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Episode 373: Seth Godin
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Seth Godin is the author of more than 20 books, including his latest The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Sponsor Spotlight: Liquid IV
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and Everest get a load of this this episode is sponsored by liquid IV I gotta say this is a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities or if you just want to zhuzh up your water
00:00:13
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As some of you know, I'm training for the unsanctioned McKenzie Marathon, set for August 5th, and Liquid IV is in my bottle. It's some tasty stuff. Been a big fan of the lemon lime. It's non-GMO, free from gluten, dairy, and soy, so you know your burly vegan digs it. Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use the promo code CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything.
00:00:41
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If you order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CNF at liquidiv.com
Behind the Brand: Athletic Brewing
00:00:51
Speaker
Also, shout out to Athletic Brewing, the best damn non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug. I am a brand ambassador, and I want to celebrate this amazing product. If you go to athleticbrewing.com, use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout. You get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money, and they're not an official sponsor of the podcast. I just get points towards swag and beer. So give it a shot. Why not?
00:01:19
Speaker
I will tell you that one minute ago, I spilled a giant cup of hot tea and broke my honeybee mug. So we're going to be mourning that for a moment, but at least I didn't burn myself.
Meet the Host: Brendan O'Mara
00:01:36
Speaker
AC and efforts at CNF Pod, that creative nonfiction podcast, a show where I speak to bad ass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara and don't you forget it.
Guest Introduction: Seth Godin
00:01:47
Speaker
The incomparable and the generous and the brilliant Seth Godin is here to talk about his new book, The Song of Significance, a new manifesto for teams. When Seth talks about leadership and sticking your neck out there, you listen, you learn, and you feel the infinite possibility that is out there for each and every one of us.
00:02:09
Speaker
As you know, I'm something of a sad trombone, but when I read Seth's work, be it his daily blog, his weekly podcast, or his every two to four year book drops, it's like a shot of me 12. If only you can bottle that. Well, I guess the books are the bottle. At Seth.blog, you can read his daily riffs or you can check out his myriad of books like The Practice, This Is Marketing, The Icarus Deception, The Dip, and Purple Cow to name just a few.
00:02:39
Speaker
Make sure you're also heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit RageAgainstTheAlgorithm.substack.com. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. In the last message that, depending on when you downloaded this podcast or listened to it, it went out yesterday, June 1st.
00:02:59
Speaker
I also put a little poll at the end to see if you want it more frequently, be it every two weeks or three or weekly, in which case it would change forms.
Listener Engagement: Newsletter Frequency
00:03:10
Speaker
Well, the first in the month one would still be the list of stuff that goes up to 11.
00:03:16
Speaker
in my little essay, but maybe something else would be more book research or book writing related. Maybe another one would be the best of the podcast or something like a riff on the podcast. A short transcript or something. I don't know. Something to think about. I'm posing it to you. I know we get a lot of email. We have a lot of subscriptions. It's just a thought.
Growing the Podcast: Social Media Strategy
00:03:38
Speaker
If you dig this show, consider heading over to your social network of choice and maybe share a link up to it, tag the show at cnfpod on Twitter or at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram so we can grow the pie and get the CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. The show appears to be shrinking in footprint and I don't like seeing that. I don't like it at all.
00:04:03
Speaker
There's also Patreon.com. You could drop a few bucks in the hat if you gleaned some value from what we do here. Show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap.
00:04:12
Speaker
Most people I speak to on this show for several, they'll talk for several minutes at a time answering a question, which is wonderful, it's fine. And I have to do little by way of talking, it's more like steering. Seth is so economical and pithy with his answers that it can be difficult for someone like myself who lacks considerable amount of brain cells to keep pace.
00:04:36
Speaker
But it's great because you're able to get in a lot more. So it's a heavy fastball. If you know,
Seth's Writing Journey
00:04:43
Speaker
you know. It's my great honor to welcome Seth back to the podcast. All right.
