← The Hardcore Self-Help Podcast with Duff the Psych
The Hardcore Self-Help Podcast with Duff the Psych
419: Seth Godin - Using Strategy to Shape Your Life and Mental Health
00:45:12
Loading summary
Transcript75 lines
- [00:00]
Seth Godin
I had a near drowning experience. And what happened inside my head was I said, I'm not done yet. And there's things I want to teach and things I want to contribute. And I was lucky enough to get through those last 50 yards. And that's not fuel that I suggest people seek out, but I share it. Because when we write the history of this planet, this moment in time where we have billions of people connected and we have paid a huge price in terms of pumping stuff out of the ground in order to have the standard of living we have, we tend to waste it as soon as we seek to be generous, we get out of our own way. Many people anyway. And part of the nihilism and ennui of our lives is we've been encouraged by marketers for 100 years to be selfish, to put our own oxygen mask on first before helping others. There are systems that want you to be unhappy. There are systems that benefit from you needing to drown your sorrows. There are fewer systems that benefit from you being resilient and happy. And a contribution strategy isn't just for Microsoft and Apple. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. One of my favorite sentences in the book is this One day soon the person you are hoping to become is going to meet the person you are. How's that meeting going to go? You have agency. That means you have responsibility to use it. And if you deny the agency, you get to whine about it. Great. If you that makes you happy. But if you see it, if you want to write, write. If you want to sing, sing. If you want to post your poetry, please do. You don't need to get picked. There are no important poetry magazines that are busy going through their Rolodex hoping to find you. They don't exist. Go do it yourself. Saying it out loud. Announcing the strategy gives us the chance to leave out the part of. And then a miracle happens because it's that wishful thinking that wears us out. That if you know you are on a path, it is generative because you know one more step gets you one step closer to where you're going.
- [02:34]
Duff
Okay, everybody, very excited. For today's guest we have Seth Godin. How would you like to introduce yourself just to my audience?
- [02:42]
Seth Godin
I'm a teacher. I've been an author and a podcaster and a blogger and an entrepreneur. I teach canoeing as well. And mostly what I try to do is notice things and help make them a little bit better.
- [02:55]
Duff
You also have a very profound skill of putting things into a bite sized, just perfect packaging and I wanted to say thank you personally, because a few of the things you've said on podcasts or talks of yours that have really stuck with me and have helped me out even in preparing for this interview. In terms of questions, there was something you said on the Tim Ferriss podcast about stuff happens between the frames, meaning don't over explain. Trust people to get the point. So some of my questions, I was lots of parentheticals, and I'm like, I could just ask him the damn question. So thank you.
- [03:31]
Seth Godin
Well, thank you. That's kind of you.
- [03:33]
Duff
I was curious how similar is your writing to your internal monologue and kind of what happens inside your brain as you're walking around day to day?
- [03:43]
Seth Godin
This is such a great question to begin with. First, there's no such thing as writer's block. Writer's block is an invention based on fear and resistance. No one gets talker's block. Very few people. Show me your bad writing. If you have bad writing, you don't have writer's block, right? When I was in high school, my English teacher wrote in my yearbook that I was the bane of her existence and I would never amount to anything. And when I went to college, I took exactly one English course in four years. So I am not a trained writer. But what I realized is that if you write like you talk, the writing part isn't very hard. What that meant was I had to get better at talking. And one of the side effects of that is that now I'm better at thinking that I try to talk like I want to write. And because I'm talking like I want to write, I think like I want to talk. And I believe this is a skill, and I think people can learn it.
- [04:49]
Duff
What does it sound like in your brain? Do you have a lot of words going on in there as you're navigating your life? Is it more pictures or is it something different?
- [05:00]
Seth Godin
I'm fascinated by the recent research that says some people have no words, which is pretty cool.
- [05:06]
Duff
Not my experience, for sure.
- [05:09]
Seth Godin
I. I rarely get the chattering monkey anymore because between pemachandran and some CBT and some mindfulness, I've been able to realize it's chattering and not indulge it.
- [05:26]
Duff
Not latch onto it.
