Seth Godin: The Smallest Viable Audience and the Work That Might Not Work [From the Archive]

[00:00:01] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Presenting the Archive. Classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

[00:00:28] Every hit changes the people it touches. It doesn't simply entertain them, it makes a change happen. What change am I trying to make here? And this runs counter to our allergy of being criticized. Because if you don't want to be criticized, you have to be invisible, you have to fit in all the way. And the problem with fitting in is then you're not changing anybody.

[00:00:55] But all of the breakthroughs, all of the magic happens when you do something that might not work. And it's the things that might not work that are generous. That's where art lives. That's where innovation lives. That's where the magic happens. And I would say a lot of this is about self-awareness. So you have to be aware, you have to put an arm's length distance between your belief in the craft and then society's beliefs in the craft. Exactly right.

[00:01:33] So I've got, once again, Seth Godin on the podcast. Seth, welcome. A privilege. It's good to see you again. I almost don't even know how to intro you. You've written like a gazillion bestselling books. Let's get to the good stuff then. We'll talk. But I want to mention though, your books are all fascinating. Like I, your first book I ever read was Purple Cow, which is probably many people's intro to you, which was an amazing book about marketing that still applies. And I also, maybe like a year ago, I read, you'll have to remind me of Grace or Graceful.

[00:02:01] Yeah. Graceful was an excerpt from Lynchpin. I just love that book. Thank you. It's just how to act in the world with grace. And I just thought it was such a moving book. And you've written so many books about marketing. You've, you've written, as you've mentioned, you've written about 7,000 posts on your blog. You blog every single day, which is sort of, and you've also written about how you avoid writer's block, which is how you've been able to write 7,000 posts. We'll talk about that a little bit. All of your posts are so insightful.

[00:02:30] You're such a smart thinker. But now more recently, you've started this podcast, Akimbo, which again, as I'm listening to it, I'm thinking to myself and other people who listen to it with me. It's like, you're just, you're such a thinker. There's no way to really describe. Thanks. You're like, you're like this modern philosopher, which I don't know if you would describe yourself that way. I don't view you as like a businessman, marketer, writer. I really think of you as like this modern day philosopher.

[00:02:58] And even though your, your origin story in my mind, and you talk about origin stories in one of your podcasts, but my origin story for you is you, you were in the marketing business for many years, decades. You started a business, sold it to Yahoo, then started writing books, initially focused on marketing. So I initially, I think you were a businessman, marketer, but you really transformed into so many other things. And Akimbo, your podcast, there's so many interesting topics you've covered in such a short amount of time. And we'll discuss some of them. But what made you start a podcast?

[00:03:29] Well, I've been thinking about a podcast for seven years. I did a retreat six or seven years ago and recorded the whole thing for people who couldn't come. And then we broke it into 14 pieces and made it into a podcast. This was your video podcast that I always saw on the iTunes. It wasn't videoed. It was just audio. It was the number one business podcast for years and years and years because no one else had a podcast.

[00:03:51] But I resisted the temptation to have a podcast, a real one, because I know people from radio like Krista Tippett. And it took me months to undo who I thought they were because of the intimacy of listening to them every week on the radio. Why did you have to undo who they were? Because that's not who she is. She's someone on the radio, but in real life, she's my friend.

[00:04:16] And the faux intimacy of audio is different than the faux intimacy of print. Because when you read something in print, the voice in your head is your voice. But when you listen to audio, the voice is the other person's voice. And I was worried that once you give that intimacy away, you can't take it back. And so I knew the kind of podcast I wanted to make. And I was taking notes about it. And I knew I wanted to be the only guest. And I knew it wanted to be short and blah, blah, blah. But I just resisted.

[00:04:44] And then probably too late on the curve, I said, sure, we'll do it now. But it's not a commercial venture. It's not designed to be the most popular podcast. It's just, can I show up and do what I do, which is teach people and help them see the world a little differently? And I've been doing that for a really long time. And a podcast is a fun way to do it. You've been doing that for years and years and years in your writing and on your blog and so on. Why did you think that now's the time that, okay, podcast is a new outlet to do that?

[00:05:13] Because a lot of these topics you also write about. Yeah. So as you and I were talking about earlier, your insight was people don't consume media the same way. The attention spans keep getting shorter. Oh, look, a puppy, right? And a podcast, it turns out, gets to a different part of the brain, a different kind of listener in a different way. I can take my time. They're not going to check their email because they're driving. I hope they're not going to check their email. So it's about being in the medium that has two things.

[00:05:42] One, that your reader, listener wants to be in. And two, this is really important, where you are doing the work you are proud of. So I'm not going on Twitter. I'm not interested in going on Twitter because even though people want to consume my tweets, I don't want to write my tweets because I wouldn't be proud of the change I was making in order to make Twitter work for me. Whereas in a podcast, I feel like this is a place where I can plant the seeds I want to plant. And if that's the way they want to absorb it, then we have a deal.

