feeling. When you release a book, you feel like survival is not enough and then comes the feeling of what happens when it only sells 13,000 copies. That's part of the deal, if that's the journey you want to take. You quote Joni Mitchell in the book and she says I'm paraphrasing but they're going to crucify you if you stay the same they're going to crucify you if you change staying the same is boring change is interesting so I'd rather be crucified for changing I thought Wow, that's really very powerful, yes, since different groups are crucifying well, if you stay the same, the real joyful fans are excited that they want you to do the coverage, it's the other people, the fancy people who lead the opinion, who are going to say that you are not relevant.

You already said that you wanted to do something different because you wanted that feeling that you have. What is that feeling that you get when you do something that might not work? You know, the book ends with a quote from Dad Wolenda from the Flying Wallendas that he may or may not have said it, but he's quoted in the movie Rounders by my friend Brian Koppelman and David Levine and he says something like uh, life is in the tightrope and the tightrope is the only place to be and what it means to be on the tightrope.

The tightrope is that our job as humans is not to eat, sleep and die, our job as human humans is to sing, dance, connect or lead, and all of those things have tightropes associated with them and that's when you might It doesn't work that we or at least I come to life because you built something, you organized the surprise party, you put the pieces together and now at this moment you are about to learn something that is so different from taking the truffles off the conveyor belt and putting them on the box all day, that's not what we were born to do, I don't think so, so we're living on a tightrope, I want to make the most of that, so if we're going to experience danger if we're really going to put ourselves at risk, which It obviously has enormous positive potential, but it also has potential disadvantages.

One of the things that seems to me to be at the core of where you are at this point in your life is the notion of feedback. that you mentioned before, it certainly seems like the lifeblood of the alt mba is feedback, how do we receive that feedback? Because most people will feel attacked. Most people, you know, put the psychological immune system on and reject it. We deal with it or some people do the opposite and take it all in and get crushed. That's interesting, so I made these things on my Glowforge. These are writer's block and take a lot of time to do because you.

I have to like the laser on each side and this one says that all reviews are not equal, that's the key to the whole thing. I haven't read an Amazon review of my work in almost 10 years. Wow, and the reason is simple because I have never met each other. an author who said I read all my one star reviews and now I'm a better writer, never because what does a one star review mean? a one star review means this book wasn't for me, well you just told us that. about you you didn't tell us anything about the book or about me, he told us about you, okay, thanks for telling us, but I don't need to read that in detail, on the other hand, if nicki papadopoulos, the amazing editor of penguin putnam, says in uh portfolio it says that you need to change the title.

I'm like I paid you hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell me to change the title. Thank you very much because I was able to self-publish this book by myself without anyone's comments and no one would have told me to change the title. This critique is magical, from what you already know, what they have built are institutional workshops, the alt-mba, where the only comments you receive are valuable and they filter all of them. other things and you can build a system like that, you can figure out how to make sure you're listening to the right people.

Therefore, opening for a rock group is a very bad idea because you are going to show up. vs. the wrong people who are going to give you the wrong feedback, it makes a lot more sense to find out who it is for and communicate it to them, it may require some extra steps, but the feedback you are getting is useful feedback. There are some benchmarks for who are the people you should listen to to build that group. I think there are two parts. In my case, at the origin of my world of books, there are the people who are going to pay you and when.

Those people give you feedback,You have to listen to them or else they won't pay you more, but then there's another thing that, as we mentioned before, is very bad at verbalizing where you're coming from when you see someone. whoever is angry looks for fear who is not angry is probably not angry with you probably is afraid of something afraid of what he will say to his spouse afraid of what he will say to his boss afraid of inadequacy or afraid of death and it will tell you they are expressing by being angry about something you did, if you index those comments too much you will make a mistake, on the other hand if you ignore all the comments the people you seek to serve will choose not to be served. for you and they'll just walk away and that's why this is so nuanced and so complicated because what you have to figure out how to do is thread a needle between being a hack and having a hobby and there's a needle there. one way to do it, but there are also people who were contemporaries of yours who didn't make a living and who died in a sewer somewhere because they made it too much of a hobby and then there were other people who became too famous and I put thousands davis in that category and they went from being magnificent artists to being bitter because they became a hack and then they wanted to be artists again and they couldn't why couldn't he?

That's interesting because he got hooked on playing for 80,000 people right there. I just watched a great documentary about him about a year ago and you can see the turning point when Bill Graham put him on stage when he realized he liked being a rock star, but if you're a rock star. You can't do something blue either, you can't do both and then he listened to a group of people who told him what he would have to do to be more of a rock star. But deep down he didn't really want to be a rock star, he wanted make your art.

This is fascinating. Now I'm really curious if you could go back in time and spend about 20 minutes with him. Is there an idea that you could try to plant in his mind a narrative of his own that would help him understand that hey, you can actually reshape this so that you can get closer to rhyming with yourself, um, do you just say, hey, look, this is how It's and some people get You know, you're hooked on it and there's no way to bring them back because there are so many people chasing money, chasing wealth, chasing fame and you know the famous Jim Carrey quote: I wish everyone could be rich and famous. so you see that it's not really what you want it to be or it's not the answer.