- [05:28]
Seth Godin
Yeah. But I guess trying to keep coming back to seeing the fear behind other people's actions and understanding what they mean, not what they say, makes it easier for me to figure out what I mean and not get hung up on.
- [05:45]
Duff
The words you do. Describe your work as reciprocal, and I think that that applies here as well. The writing feeds the talking, which feeds the thinking, which feeds the observation, et cetera. Cool. Thank you for the context you mentioned. Cbt, could you tell me a little bit about sort of your, like, the story of your, like, mental and emotional health? I don't know a lot about that in terms of, you know, your experience. Like, what's your story like?
- [06:15]
Seth Godin
Well, I've made it a habit of not talking about my life and my story too much. Okay. It's easy and it's a trap. And the reason I think it's a trap is because others can look at what you engaged with. Maybe really hard stuff, you were an orphan and you got over it. Or maybe really easy stuff. You have all this privilege, but it makes it easy to say, well, of course that person can do X. And I'm trying to universalize here. And so, you know, what I say to people is, if you're having challenges with creativity, I would love to see your daydream notebook. Where is your daydream notebook? Where you are writing down every day at least 10 things that you are daydreaming of, because everyone daydreams. And if you're not writing down 10 of them, you're not taking it seriously. And the act of doing it makes it concrete. And making it concrete means you can make it better. And then it becomes part of the habit. So what I say my blog has a strategy behind it, but one of the things about my daily blog practice is there's going to be a blog tomorrow, and it's not going to be because it's the best blog post I ever wrote. It's going to be because it's Wednesday. And understanding that, you know, we don't skip lunch, we don't skip brushing our teeth. There are all these things we could build into our lives that we don't skip, and that starts to change who we are.
- [07:48]
Duff
Your job is not to be creative. Your job is to ship. Was another one of those quotes that stuck with me.
- [07:54]
Seth Godin
Yeah, ship generous work, don't ship junk. But it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be huge, but it has to be something.
- [08:01]
Duff
I can respect the hesitance to dive into too much of your own story, because that's not the focus. Would you mind, though, talking about how almost drowning off the coast of San Clemente affected the way that you perceive things or the way that you operate in the world?
- [08:18]
Seth Godin
You know, Covid was hard for so many people. People didn't make it through. They lost loved ones and soon after that, I had a near drowning experience. And what happened inside my head was I said, I'm not done yet. And there's things I want to teach and things I want to contribute. And I was lucky enough to get through those last 50 yards. And that's not fuel that I suggest people seek out, but I share it. Because when we write the history of this planet, this moment in time where we have billions of people connected and we have paid a huge price in terms of pumping stuff out of the ground in order to have the standard of living we have, we tend to waste it by watching the next thing on Netflix instead of contributing. And a big part of my work is reminding people that they can bring a strategy to their effort and actually make a difference. And I think if you know you can make a difference, it's easier to make it a habit.
- [09:37]
Duff
You focus a lot on that productive contribution. Serving others or serving the world. Does that help you as an individual? It seems like you've taken a stance, really. You know, you're aware of yourself, but you do focus a lot on other people, the world, things like that.
- [09:59]
Seth Godin
Well, the lifeguard analogy, I think is so useful. If you're 17 years old and you've got a gig as a lifeguard and someone near you starts drowning, you could accurately and correctly say that you are not the best lifeguard in the world. In fact, there's probably a better lifeguard on that dock right now. But that person in front of you doesn't care. That person in front of you is drowning. And you can contribute something by saving them. You don't need to have perfect credentials. You don't need to practice before you do it. You know that you can go save them. Well, as soon as we seek to be generous, we get out of our own way. Many people anyway. And part of the nihilism and ennui of our lives is we've been encouraged by marketers for 100 years to be selfish, to put our own oxygen mask on first before helping others. It would seem to me that if I was on an airplane where there was a disaster, I would be way more motivated to put somebody else's oxygen mask on first and then try to figure out how to get one for me. But that's just my practice. But what I'm hoping to help people see, as we lean in to the work we seek to do, is if you're taking, you gotta justify it. But if you're offering, if you're opening the door and turning on the light, it's much easier to go forward because you're doing it for someone else.