[00:06:12] You said you wanted only yourself as a guest. I really find that to be a fascinating format. For the past five years, I've been doing this podcast, and I would say 99% of my podcasts have been with a guest. Sure. But lately, I've been thinking also, oh, you know, sometimes I have things to say where there is no guest. And so I've been debating changing formats. So I've been listening to your podcast to see how it works. And it works great. It does require it to be a little shorter because it's kind of like the talking head phenomenon on TV.

[00:06:41] Nobody wants to just watch a talking head. But with it shorter, it really works. And you're hitting a couple different topics. You have nice break points. Yeah. And I think you are multi-patient and omnivorous enough to do the same thing, right? Which is you have to make an assertion. It's not interesting if there isn't an assertion. What are you saying that's not obvious? How do you support that point of view? And if you can't do it in 15 minutes, you probably can't do it at all. That's so interesting.

[00:07:10] And, you know, I was going to say, and you started to bring it up just then, there is an almost formula to your podcast in the sense that you kind of take a belief that is opposite of or slightly different from a commonly held belief, and then you spend the rest of the podcast defending your perspective that is new for many people. And I find that to be, you say you're not trying to have a hit podcast, but I find that to be a good formula for making a hit podcast or a hit anything.

[00:07:39] Well, yes. I think that there's a distinction. It's a thought reversal. There's a distinction between Malcolm and me. There are two distinctions. One is he's significantly more successful and popular than me. But the second one is part of Malcolm Gladwell's approach, the podcast is called Revisionist History, is to deliberately go the opposite direction. I'm more focused on overlooked, underthought, ignored, or most of all, the thing you're afraid to confront.

[00:08:08] So my best posts, people say, are obvious. I like that. I like that I said something that after you read it, you said, of course. But if I had asked you before you read it, you wouldn't even have had it on your radar. Right. And you mentioned the same thing in your podcast and your Akimbo podcast about hits, in the one titled Hitsville, that after somebody sees a hit, they often say, oh, of course that was a hit.

[00:08:36] But nobody ever predicted, could have predicted that thing would have been a hit. You know, like the Da Vinci Code you use as an example or, you know, size, Gangnam style. And so I wanted to maybe, I wanted to talk about a couple of your podcasts because I thought some of the ideas were so interesting. But let's start with Hitsville, which I think was, you've been doing it in seasons as well. And I think that was the season before this one or maybe the first season. It was the first episode or the second episode. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:01] So in Hitsville, you talk about first, there are platforms for creating hits. Like Amazon is this platform where you're going to find many books that aren't in your local bookstore. There's going to be millions and millions of books, whereas a local bookstore will have 10,000 books. So there's different opportunities for hits to occur because many more books could be sold there. But you don't want to live on the long, what you call the long tail, what Chris Anderson calls the long tail. So let's talk about that for a second because I feel like in the beginning

[00:09:31] of that podcast, you're talking more about the platforms rather than the hits themselves and the ideas behind the hits. So maybe just how are you thinking about... So why is this important to the typical person? The reason it's important is we've gone from 50,000 books published a year to millions of books. We've gone from a few people have a radio show to a million people have a podcast. We've gone from no one has a blog to 80... So all of a sudden, everyone is out there with their stuff.

[00:10:00] And the platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, iTunes, they all need creators to show up with their stuff. Because if there's no one showing up with stuff, there's nothing to buy. And what they've done is built this game where they've told you that if you don't have a hit, if you don't have the most followers, if you haven't hit number one, if you haven't earned the most money, you're somehow defective. And so our culture has shifted to lots and lots of, quote, ordinary people

[00:10:28] wanting to have a hit in whatever space they're in. And we've taught people that if you don't have a hit, you sort of have to apologize for it. And the thing is, as Chris Anderson pointed out in his book, the long tail benefits the person who owns the platform. So Amazon doesn't care what books sell. iTunes doesn't care what music sells. They're going to sell all of it. So by selling all of it, they open the door for lots of people to show up.

[00:10:56] Here's the problem, the trap. The problem is, if you're making Jamaican polka music, and you're way out on the edge of the long tail, you're probably selling one track a day. That's typical. Many songs on the iTunes store sell zero. That you're busy making a podcast, and you have 100 listeners. You're way out on the edge. Well, Apple's fine with that. But you're not. So what do you do about it? And that's what I was trying to point out in the podcast is a couple of things.

[00:11:25] One is that editors and people like editors can pick the hits. The answer is they can't. Never in history. Never. And number two is, we believe that somehow we can game our way to the top. And I want to argue we shouldn't try. It's funny. I just want to talk about that point. A lot of these platforms are set up to make you think you can game your way to the top. So for instance, take Amazon as a great example. Let's say you write a book. Many people want to write books. Many people want to write best-selling books.