00:04:59
Speaker
Your last book was The Practice, and now you've got a new one. And I wonder, just from book to book, how has your practice evolved as you look to tackle new books or not changed? It has changed quite a bit. And part of the shift is that I don't look to tackle new books. I used to think that I made a living making books. When I was a book packager, I made 120 books.
00:05:25
Speaker
I went to sleep knowing that in the morning I would wake up with a new book idea. If I didn't have a new book idea, I didn't eat. And after permission marketing, I saw myself as a published author because it was the best way I knew to teach people. But about six books ago, that shifted because there's so many other ways to reach people now that one of my books will reach one-tenth as many people as one of my blog posts. And so why bother?
00:05:56
Speaker
You only write a book, I think, in this field, if you have no choice, if the idea will not let you go. If the idea demands the heft and time and most important, the impact from the virality of handing someone a book. Handing someone a book is different than emailing them a link. So this is the most personal book I've done and I did it because I had no choice and because it needed to be said.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah. The you talk a lot about tension in the book. And when you when you're looking to embark on like, OK, this is when you have no choice to but to but to write the book at hand that is coming to you. What is the tension like internally when you're like, yeah, that's this is the this is the fork in the road I need to pick up.
Stress vs. Tension: A Positive Perspective
00:06:46
Speaker
So there's a difference between stress and tension.
00:06:49
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I hope we can all spend more time trying to remove stress from our life. Stress leads to trauma. Stress is wanting two things at the same time that you can't have. Stay and go. Do this, don't do this. We get paralyzed by stress. Whereas tension is a good thing. Tension is the feeling of this might not work. Tension is what happens when we pull back a rubber band before we let go to shoot it across the room.
00:07:16
Speaker
And so for me in my writing, the tension is always, am I doing justice to the person who is giving me the benefit of the doubt in this moment? Am I using too much shorthand or not enough? Am I showing up for them in a way that will land? I don't care about being perfect at all. I just care about making a difference.
00:07:40
Speaker
And when you're asking those questions, do you pose those questions to a confidant being an editor of some kind, some counsel that helps you metabolize those questions so you can get back to the work with good energy? So I'm glad you brought up the word editor, because a lot of people who might be listening to this perhaps don't understand that there's more than one kind.
00:08:05
Speaker
There is proofreaders whose only job is to make sure that everything that was supposed to get changed got changed. There's copy editors who worry about the stupid Oxford comma and all the grammar type things, but don't actually change what the book is trying to do.
00:08:24
Speaker
There are line editors who can help you say, these three sentences would be better if they were more like this. And then there are developmental editors. They are people who say, you got to get rid of chapter two. And you're completely missing the point in this whole arc. And this thing could be better. Developmental editors are priceless. And lots of people pretend that they can do that, but not many people can. I can do that for other people's books.
00:08:54
Speaker
And I try to do it for my books, but obviously it's hard. Nikki Papadopoulos, who is my editor at Penguin is a developmental editor like I've never met before. And so she changed the title of the practice. She helped me reorganize my thinking in certain places. But what I've done over the years
00:09:19
Speaker
is mostly avoided showing people who care about me my work before it's mostly done. Because if my work is what it's supposed to be, which is challenging, they will encourage me not to do it. Because they are looking out for me, they think, and protecting me. And I say, well, I don't know. And that's the last thing I need to hear.
00:09:42
Speaker
So I've tried to have a very tiny circle of people who I know are going to push me to do more, not encourage me to do less.
00:09:53
Speaker
Right. I think I remember the last time we spoke, you know, to sort of thematically picking piggybacking on what you just said was, you know, a lot of like, I believe you said like reassurance is futile. So you need more people who aren't going to reassure you, but instead, you know, divorce the criticism of the work from from the person and get you to just express the best possible version of you and your ideas on the page, you know, without bruising your ego, but also serving the work at hand.
00:10:24
Speaker
Right, this is something that I talk about a bunch in the new book. One of the ways to create a significant organization is to have higher standards, to relentlessly criticize the work, and to never criticize the worker.