- [11:27]
Duff
I like that you mentioned that we are sort of trained to be selfish. You are very aware and good at describing systems that are at play that we may not even be aware of. Are there any others that you can or are there any specifics that you can highlight that probably affect us daily that we may not even be cognizant of?
- [11:51]
Seth Godin
Oh, I can't even begin to tell you how many systems are out there that if we were starting over again, we would never have. Like just to pick one off the top of my head, if someone invented milk today, here is this product that comes out of a mammal that's supposed to be for its baby, and it's in a barnyard covered with excrement. And we're going to get some of that stuff, but we have to boil it first, because if we don't, it'll kill you. And then we're going to ship it to your store. But you better buy it right away, because if you don't buy it right away, it's going to get rotten and smell really bad and might make you sick. You want to buy some? It's $2.99 a gallon. Like no oat milk. Please sign me up for oat milk. But culture is a system. Delivery units are a system that when you live in a certain part of the world, of course you drive a pickup truck. Do you ever put anything in the back of the pickup truck? No. But people like us do things like this. So there are all of these systems of misogyny and caste and oppression and connection and status all around us. And some people control systems and manipulate them. And you and I are both wearing eyeglasses. Until recently, one company in Milan, Italy, controlled more than half the eyeglass market, including the place you go to have your eyes checked. The people who make the glasses, the brand names are going, all of it, right? One guy figured out that he could manipulate that system and come out ahead. But the real systems we need to see are the systems where no one's in charge, where the systems where this is just the way it is. And changing those systems is very difficult. But we can begin by seeing them, understanding that they're there, and then figuring out what to do about it.
- [13:43]
Duff
What's an example of a system like that where no one is in charge, as you're discussing?
- [13:50]
Seth Godin
Well, the biggest one for sure is the system of markets, sometimes called capitalism. So here's a pencil and a group of people came together for this pencil to exist. They're the people who make the wood, the people make the graphite, the blah, blah, blah, blah. And they've never met each other and they've never had a meeting or a plan, but the market magically made it so that this thing cost $0.09 and you can get one. Whereas if we needed to have Pencil Corporation of America that was integrated all the way back to the forest level, a pencil would cost $9. So when you think about what does the market want, what does capitalism want, you can start to understand how we ended up with some of the things we ended up with. Because it wants each little component of it to figure out how to make a living. Doing something, selling something else, finding a need, solving it, giving people options, et cetera. And the next thing you know, there's a farmer's market on Saturday. But it didn't happen because there was a meeting. It happened because the market is looking for holes to fill.
- [14:59]
Duff
Yeah, I could see that in a roundabout way, helping people have some grace with themselves as well. Because we are also kind of products of that, or at least we are within that, right?
- [15:11]
Seth Godin
Yes, exactly. And so to pick one example, John Scully, who was at Apple for a while before he was at Apple, worked at Pepsi. And he took credit for inventing the idea of making the top of the Pepsi bottle a little bit bigger. And the reason is that teenagers are part of a system. We've all survived it. And one of the things teenagers want is status. One of the ways they got that status was slamming. That's the term drinking a 16 ounce jar bottle of Pepsi all in one gulp by making the bottle a little bit wider. It was easier to slam a Pepsi than a Coke. So their market share went up. At the meeting, no one said, well, what about the diabetes and obesity that will come from this? That's a byproduct of a system. Right. And what fashion does to women in the United States is astonishing. And the costs, both environmental, financial, and especially emotional, are huge. And I don't think Diane von Furstenberg is trying to make you unhappy, but she is.
- [16:20]
Duff
There's that dissatisfaction or craving. There's a need to get something, to buy something, to fill a hole that you're told is a hole.
- [16:28]
Seth Godin
Yeah. And to feel bad that it doesn't fit you.
- [16:33]
Duff
Yeah, yeah. Bringing it down to more of a individual micro scale. So your book is. It's called this is Strategy. How in your mind do the tenets of that book apply to people on an individual level?