[00:11:54] Amazon's created so many categories. Even if you don't hit number one in the entire Amazon store, you can always tell your friends, oh yeah, I hit number one in paranormal fantasies for kids ages two to four. Right. So there's thousands of categories where you could potentially hit number one. And you can even game that. I'm going to pick the category. They let you pick three categories. I find many people pick categories that have nothing to do with their book just so they can be number one in that category. Right. And that bragging isn't working anymore.

[00:12:23] You and I know that the New York Times bestseller list is completely gamed from now on. And even bought. Yeah, bought. $40,000, you can buy yourself a slot. $80,000, you can be number one. And lots of people have done this. Why? Because then they get to brag that they have a number one bestseller, which means they think that then they'll get speaking gigs and blah, blah, blah, and it'll pay for itself. So the people who matter now understand it means nothing to be a number one New York Times bestseller. Nothing. So don't even try.

[00:12:53] My argument is, instead of trying to reach the large undifferentiated masses, seek the smallest viable audience. And this is what my new book is about. The smallest viable audience does several things for you. First of all, it requires you to make better work. Because that small group, if there's only 500 people who are going to be in the core group you're serving, you better delight them. You better blow them away. Because otherwise they won't tell their friends. Number two is,

[00:13:23] it is truly achievable. If you can describe the 500 people you seek to serve, you can find them. You can afford to reach them. So it brings our work to a new grounding, a foundation where we can say, I sought to serve these 500 people, to change them, to influence them, to delight them. And I did. And if you can say that, now it's not up to Amazon. It's not up to Netflix. It's up to you and your relationship with that group.

[00:13:50] It's so funny because this brings up several things. One is Kevin Kelly's great essay, of course, A Thousand True Followers. The idea is that you need a thousand super devoted followers, basically, and you can make a living. The other is, it reminds me of your last book, which is this massive, beautiful, beautiful book. And I totally forget the title. I think I have early onset Alzheimer's. This might not work. This might not work. And it was just a beautiful book. It did blow me away.

[00:14:19] And you came on the podcast to talk about it, where you only sold 500 copies, right? How many copies? There were 5,000 copies. 5,000. Right. And that, I refused to make more. So if, once you know that, right? Once you know the revenue is going to be a million dollars, there's going to be 5,000 readers, it's going to be 17 and a half pounds, it's going to be 800 pages, go make something you are proud of. And that's enough. Because if I had tried to make it into a hit, I would have compromised every one of the elements of it.

[00:14:49] 100,000 people wouldn't have bought a book that big and that extraordinary. So I would have made it less of it. And then what would I have gotten in the end? Yeah. Because I guess when you try to make something for the masses, for millions and millions of people, you might think to yourself, okay, well, if I only hit one 10th of that, I'm still selling a lot. But the problem is you might just totally bomb. You never hit one 10th. But okay, I'm going to, you bring up size Gangnam Style. And I remember watching the video once,

[00:15:19] the development of size Gangnam Style. And you see Cy, every quarter second of that video, he's working hard in the editing to make that quarter second funny and interesting. Sure. So, and he's aiming for a hit for the masses. Well, but what we didn't see are the 500 videos of the 500 other people who spent even more time than he did also doing what he did and none of them succeeded. So, Cy, which his video has been seen

[00:15:49] more than 2 billion times, right? How does that happen? We don't know how it happens and we know we cannot repeat it. It is not based on his talent because if it was, the one after that and the one after that and the one after that would be successful and he's invisible now. He's gone. Why? Did something break inside of him? No. It's that his talent was never the point. You have to be good enough and then after that, it's a giant spin in the wheel and the arrogance of Western civilization is to say,

[00:16:18] I won the spin, therefore, I must be good, right? That's not necessarily the case. And you mentioned the concept of whales that there are a few people in each tale and each platform who kind of, let's say, dominate the message of that platform. And so, you look at the background of almost all these hits and there's usually someone like a Justin Bieber who tweets, oh my God, I just saw the most amazing video size Gangnam style and then it takes off from there. And without that one tweet, it never would have caught fire. Yeah,

[00:16:48] this is, you know, Malcolm wrote about this in The Tipping Point and it's been discussed a lot. Duncan at Columbia goes into this a lot too. There's plenty of evidence that that's not actually what happens. That Justin came later in the process for something like that. that usually it begins with people we don't expect it to begin with. Yeah, Oprah needs to anoint somebody once a month. And if you can get picked by Oprah, if you can get picked by Justin Bieber,

[00:17:18] go for it. I'm not opposed to that. But don't bet your happiness and your work on that magic happening. It's way more likely that what's going to happen is a small group of committed people are going to come out of nowhere around your thing and in epidemiology there's this concept of R0, R with a zero after it which is how many people who got a disease infect, how many do they infect? And if it's over one it means you have

[00:17:47] a pandemic on your hands. So it's very rare for something to go over one. That one person gets you one person gets you one person because that's infinity. For something like the flu to spread there's moments when it goes over one but usually it goes back down. So when we make a piece of work that we want to spread it's a mistake to try to get the gatekeeper to like it. The correct answer is to find the 500 people or the 1,000 people who cannot go to bed tonight without telling somebody else because then R is not