00:10:40
Speaker
This is really hard to do. Even in a business like book publishing, most of the editors that I have dealt with, except for Nikki and Megan, would quickly resort to criticizing the author if they thought they weren't able to make their argument about the work itself. And you're just not allowed to do that if you expect people to bring their full energy to the project at hand.
00:11:07
Speaker
If you are working with someone who's good at it, then it's not criticism. And then it's very easy to deal with because it's not about you. It's about the work, as I wrote about in the practice. If a locksmith tries a key for someone who's locked out and it doesn't work, the locksmith doesn't take it personally. They just get another key.
Leadership vs. Management: Insights from Seth
00:11:28
Speaker
Leadership is so integral to this book, to a lot of going all the way. Most of your work is certainly going back to the linchpin.
00:11:37
Speaker
which to me that that one strikes me as like okay you know making yourself indispensable you're the the individual and this one seems to go up the ladder to try to make a make a make a case for leadership over management so maybe we can start by making the distinction between leaders and managers and we can there's certain threads there I'd love to pull on to well I mean you're just so good at working with words and these two words really get us into trouble
00:12:06
Speaker
Managers use their spot in the hierarchy and on the org chart to exercise authority to get people to do something that's been done before, but cheaper and faster. And so we need managers at the airlines and we need them at the fast food restaurant. They use surveillance, not trust, and they create a reliable system. We needed them more
00:12:35
Speaker
when so much of what we did needed to be faster and cheaper than yesterday. Leaders, on the other hand, do something voluntary. Leaders show up
00:12:47
Speaker
and say, I'm going over there. Who wants to come? You cannot order somebody to follow you. Then they're not really following you. And some managers are leaders, and some leaders are managers. But there are also frontline people who don't have any direct reports, who are leaders. Anybody who is bravely causing a change to happen and taking responsibility is a leader.
00:13:13
Speaker
And if leadership is a skill which you write about in the book, and there might be someone out there who hasn't exercised that muscle in the past, but there is a tug, there is a tension, let's say, between their ears, and they're thinking about it and they don't know quite how to exercise that. And if it is a skill that can be learned,
00:13:34
Speaker
How can someone maybe at the sort of the ground level of their leadership fitness start to exercise greater endurance and greater strength with respect to leadership? A great question. You know, people send me emails saying I'm 22 years old. How do I get started in marketing? Should I go get a degree? I like the way to learn marketing is to do marketing, not to get a marketing job, but to do marketing.
00:13:59
Speaker
Find a charity you care about, raise $10,000. Buy a bunch of stuff in a garage sale, sell it on eBay for a profit. When you start doing marketing, you get better at marketing. Well, the same thing is true for leadership. What's the smallest unit of change that you are open to being responsible for? Can you coordinate lunch for five people?
00:14:23
Speaker
Can you have one conversation with somebody who appreciates it that causes a change to happen? Can you have a customer service call where you're not reading the script, but actually leading the customer to come to their own conclusions about what is possible? It doesn't have to take more than five minutes. And if you can do it for five minutes, you can do it for 10. And the next thing you know, you're building the muscle.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, and invariably, if someone tries to bring maybe a new posture of that degree of leadership, you might start running into a degree, not press fieldy in resistance, but a kind of resistance from people who might be like, give you that eye roll, be like, oh boy, look at this person trying to...
00:15:05
Speaker
trying to trying to change how it is like, hey, this is how it is. Just stay in your lane. You know, for people who might run into that that speed bump or let's just call it a roadblock or wall, what might you counsel them to do in that event? You know, if if they run into that degree of resistance when they really want to lead. Everyone is going to run into that, but you are not going asking for authority.
00:15:33
Speaker
you are taking responsibility. So the secret is to shun the non-believers, to build something that a few people can follow, because that's the way all ideas spread. First, the early adopters, then the early majority, and finally, the laggards. The laggards are never going to applaud you when you begin to lead. Do not look for their applause. That what we have in any community is a finite number that you might be only count on one or two hands.
00:16:04
Speaker
who are ready to follow you to do a thing. And then if you want to make more change, do it again and it will begin to spread.