- [16:50]
Seth Godin
Yeah. When you were gracious enough to invite me on. I thought really hard about do I belong on a conversation like this? Thank you. In fact, strategy isn't just for Microsoft and Apple. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. One of my favorite sentences in the book is this, one day soon, the person you are hoping to become is going to meet the person you are. How's that meeting gonna go? Because that meeting could go really well. It could say, yeah, I invested four years ago to be where I am now and I'm glad we met. Thank you. But it also could be a cause for heartbreak. And a lot of the challenges of modern mental health is about that heartbreak of dreams not met, of finding ourselves in a bind, feeling trapped. Well, that's all strategy. Strategy is, what will I do today to work with the systems that are out there so that tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that and the tomorrow after that, I'm going to build a life where I want to live. And where we get trapped is we do something today in the short run because it's an emergency, because I had no choices, because I'm busy or tired, and then we have to live with it tomorrow. And what I'm trying to cover in the book is to say all of us have a strategy, whether we name it or not. Good strategies always outperform in the long run. Strategies that are just intuitive. We're just winging it. And you know a trivial example, if you need to get to a meeting in rural Georgia and there's only one flight out of one airport and four flights out of the other airport, it's a good strategy to go to the airport that has more connecting flights. Because if one of them goes wrong, you'll still be fine, Right? That if your flight leaves at 2pm, getting to the airport at 11 because they have free WI fi instead of sitting in your office, which also has free WI fi, and wait until the last minute. One strategy is a better strategy. It gives you more resilience. But then this gets much bigger than making an airplane. It's well, did the system persuade me to live a life in debt or do I have the wherewithal to live a life in surplus? Because if I spend the first three years of my life spending less money, the rest of my life I'll be earning interest. Whereas if I spend the first three years of my life as an adult spending money, I'll be in credit card debt forever. That's what the credit card company wants. But it might not be what you want.
- [19:31]
Duff
I think the first three years, right, that a lot of People don't think of strategy in terms of applying it to their life. They may have one. Well, they do have one, right, Is what you would argue. It could be good, it could be bad. How do we get aware of the strategies we might want to employ, you know, in daily life, not only just for ourselves, but also in contribution to others?
- [19:58]
Seth Godin
It's two simple questions to get us started. Who's it for and what's it for? That's it. Who's it for and what's it for? I ran into someone the other day, didn't know them. They were just talking in the parking lot, and they said the car payments on their car were finally paid off 36 months later. Which means that tomorrow they get to buy a new car. No, that's not what it means. Right, but if you need to buy a new car to impress your neighbors or your girlfriend or your ex who doesn't even know you bought a new car, then please do. But you should know that's why you bought a new car, not because your old car is broken. Who's it for and what's it for this time? I'm going to spend the three hours I'm going to spend tonight watching television instead of going for a walk. Who's it for? What's it for? Who benefits if I stay home and watch television and eat Ben and Jerry's? Who benefits if I go for a walk? When we keep coming back to who's it for and what's it for? What we discover is that high school is still in charge in many of our brains, that what we're trying to do in many of our decisions is please that person who bullied us when we were 17 or somehow undo that feeling of isolation. And if it's getting you what you want, please do. But if it's not getting what you want, let's name it. And once you name it, I bet you're aware enough to do something about it.
- [21:33]
Duff
Who's it for? What's it for? That isn't. You're not saying that based on that? You have a preconceived idea what they should do. They just need to be aware of what is there.
- [21:44]
Seth Godin
Yeah.
- [21:44]
Duff
And that will help.
- [21:45]
Seth Godin
So I don't. I don't use. I don't use Twitter. I could have used Twitter right at the beginning because I. I knew about it. That's what I do. And I said to myself, I could probably have a lot of Twitter followers, sure. But if I was going to do that, I'd have to spend Less time doing something else. So I'd become a slightly worse blogger in order to become a much better Twitter user. Who's it for? What's it for? Who benefits if I have a 2 million Twitter followers, right? People who are spending a lot of time on TikTok, they will tell you, well, I'm doing this because one day I'm going to have 79 million followers. And I'm like, well, who else has 79 million followers? And when they have 79 million followers, does it get them what they want? Let's be clear. You're doing this because you like the feeling of winning, possibly winning the lottery, not because it's a good strategy. And if you could just name it, then great, go buy a lottery ticket. Just make sure you can afford it.