[00:18:17] is over one. Then we have a pandemic on our hands and then the question is will the people after that and the people after that. So you said Purple Cow was one of the first books of mine you read. Why did it spread? It's not better or worse written than my other books. It spread because what happened was the first I seeded it to 3,000 people. Those 3,000 people got it in a milk carton and some of them left it on their desk. You don't usually leave a book on your desk and if you do everyone ignores it but if there's a milk carton

[00:18:47] on your desk your co-workers might ask about it. So it was an example of what it was about but the real win was I gave you a term to use in a meeting and at the meeting you could say to your art director or your product development people what we need here is a Purple Cow and there wasn't a term for that before but because you had the term and using the term would make you feel good you used it and because you used it people talked about the term and when people talked about the term they needed to know what it meant and when they needed

[00:19:16] to know what it meant they would go by the book. Okay but let me question on that so you mentioned Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point I could think of other books like Freakonomics or even my book Choose Yourself where we sort of not quite invent a term but create a philosophy around a term and almost define that philosophy around a specific term like you change the meaning of the word the words Purple Cow Malcolm Gladwell changed the meaning of the tipping point or at least made his name associated with that phrase

[00:19:45] so you can argue then okay if I want to create a hit the very first and you've told me this before what makes a best selling book not what's inside the pages but what people see when they first look at it one of the things they see is the cover one of the things they see is the title so you can start to plan a hit based on what people's first reactions are to what they see well let me title for instance let me try it with a little more nuance which is every hit

[00:20:15] changes the people it touches it doesn't simply entertain them it makes a change happen and that's what marketers do we make change happen but that requires making an assertion saying I want you to feel this feeling I want you to believe this belief and once you see it you can't unsee it so that change has to happen before you slap a title on it before you make a cover you say what change am I trying to make here in the way

[00:20:50] of being criticized because if you don't want to be criticized you have to be invisible you have to fit in all the way and so if we look at what most people do on social media what most people do in their day job is they seek to fit in and the problem with fitting in is then you're not changing anybody so let's take akimbo as an example what's the change you want to see overall with this podcast what's the change you want to see happen I think that there are people

[00:21:19] who feel under challenged about the way they think about culture they would like to think about culture more deeply they would like to change the culture so akimbo means two things it means standing with your arms folded in a position of power or your hands I had to look that up by the way or your hands on your hips because I've seen it in a sentence but I've never seen it by itself like wonder woman yeah so you have on akimbo.link you have the woman standing to the side looking fierce exactly has that strong stance

[00:21:49] exactly but where did that come from it comes from the idea of the bend in the river the bend in the river is that crook akimbo from the Norse or whatever so I am making a podcast for people who want to change the culture for the better if you want to change the culture for the better it's good to know the geography of the culture and what causes it to change and so the episode that I just finished is about how we are driven by our primary senses like smell even though we

[00:22:18] can't narrate them they just go straight to our amygdala and shift us well once you start to see that you will see it in a lot of places so why does your chiropractor office feel different than your surgeon's office because when you walk into the surgeon's office you're in a different mental state and emotional state than when you walk into that cheap paneled chiropractor's office so why did the chiropractor do that because for not a lot of money she could have shifted your state into one where her placebo would work even better and once you start

[00:22:48] to see these breadcrumbs that I'm leaving behind I think you'll become better at changing the culture that's the change I'm trying to make but like everything seems like I know I keep focusing on the hits bill but you've inadvertently or or advertently mentioned concepts from several of your other podcasts it seems like part of the concept here is that there's a lot of randomness that happens and how do you kind of get a little bit of control over that randomness so again in hitsville

[00:23:18] you mentioned you want to not just make a post that's a hit you're going to also be a mini platform yourself you're going to create 7 ,000 blog posts and overall your collection might be a hit collection because you have more control just by the sheer mass so any one of these things could be hit or all together they could be mini hits and together then the collection's a hit the tactic you're talking about is a good one but there's a bigger thing behind it that's really insightful which is

[00:23:46] the arc of all the work here is about two things that I believe change all of us which are fear and status fear because we're all going to die because of marketing conflate that with we'll bring the wrong purse to a party which is the same as dying right and status which is the flip side of it is who gets to eat lunch first who gets to water at the oasis how do I move up where is my standing and so my theory is that the culture is being

[00:24:15] corrupted to make us more fearful and to use status as a weapon to bring shame associated with status and this is not just a taste culture this is history back when we were but for the last 50 years it's been commercialized and amplified those two things that we do it on purpose and so that's where a lot of public misogyny and racism starts to show its face because we're using fear and status so what I'm trying to help people understand is one if a random event goes