I am so curious. What would you say to him at that moment? Well, I guess I have a slightly different opinion. but it's specific, he would just say thank you for sacrificing so much to be who he was and to make the change that he did for people in the face of overt racial oppression. He had so much to prove himself to other people who didn't take him into account. they spat on him he has the right to sell whatever he wants and to someone today what I would say regardless of your background regardless of where you come from I would say what do you want what are you looking for because if you are trying to fill an infinite hole and the filling part It doesn't make you happy.

I need to tell you about math and math says that infinite holes are never filled and then you know that every year when Forbes releases their list of billionaires they ruin the day. or the week or month of at least 100 people who have at least a billion dollars because they are not as high as they would like to be that is absurd that is absurd that you are keeping track of what you care about that in any case that is a hole infinite, it doesn't help you get where you want to go, maybe it makes sense to say where your fuel is, what is the work you do, where when you do it makes you feel like you have contributed something, stop buying metrics that were invented by other people to help them get where they want to go and you know, a simple example is people who buy their way on the bestseller list, just when they are spending 50,100,000 to play a system that all the insiders They know it's not very difficult to play, why do you do that?

What do you get in return? And how could you stop tracking something that shouldn't be done and track something else that depends on all of us? make that decision who are you trying to please if there is that person you are trying to please who is always unpleasant you found an infinite hole stop trying to fill it and go please someone else that you like if I had to do it I don't I have to conjure up an image. I have an image of you in my head, of someone who tap dances in the most elegant and beautiful way, avoiding all kinds of mental traps that we all fall into, and I say something specific that I have never done.

Put these things together, so forgive me, I'm just thinking out loud, you have this beautiful ability to be moved by people, people you may have never met, so we talked about Leonard Nimoy the first time and now it's Miles Davis. Are you open to that? Are you naturally

impact

ed by people? Do you look for beauty and things like that? It was a very interesting framing around Miles Davis and seeing that it obviously

impact

s you in a very real way. It's as curious as that. a beautiful place to live for people who want to live there, what have you done to end up there?

I always resist something being natural or a talent because I think it liberates us too easily. um I think people have different emotional thermostats and they're set maybe by the way we're raised on the traumas that we have or don't have, but yeah, I also think people are on various spectrums on where they are on that thermostat. in my case. I think the practical discussion is what are you training? I can't bench press 10 pounds because my shoulders don't work very well due to the surgery, but even if I could, I could train to get to 20 or 30 or whatever and so we don't go anywhere near someone who has a lot of weight. muscles in various parts of their body and we tell them if you were born that way, no, they were trained to be that way and if you ask Patricia to play scales, she can play scales blindfolded because she trained for years and years and years the fact Her father being a jazz musician didn't give her any genes in music that she just trained and that's why I've been training for a long time to answer the question of why someone just did what they did, how can I get rid of part of the magic of the world?

It's just a giant magic trick and I don't know how it works. I know what freon gas does and I know how a refrigerator works. It's important to me. I know that when you turn on the light switch, why the lights come on, that's important to me and I needed to understand why that person who rejected my book on spots and stains rejected it and why the person who tried to buy the book and I couldn't he was really mad at me I needed to understand that the same way I need to understand why lights work and often I'm completely wrong but I'm closer than if I hadn't asked the question in the first place and so I think the training is: Can we develop practical empathy?

They don't know what we know, they don't want what we want, they don't need what we need and that's okay, what do they know, what do they need, what happened to them? that led them to believe that right now they are being reasonable and if we can ask that question enough times not only do I think it helps us make changes, but it helps us live with the world as it is because we can't change everything. world, but if we understand it we can at least decode it and find a way to improve it. Is incredible.

One last question: what are you waiting for? So knowing that you go into the book asking how do I want to change people, what are they? You hope people take away two things from this concept of practice. For all of us we need what you could contribute if you contribute. And for you, the reader. I think it would be horrible if you died with what you have. still inside you and it is not formed yet, you will form it when you have a practice, when you start believing in yourself, do not wait to be chosen, Oprah will not call you, but will adopt this practice of making things better because 2020 is a anus.

We all want to forget, but the only way forward won't be for an alien to come and fix everything, because we made something better for 10 other people, if we all do that, it multiplies and then things get better, I love it. Where can people find you? I'm on Seth's blog and I'm delighted to announce that at Kimbo, the workshop organization I started five years ago, is now a B Corp, legally obligated to work in the public interest as well as that of... makes a profit and it's run and owned by two of my senior people, so I'm a part of it because they publish my workshops, but it's them and now it's over 20,000 people learning together.

It's at kimbo.com. I have a podcast that's not like you're just a podcast on akimbo.link and uh, yeah, I'm a little hard to avoid. If you just click, you will find me. I love it, guys. This is, in my opinion, one of the most profound authors, sure thinkers if you've done it. You're not subscribed to everything he does yet, I highly recommend it and speaking of things you should subscribe to if you're not already, make sure to subscribe here and until next time, my friends are going to be legendary, take care, heroes are a enormously large supply. say what bill gates would do what elon musk would do what jacqueline novogratz would do and you can study her work enough so that even from afar without them knowing you exist because she's your hero you can start modeling it yourself