- [22:43]
Duff
So that comes down to being real with yourself, recognizing the factors that are at play, which requires self reflection of some capacity for you. It sounds like that soft writing, right?
- [22:56]
Seth Godin
Well, part of it is it's worth making it into a book, because books don't have to be private. You can find three other people. And now it's not self reflection, now it's peer reflection. And you know, this is the secret of Alcoholics Anonymous, this is the secret of so many institutions that make us better, is you can't lie to other people as easily as you can lie to yourself. So who are the three people that you're going to meet with once a week and tell them the truth about your promises and your efforts? So it's not a substitute for professional mental health care, but it is an excellent way to think about your Strategy.
- [23:40]
Duff
You have 12 slogans in your book or what you have available for us podcasters to look at. One of the slogans is networks can be created. And I think that's absolutely true, but it's something that a lot of people struggle with. Do you have any advice for people that struggle with that?
- [24:01]
Seth Godin
So we get back to the lifeguard thing. Years and years ago, I built one of the first Internet companies, and AOL was one of our biggest clients. AOL invited 50 of the people who were making content to a conference, and their goal was to tell the 50 of us what they were going to do next and persuade us to go along with it. But one guy tomorrow decided that he could do something of service for a dozen of the other people who were there. So he rented a slightly bigger hotel room and he invited us all over at 6 o' clock to meet each other. And we spent the next two hours comparing our contracts with aol how could we do better at this? How could we do better at this? And all 12 of us got this huge benefit out of being connected, having a secret cartel. And I've been grateful to Tom ever since, but Tom got more out of it than any of us. So it's scary back to high school, scary to say, I have a special lunch table. Will you want to join us? But when you're doing it for generous reasons, and you do it very small, one little tiny step at a time, it's totally doable. Right? And it can be something as simple as, I saw a photographer do a brave thing about eight years ago, maybe more. And I sent her a note and I said, that was great. And I didn't know who this person was. I was just being encouraging. Well, it turns out we went to summer camp together and we hit it off again. But the point is, it didn't cost me anything to send them that note. And we can start weaving this together without the fear of rejection, because we're doing it in the small for the right reasons.
- [25:47]
Duff
Right. In that lunch table kind of metaphor. At high school, you are sort of trained to not invite people to your table, but see the table that you want to be at, and the stakes for getting to that table feel unrealistically high. And you're saying that you don't have to do that. You can create a table and say, hey, come join me at my table for authentic reasons.
- [26:13]
Seth Godin
Yeah, exactly. We all get to make our own tables. That's why we're not in high school anymore.
- [26:18]
Duff
Yeah. I think that's really valuable, especially to people with. You know, I work with a lot of people with social anxiety, and it is so much of that. Of that fear of, you know, where can I get into this thing versus invite people? You can. You can be that one. And you get more out of it even than maybe the other people.
- [26:38]
Seth Godin
Yeah. I mean, again, empathy is valuable. But I can't speak for someone who has real social anxiety. I am actually sort of shy most of the time. But if you love dogs, go put five flyers in five mailboxes. I walk dogs every afternoon for free. Give me a call if you're interested. If no one calls, no one knows it was you. You have lost nothing. If someone calls now you have a new dog to walk with, and maybe you're going to get to know your neighbor because you did something useful for them. And the woman in my neighborhood who walks dogs walks 20 dogs a day. And she has people who are rooting for her because she is of service.
- [27:21]
Duff
Brilliant.
- [27:22]
Seth Godin
Yeah.
- [27:24]
Duff
There'S some stuff that will percolate from this for me too, so appreciate that. There's a quote from your upcoming book. You said we mistakenly spend time figuring out how to win the game we're in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place. Can you break that down a little bit for us?