[00:24:44] against you do not take it personally in fact you should expect it because that's what makes it a random event that means you shouldn't then cower in fear you should expect that that thing you're launching isn't going to be a hit how do you organize so that it's fine that it's not and that's the thing with 7000 blog posts I've never once had a blog post that won the internet never once had a blog post that got millions of visits not once and that's fine with me because that's

[00:25:14] not what I'm trying to do I know how to write that kind of link bait I don't want to do that and then the other one is status which is when you look in the mirror and measure yourself who are you measuring yourself with and against so if you decide to become a stand-up comic does it mean that you're not a good one if you're not as famous as Jerry Seinfeld like is that your measure is your measure how many laughs you got tonight because that's foolish because maybe everyone in the audience only speaks Dutch and that's why you didn't get a lot of laughs tonight you have

[00:25:43] to figure out how to do it over time and measure the right things so what we teach in the Alt-MBA over and over and over again is the dance between the fear and the status because if you get clear about that and you can act in ways where the fear doesn't get in the way of your work and you can be generous so that status isn't the short-term goal it's the long-term impact you can make way more change happen than you ever expected I think that's really important and you bring that up in another podcast all your

[00:26:13] podcasts are great so I don't know which one it was in but basically the idea that let's say you write a book you write the book but now you have to think about what does the editor think what is the marketing department think what is the publisher thing what is the publishing industry magazines think what is the bestsellers let's say so there's like 19 out of 20 things that you have to think about when you write a book instead of just the craft of writing so and so the idea is people should just go back to the craft of writing write the next book or

[00:26:42] rewrite their book or whatever and I think that's really important in any situation because we can't control the 19 out of 20 things and I think that's kind of the theme of a lot of your work and it makes it even worse when we think we can control them because so we played a lot of croquet when I was growing up in my bumpy backyard and the thing about croquet is you got to go left to go through that hoop and then right to go through that hoop and then left to hit that pole right zoom zoom zoom and the

[00:27:11] number of people you have to have say I love your book to get it through the traditional channel makes your book worse and it makes your book more average because each one of those people while they mean well is trying to please a conservative constituency so my argument is we just blew this whole thing up the long tail is here so instead of racing back to the old days and worrying about getting through all the filters let's go to a new place where we say it's not for you it's not for

[00:27:40] you here it is it's for you and it's pure it's exactly what I wanted to make for you and when we look you know sweet green the salad bar chain in New York doesn't sell french fries now there's a probably not a board meeting but one could imagine one where someone on the board says but some people love french fries let's also serve french fries because then those people will have something to eat and you keep broadening it and broadening it and broadening it and the next thing you know you're

[00:28:09] Roy Rogers Sbarro junkie stuff that's not what they did they said no it's not for those people it's for these people no filters these people and as soon as you go public that all gets wrecked because the public markets say you got to get bigger and bigger and bigger so it gets averaged down and then you do get compared to the ones who won the long tail like McDonald's yeah exactly so I'm not in favor of most people who care having their thing eventually go public I think if you care keep

[00:28:39] making the thing you care about and it's interesting to have watched Howard Schultz at Starbucks dance that dance for 20 years of saying we know we could make more money by serving soft serve we're not gonna we're gonna do this work we're proud of instead and it doesn't maximize return on investment it maximizes the cultural yield of your work take a quick break if you like this episode I'd really really appreciate it would mean so much to me please share it with your friends and

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[00:30:06] offering 15% off any annual plan and that discount is only available through my link again that's storyblocks.com slash James for 15% off annual plans it's become essential to my workflow check it out Howard Schultz is a great example it seems to me whenever he felt like Starbucks was going kind of off course it's almost like he'd visit Italy and go back

[00:30:36] to those original cafes that I don't know lit his heart on fire and say no no we got to just go back to what lights my heart on fire and I feel like you do the same thing like you're what lights your heart on fire is kind of taking these conceptions of okay you know this is what makes a hit or this is you know coincidences are this or you know you need to have a blog for this reason or I don't know all these things that you do and you kind of what you

[00:31:04] do is specifically if I'm going to try to put a formula to it is take these things that you care about and think about and kind of twist the way people normally look at it not on purpose no I don't the formula is here's a microphone we gave you a microphone and it's a special kind of open mic night because you won't get thrown off stage but people might leave the room but you have a microphone what are you going to do with it my formula is I wake up in

[00:31:33] the morning and I think about the people I seek to serve I know I have a microphone I am not trying to get more people to come to the club I am not trying to generate revenue I just want to teach the people who want to go where I want to go that's all I do and I don't reverse engineer and say well if I did this it would work even better I say this is an art project this is a chance to contribute to the culture that as I want it to be and I understand that if I picked a fight

[00:32:02] with someone my blog traffic would go up I don't want to do that even though it costs me approval it costs me clicks so I don't look at my stats I don't know how many people visited my blog yesterday I don't know how many copies of a book I sell by refusing to know those things by not reading my Amazon reviews I make it so I can actually do my work so if we're having a meta conversation here the formula is no matter what it is you do that is a good

[00:32:32] path because it makes it more likely you will get what you seek than if you try to reverse engineer random events right so you're saying like let's say what you do is writing or what you do is a certain kind of business get rid of distractions like oh what's my Amazon sales rank on my book that's sort of meaningless it's you know don't focus on the latest news about the Kardashians because that might not have nothing to do with improving my craft as a writer focus on what you do and

[00:33:01] then I think also focus on your set you've said over and over try to figure out who your audience is and we spoke about this before the podcast audience selection versus audience development don't try to educate a million people to be your fans what's the audience you really are aiming for that you could really focus a message to that you know they're going to listen to and how do you select your audience like what's the audience you're going so if I was going to say this in six words that people could write down it's really simple choose your

[00:33:28] customers choose your future if you're a freelancer and you have bad clients you're going to be bad freelancer if you're a freelancer you have great clients you're going to get better clients it goes on and on and on if you're a doctor it doesn't matter what it is choose your customers choose your future and who are your customers my customers are people who are thirsty dissatisfied and generous what do you mean by generous because I like that phrase so I find the whole Ayn Randian Atlas Shrugged thing complete

[00:33:58] nonsense it's the you know fine for 14 year olds but we had plenty of things we did when we were 14 that we don't take seriously this idea that you need to be selfish is that some sort of way to win and that we should keep track of bank balances as some sort of indication of our worth makes no sense to me what it means to be generous is to say I'm going to expend emotional labor which is not the physical labor of digging a ditch but the difficult labor of confronting my fear

[00:34:25] putting aside my short-term needs to help other people get where they're going because I believe if we can go to that place all of us will benefit right zigzagli said you can help if you have enough other people will get what they want you'll get what you want I just like the first half of that if you just help enough other people get what they want period that if we lived in a community where that's what was going on I think would be a good place because in the connection economy

[00:34:53] connection creates value who connects to us we're connected to people we're generous to we're connected to people we see because people want to be seen people don't want to be lonely they don't want to be objectified they want to be seen so my ideal reader listener whatever is somebody who looks at this opportunity says oh I got a mic right tell me how to be generous to the people I care about because if we can do that it becomes a virtuous cycle that doesn't tear

[00:35:22] everything down it builds everything up because I think under the undercurrent of a lot of what you're saying is those 5,000 people say they're not that might be the audience you're targeting but there's something else it seems like you're targeting which is you want to create content that's shareable so it's easy for you to create content that those 5,000 people will like and they'll consume it because they've been fans of yours for years and they've read all your books and they'll say oh here's another set of everything I'll buy it but you want to

[00:35:51] kind of always find that what you do push yourself to say what's new so that they can say to their friend who might not have heard of you hey you have to read this this will change your life pretty close I've said I want to be judged not by my work but by what the people who learned from me taught other people so I don't want people to tell other people about me I want people to teach other people and if I don't get credit it's fine with me that that second order

[00:36:20] teaching shows me that I did a good job yeah and it's it's related to all this math like about network effects so so for instance a simple example that is if you want to use LinkedIn to get a job you don't go to your first level connections you go to your second level connections your your weaker ties and they're the ones that are most likely to help you find a job in part because a there's more of them but I don't know I don't know what the reason for this network

[00:36:50] effect is but somehow if your weaker ties appreciate what you're doing you know kind of the connections of your connections and that shows you're having an impact it's even cooler than that so the people run LinkedIn told me that more than 70% of their revenue comes from things you don't even see not from in mail stuff like that it comes from recruiters paying LinkedIn to help them find people like you the best way to get a job using LinkedIn is to be amazing because if you

[00:37:19] are amazing and you keep doing amazing work people will come find you that's what makes it work so the reason that second order effects are better than first order effects is first order effects are based on the connection we have with people on an emotional level who know us there is shame associated with not helping us there are status associated in this interpersonal relationship with helping us that disappears for second order effects because there's nothing at stake other than wow something amazing is

[00:37:49] happening here I better tell other people so that's the part that people miss it's what they miss about SEO it's what they miss about LinkedIn it's what they miss about Amazon which is the place to do the work is not in the hustle the place to do the work happens long before the hustle where you are the person they want to find if you become the person they want to find you don't have to spend a lot of time getting found I totally agree I think the whole concept of SEO feels very fake

[00:38:17] to me because if you have nothing to say there's nothing to SEO but for you how do you and this sounds like a naive question but it's a question I want to know the answer to and maybe other people how do you become amazing I mean obviously those sit every day and work at your craft like you write your blog post every day you do this podcast now on a regular basis but what's if you could formalize it how do you become amazing right and that's the essence of the work

[00:38:46] and so we've spent a bunch of time talking about some of the surface stuff but the work is the emotional labor of confronting our fear can't make it go away but you can dance with it and we live in a culture with more neophiliacs than ever before what's a neo neophiliac people who like the new and so something's new now for four days not four months used to be a movie would run in the theaters for a year now a movie runs in the theater for two weeks and we say that's old