- [27:43]
Seth Godin
Okay, so I'm a game designer off and on, but I'm not talking about board games or wordle. I'm talking about a game is anything with players, rules and outcomes. And so when three lanes are merging to one lane and there's a traffic jam, that's a game. Who are you going to let in front of you? Who's going to let you in front? And you can play that game better or worse, you can be a jerk at it. You can come out fine. Work is a game, and politics is a game, and the cafeteria is a game, okay? So one of the things that western culture has trained us to do is not quit. Another thing it's trained us to do is to insist that we could do it. So they just did a survey in the United Kingdom, and 25% of the adults who answered the survey, including senior citizens, said that if they trained really hard for the next four years, they could make the Olympic team. This is absurd, right? But 25%, so that's supposed to be a good thing, right? Well, I don't think you should play games you can't win. If your goal is to win, you should play games you can't win just to be fun. But if your goal is to win, and it's very clear you can't win, play a different game. And so what we see is a society that pushes you to play the game it says you should play and to play it, not to win. But that's not a happy thing. So play a different game. And this goes back to which group are you organizing? You know, if the game is who is the most traditionally beautiful person at the senior prom. You know before you start that you're not going to win that game. So don't go into debt to buy a dress or a tuxedo that is going to have you come in 20th place. Play a different game. Right? You can go to the prom with your circle of people, have the best time ever because all of you have opted out of a game you can't win. And a lot of tension and stress comes from our belief that we need to play a game, even though we are pretty confident we're not going to Win it.
- [30:07]
Duff
What are some games that we are currently playing that we are going to lose, that you think people should play a different game instead?
- [30:17]
Seth Godin
Well, I think the biggest, most common one is going into debt to buy stuff. Yeah, that's a game. You have a limited number of resources. You can't buy everything. You can't have a yacht bigger than Steve, then Jeff Bezos, his yacht. Right. So we've got all of these people who are hooked on what can I buy and how can I demonstrate that I have status because of what I bought. There are games of maintaining the status quo because we don't have the guts to admit that maybe the status quo should change. So there's something we want to do. It turns out most, many, many lawyers and dentists in the United States are unhappy in their careers. Now, it would seem to me you have two good options. One, figure out how to have a narrative about your career that makes you happy with it, or two, stop doing it. But there's so much pressure to say, well, I went to dental school and I'm in dental debt, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but that's a gift from your former self. You don't have to accept it. You can say, thanks, I'm good. You can keep that gift. And so sunk costs get us paralyzed. And we try to justify our unhappiness instead of realizing we could take a deep breath, move something away, go back to being generative and being generous.
- [31:40]
Duff
Another slogan, disunk Costs can be ignored.
- [31:44]
Seth Godin
Right.
- [31:45]
Duff
But Seth, that's scary, right? That's scary. You're throwing away this gift from your former self, which is you have the capability to do, but that's very scary. What do you do if it doesn't work out?
- [31:58]
Seth Godin
Yeah, exactly. And so I find starting with trivial examples is a good way to train one's thinking. So let's say you were apt. Sitting for a week and a half and it's the last day. You got one meal left, and you look in the fridge and there's some stuff in the fridge that was really expensive, and there's some stuff in the fridge that wasn't expensive. You have one meal left and you feel like eating the cheap stuff. Should you do that? Is that okay? Is it okay to not eat the second half of that little container of fish eggs you bought a week ago? Right. I think most of us can acknowledge that it's okay to eat whatever you want for dinner because everything's going to get thrown out or eaten anyway, so just pick what you want. Okay? So if it Works for that. Then the question is, you're on a. A beach vacation and it's raining. Should you be unhappy or should you be fine and just go to the movies because you're on vacation, you have time to go to the movies. The fact that you paid for a beachside cabana doesn't matter. That money's gone. You can't get it back. You can't change the rain. So instead of mourning what you don't get, just say, great news. That movie I've always wanted to see is playing down the street and I have a good excuse to go see it. I hope most of us are okay with that. So from those two steps, we can get. You know, I built a division in my company that made DVDs and not the movies, but the using DVD as data to make really fancy computer things. And we were off to a good start. And then DVDs became obsolete and I could have insisted that people buy my stuff, but then I would have wasted the moment where I could have switched the Internet. So switching for the right reason at the right time is a gift. It's not a sacrifice.
- [34:00]
Duff
I find that a lot of people end up doing that, but only after there is, say something life threatening that happened to them and it really made them reevaluate or their career sucked their soul away so much that now they have to do something different. Which is, which is too bad because it doesn't have to come to that point to make that change.
- [34:22]
Seth Godin
Yeah, exactly.
- [34:23]
Duff
Yeah. You also talk about validation. The source of your validation. If you can change the source of your validation, you get to choose or choose the source of your validation. You get to choose your future. Talk about that a little bit.
- [34:37]
Seth Godin
Okay, so there's a few parts of the rift. We begin by saying, choose your customers or choose your boss and choose your future. If you want to make a lot of money on Wall street, you have chosen to work for someone who might be a jerk. And that's going to define your days for a long time to come. You get prizes, but you also pay a price. Choose your customers, choose your future. If you build an institution that specializes in really stressed people before their big events, you're going to spend your whole day with stressed people. And the next one is choose who you're trying to please and choose your future. So if you move to Silicon Valley down the street from that fancy tech bro and that fancy tech bro, you're going to probably buy a car that doesn't embarrass you in front of those people. Not because you want it, but because you've chosen who you're trying to impress. If you want to see a bunch of unhappy people, go to the Hamptons in New York in August because there's all these people who should be the happiest people around who are fretting because who didn't come to their dinner party, who has a better car, who's got a better spot in line, because that's what they signed up for. And if you don't want to do that, don't go to the Hamptons, go somewhere else.
- [35:56]
Duff
Right. So similar thing, though. If you are in that position, there's that sunk cost of, well, I've already gotten all this stuff, and I'm already in this position. What am I going to do? Am I going to move away from San Francisco to Fresno and, you know, start over? That's scary.
- [36:19]
Seth Godin
It's very scary. And those are some of the happiest people I know that have done that. Yeah. I mean, I haven't been on an airplane in three years, mostly because of the climate, partly because of health. And it was very hard to say to somebody who was going to offer me a lot of status and money to go fly somewhere and give a speech for an hour. I worked very hard to get those kinds of invitations. And now I say, well, I can't. I'll do it by zoom, but I can't. And it made my life better. So we. We make sacrifices for the market, for. For other people, but you don't have to do it forever. And you can decide what the cost of those sacrifices is. And you have to realize there are people who are working very hard to make this work against you. So there's a scam that went around for a while. It's mostly fading, where you'd be in a busy public place and someone dressed as a spiritual guide would hand you a trinket, a bracelet, or a flower, and then would wait for you to respond by making a donation. Because we understand that reciprocity and guilt drive a lot of people's behavior. You're allowed to say to that person, no, thank you, and give them back the flower. You don't have to feel bad about that. They created the conditions for the interaction, not you. And that's happening at the checkout. That's happening with, you know, they don't put the. The spinach at the checkout, at the supermarket for a reason. Because in that moment when our resistance is low, that's when we're going to buy a container of necco. Wafers. Right. And once you see that someone has a strategy that involves making you unhappy, you can have a new strategy that involves not dancing with their strategy.
- [38:11]
Duff
And you know from experience and the people that you've seen who can break through with that end up being some of the happiest people that you know. Even the story they tell themselves, because they can't be right.
- [38:22]
Seth Godin
Because they have agency. Right. That they have decided that they have enough. And that is something that you can have that no billionaire will ever have. And you can choose that to have enough.
- [38:39]
Duff
Brilliant. Seth, what's something that you don't get asked about enough that you wish you got asked about more?
- [38:49]
Seth Godin
You know, I am really lucky that I don't have an editor and I can type and people will read it.
- [38:57]
Duff
Yeah.
- [38:58]
Seth Godin
But then I realize that that's true for everybody. So if there's something that I want people to ask me about, I just have to talk about it. And I'm not walking around hoping someone will ask me. When I was in high school, I was really hoping someone would ask me out, tell me I was a good person, invite me to dinner, whatever it was. Because it felt like I didn't have any agency. And the world has changed so much that it's critical to understand you have agency. That means you have responsibility to use it. And if you deny the agency, you get to whine about it. Great. If that makes you happy. But if you see it, if you want to write, write. If you want to sing, sing. If you want to post your poetry, please do. You don't need to get picked. There are no important poetry magazines that are busy going through their Rolodex hoping to find you. They don't exist. Go do it yourself. And you know my friend Sarah Kay, who I think her TED Talk is the only talk where she got two standing ovations in one talk. Sarah Kay didn't have a license to start making spoken word poetry when she was 16. She just did. And so can we. And I know that's scary, but it's also magic.