[00:39:16] what's next so given that there's so much neophilia there's a demand for new that's good but creating new is really hard because what everyone wants to do is buy a dummies book see the structure follow the rules do the bullet points and be done knowing it's going to work but all of the breakthroughs all of the magic happens when you do something that might not work and it's the things that might not work that are generous that's where art

[00:39:45] lives that's where innovation lives that's where the magic happens so let me think of that the things that might not work that's where the generous is right and so so give me an example like because I oh because I listen to your podcast I've listened to pretty much all of them and I always wonder did he just wake up and think about this odd story of coincidences this guy who had a baby fell on him you know the same baby two years in a row

[00:40:12] like where where do these you know uh take take your quote you just said and apply it to that example okay so um let me give you a public example first and I'll talk about the baby thing so Warby Parker is saving Americans hundreds of millions of dollars by attacking an Italian conglomerate that's a multi-billion dollar company that makes all the eyeglasses in the world Warby was started by a bunch of

[00:40:39] kids at UPenn at Wharton and it worked but all of their advisors and all the people who trusted they trusted said nah that's never going to work Adam Grant mentions this in exactly Adam Grant is never going to work so they did something that might not work and as a result large numbers of people benefited plenty of their classmates built another version of this or another version of that didn't work so I got a podcast coming up I know in the back

[00:41:08] of my head I have a microphone what am I going to talk about and uh my art director creative director Alex Peck mentions James Cook to me for something else that I write about and the very next day I run into James Cook on Wikipedia twice in 20 years and that's a coincidence and I feel that feeling we all get when we get a coincidence I say to myself is that feeling right is it okay that I feel this feeling what could I teach people about coincidences that

[00:41:37] might rub them the wrong way but is actually true so I said all right I'm going to need some really juicy coincidences here so I start googling for juicy coincidences and then I think about oh wait there's that doppelganger I met and that coincidence happened and I got this other one so now I got seven coincidences three that I found in the outside world four that happened to me I trust some lines between them and I say the obvious thing to say about coincidences is this I shouldn't say anything obvious because everyone go of course what's the non-obvious insight that we can tell

[00:42:06] ourselves about coincidences that might help us make better decisions going forward deal with con men bring better work to the world oh I need a couple more dots to make that argument so I search some more all right now I got enough anecdotes this isn't proof I just want to describe these anecdotes to people and if they're like me when they hear them they'll come to the conclusion I came to and I'm not saying I'm right I'm just saying look at these dots when you look at all

[00:42:34] these dots what do you think and if you of course then it was a good podcast and so what's what's to you a bad example where you were going down an idea that you thought initially was interesting like for instance this coincidence one I thought it was a great podcast you bring up great anecdotes part of your amazing ability as a podcaster is your ability to tell a great story but like the coincidences idea you're kind of on the gray area of things people know and things people don't know

[00:43:03] because people know that okay over the course of a lifetime odds are you're going to experience five or six coincidences amazing coincidences you would think but that's not what my email says right so so that's why I say it's in the gray area like I had heard the concept before but then I really appreciated your storytelling and the examples and it made me think further about the issue whereas some people might not know the concept at all and so the other thing I'm curious about is are you just a massive

[00:43:30] reader so that you're being exposed to thousands of ideas that people might think are common ideas I don't I don't think I work as hard as people think I do and I know I don't read as much as I would like or as I used to but what person who admits that but I'm a collector right so something happens to me at the DMV right and I'm like there's this is gonna be a blog post it's gonna be a blog post a year from now

[00:43:57] five years now I'm remembering this story I don't remember where I parked I don't remember this I don't remember that but in that moment yeah that one and I feel like a talent scout like I'm guessing that when a talent scout meets the next big actor or model they remember that that's because what they're looking for so I'm always looking for that most of the time it ends in a trite dead end right so you will never hear me say that the

[00:44:23] secret of success is to work harder because we've heard that 10,000 times there's nothing interesting in saying work harder that doesn't rise to the level of me needing to teach it so will you start to think can I play with the idea the secret to success is to figure out how to work less yeah exactly not because I want to have that link bait headline but say well where would the nuance in that be and then that led to the idea of emotional labor that led to Steve Pressfield's The War of Art which led to the idea of the resistance

[00:44:53] which led to the amygdala which led to the fact that the fear can't go away which led to the fact that the reason emotional labor is so difficult is we're trying to make the fear go away because that's what we got taught to do which led to education which led to will this be on the test which led to will this get me into a famous college all in a giant circle and that's three years of my work life right there and I would say a lot of it and and we'll close up I know we have some time constraints a lot of this is about self-awareness so yeah when

[00:45:21] you when you get into an environment oh I wrote a book what's next and then you have the all of culture attacking you like well was it an amazon bestseller was the new york times exactly did everyone write you emails did everyone hate it like you get all the you have to be aware you have to put an arm's length distance between your belief in the craft and then society's beliefs exactly exactly right and so you know the documentary jiro dreams of sushi is fascinating yes because for 40

[00:45:50] years of this guy's life he chopped wood he carried water for 40 years of his life he had a craft and he didn't worry about the outside world he did his craft at the expense of his family but he and many too many tuna but he did his craft and then he got a michelin star and suddenly the whole thing shifts to the external right how hard is it to get a table what does this reviewer think of you what does this critic think

[00:46:16] of you and for me that's a tragedy because after it happened you don't see any joy in jiro's life anymore because he's always looking in the mirror he's always looking over his shoulder it's always that and that's not what he set out to do when he started but it's that awareness that the award wasn't the the reward right exactly and so what i'm trying to say to people over and over and over again is my opinion doesn't matter

[00:46:43] the skeptic's opinion doesn't matter the critic's opinion doesn't matter did you change someone for the better in a way that you're proud of and if you did that please do it again and and i think having the ability to change someone for the better you're saying focus a little bit on who you want to change and that might be based on your background and your experience your knowledge and then build up knowledge even more even more knowledge related to that and then kind of come up with these

[00:47:09] unintuitive uh ways to express it combined with storytelling yeah i'm sorry if i'm trying to formalize you too much i got it that i'm i'm put me down for that so so so let me ask you two questions and then you have to go how long have you been married 30-ish years 30-ish years uh can i mention your wife's bakery please she would love that what's the name of it called by the way bakery by the way bakery by the way it's gluten-free four locations one on 90th street here in

[00:47:38] manhattan uh what's the secret to a successful marriage i'm engaged i want to know i think the the secret has to be that there is no secret that's very unobvious um the the obvious things of listening and caring and creating space that there's two different people who are doing something together that they don't always agree but that they always are part of the together part

[00:48:07] and the leaving space for people to be who people are you know that's not going to work for everybody but that's all not a secret right it's just be a good person keep your promises show up with a smile on your face these are all things that we already know i love the leaving space idea because again it's related to audience selection versus audience development yeah exactly so you have you find the person you can

[00:48:33] you can leave space with yeah i mean there are people who say the secret of a good marriage is marrying the right person which is very flattering to the person that you married and i'm so pleased that i married the person that i married but it's not very helpful advice because you won't know till 20 years later if you marry the right person if that's the advice no i think the advice is there's seven billion

[00:48:55] people on the planet and we ought to be able to find enough space to engage with any of them not necessarily in a 50 year marriage but to be able to have the ability to see people as they wish to be seen to tell stories that are true to engage with others on a journey because all we have is time and we don't have that much right and it's when we try to you know force other people using um dominance not affiliation when we

[00:49:24] get all hung up on our status roles there's a thing in the times today that men are uncomfortable when their wives make more money than them well that's nonsense that's got put on you don't take that that the alternative is to say uh if you like being married be married but then like it because it's a choice and the stories we tell ourselves matter way more than the stories other people but just sort

[00:49:49] of saying one can get married to anybody and make it work i'm not ready to say anybody but i think if you look at all the data that's so easily available there's not a lot of correlation between marriages that work and demographics or even psychographics that are easily available that if we put all the data about everyone into a computer it's not clear it would find better spouses for each of us

[00:50:15] what i do know about our lives is the story we tell ourselves that narration is going 18 hours a day and it's that narration that changes so much of how we see the world and so much of how we do it's all cognitive behavioral therapy is about it's that noise in our head and so as a teacher i don't teach about marriage but i teach about the noise in our head i teach about the story we tell ourselves

[00:50:40] and it's hard to help someone change their story but that that is the kind of teaching that matters if you want to teach someone to be a great hockey player you don't teach them a slap shot you teach them how to think that they're a great hockey player because then they'll make the slap shot happen so other question last question i've been doing this podcast for five years with guests such as yourselves i had the most amazing guests in the world uh over the past five years like just

[00:51:08] it's just i'm so feel so grateful for it and i kind of want to change formats a little bit like i've been doing the same thing now for five years how would you change the format of this podcast what could i do better well it's so thrilling and challenging to have these conversations with you because you're erudite and generous and smart in these conversations and so i wouldn't change any of that i think if you are feeling restless why not make one out of every four podcasts a podcast with

[00:51:36] just you yeah start there i like that idea we've been doing that a little bit but uh i think i got to play with that more so seth going when's your when's your next book coming out comes out november it's called this is marketing this morning will you come on the podcast again for that if you'll have me excellent i'd love to talk about and akimbo i encourage everyone to listen to it i think we even had akimbo on an episode on yeah in the space of this podcast and i've listened to every episode

[00:52:02] they're brilliant like and people around me who are just casually listening i'm like who is this guy this is brilliant thank you so thanks once again seth for coming on the podcast it's a pleasure keep making a ruckus thanks oh and welcome to pluto phone if you know the name of the movie you'd like to

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