- [40:14]
Duff
Sure. I mean, that's also making your own table. Right. Rather than waiting for the invitation to do that. Making your own table and saying, I'm going to do this. If you'd like to join your more than one, welcome to. Yeah, that resonates with me, too. Like, I. I wrote my first book about anxiety when I was getting my degree, so not afterward. But I was in my pre doctoral internship, so I had a master's degree. I was. I was nobody right and people like, don't you have to. Don't you have to, like, wait till after? Don't you have to get licensed? You know, I'm like, I don't think so. And then it turns out, no, you don't. Brilliant. I want to start the process of wrapping up to be respectful of your time and everything. What else do you want people to know about the book that's coming out that we haven't already touched on? What else do you want people to know so that they can know if it's a good one for them?
- [41:11]
Seth Godin
Okay, so I posted more and more excerpts at Seth's blog tis. And I'm not interested in selling books. My publisher wishes I was. I'm not. I'm interested in helping people change. And I just want to. I touched on it earlier, but there is a very specific set of challenges that some people have where they have, you know, crippling anxiety or they have other things that frees them in place. I'm not talking to those folks because I don't have personal experience or a degree to help you with that. Go get the kind of help that can help you. But many people, in fact just about everyone I've met, stumbles sometimes with the choices they need to make. They stumble sometime with the narrative of what they are telling themselves about the world around them. People generally succeed not because of talent, but because of skill. And skill comes from practice and commitment, and that's another place that we stumble. And so it may seem like the deck is stacked against you, but there's a deck. And understanding that there's a deck, understanding what cards are in the deck, understanding that you can play crazy eights, you don't have to play poker. These are important adult decisions. And we can undo a lot of the high school brainwashing, and we can learn to see what marketers are doing to us, not for us. And so I wrote the book so that we would talk about it. I wrote it so that you and I could have this conversation. But it won't help if people just listen to us. It will only help if they go have a conversation. And it's that iterative connective scaffolding of let's talk about, who's it for? What's it for? What is the change we seek to make that maybe we can turn tomorrow into what it's possible to be.
- [43:09]
Duff
So then, on that note, what would be one action you might have people take? If you could, you know, have everybody listening take an action, what might it be?
- [43:21]
Seth Godin
I think we have Done a good job of not having honest conversations about our strategy. It's supposed to be a secret. Is there something wrong with us? If we can announce what our strategy is, it makes us Machiavellian or something, and we need to get comfortable just talking about it. Right. My strategy is I need to feed a family of eight tonight, and I only got five bucks, so I'm not going to pretend we're having a steak dinner. We're going to have fun doing this. That's my strategy. That's my goal. That's who it's for. That's what it's for. And suddenly, I don't feel guilty anymore. I feel great, because instead of apologizing for the fact that I didn't spend $40 on a piece of dead cow, I get to celebrate the fact that we put $40 into the bank so that we could go do something together three months from now. Right? Saying it out loud, announcing the strategy, gives us the chance to leave out the part of. And then a miracle happens. Because it's that wishful thinking that wears us out. That if you know you are on a path, it is generative because, you know one more step gets you one step closer to where you're going.
- [44:37]
Duff
So say it out loud. Be real about it.
- [44:39]
Seth Godin
Yeah.
- [44:41]
Duff
Great. Seth, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I really, really appreciate your time. There's some really cool insights from here, and I'm really excited for the book to come out. I know you're not trying to sell books, but I hope that it reaches a lot of people and helps a lot of people.
- [44:57]
Seth Godin
Well, thank you, Duff. I think people don't realize how hard you're working, how often you show up, how you're digging in and turning on lights for people. And I have such respect for people who show up on the regular. So thank you for what you're doing. It matters.