00:16:11
Speaker
But you have to shun the non-believers. And I think a lot of people will be asking you this on your virtual book tour and in-person book tour. Bees and the metaphor behind bees are central to the packaging of the song of significance. And did bees come first as a way for you to illustrate an idea or did the idea come first?
Bees and Teamwork: A Metaphor Explored
00:16:34
Speaker
And you're like, well, bees kind of embody it pretty well.
00:16:38
Speaker
It was The Beast. There would be no book if it weren't for The Beast. I wasn't working on a book. I always, I recently always say that it's my last book. I really believe it's my last book until something won't let me go. And when I heard about Jacqueline Freeman and the Song of Increase and spent 10 hours with her audiobook and then spent time talking to her,
00:17:03
Speaker
they wouldn't let me go. The bees are endlessly fascinating. I couldn't write a whole book about bees because my readers don't want to read a whole book about bees. But on the back cover of the book, instead of a lot of copy, what it says is, honey is not the purpose of a hive. Honey is a sign that the hive is functioning well. And we need to think about
00:17:30
Speaker
how we are thinking about honey and whether the purpose of work is to make a profit or if a profit is simply a symptom of an organization that is running well.
00:17:42
Speaker
Yeah, and if honey or profit is the byproduct of a well-functioning hive, if there happens to be maybe, let's say, a semi, let's call it fissures in the culture at a workplace, how might someone, how might an intrepid leader there start to spackle in those holes and try to build from within if they can't take their talents elsewhere?
00:18:13
Speaker
Well, the first thing is you can't take your talents elsewhere. Work is now voluntary. For anyone who has the technology to listen to this podcast, wherever you work isn't the only place you can work. That didn't used to be true. If you lived in the company town, if you only had a certain narrow range of skills, if you couldn't easily learn anything that needed to be learned, you were stuck. You could get fired if you left your resume in the Xerox machine because the boss
00:18:43
Speaker
hated turnover, he hated that you had options. But we must approach work going forward as voluntary. You have to work somewhere, but you don't have to work here.
00:18:56
Speaker
And in the face of that, you may decide working here is exactly what you want, which means you are enrolled in the work of changing this place. But it's a mistake to settle because you've been indoctrinated into believing that turnover somehow makes you a bad person.
00:19:15
Speaker
Now, you alluded a little bit to the Milton Friedman fraud of the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize short-term shareholder value. This was only said for the first time in the late 60s. There's no evidence that it is correct.
00:19:32
Speaker
And the reason it caught on is because it lets everybody off the hook. It lets them off the moral hook. It lets them off the commitment hook. If you're making a profit, leave me alone, right? Because you're allowed to cut corners. In fact, you're required to cut corners. You're required to race at the bottom to endanger worker safety or whatever it takes because your job is to make as much money as possible.
00:19:56
Speaker
But no one ever said that before, and it's not required. What's required, the only purpose of an association of people called the corporation is to serve the people it has promised to serve. One of those groups is the employees, one of those groups is the owners, and one of those groups is the customers. And a fourth group is probably the planet. And it turns out that if you serve those four groups in equal measure, you'll do fine.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, and there's one particular example in the book that you illustrate really well is this particular car wash that hires neuroatypical or whatever the term is to work there. And by building that culture, they were objectively profitable, but it was also such a company that
00:20:48
Speaker
I guess you feel good going there. And as a result, it snowballs and as you want to say, the ratchet turns. And maybe you can just unpack what they're doing so well as a case study and what good culture and good leadership can engender in the community. So I think it's a useful way to point to the fork in the road. A automated car wash has the word automated in the title.
00:21:15
Speaker
that the workers there are simply cogs designed to keep the machine from breaking and also to dry your car when you're done. You want to pay the workers as little as possible, make the machine run as fast as possible, and maximize your profit. It's not that hard to build a car wash. And Thomas Derry didn't care about any of this. He cared about his younger brother, who was born with autism.
00:21:40
Speaker
And it occurred to Thomas and his dad that as his brother grew up, there weren't going to be many places where he could work. And so Thomas started a car wash that focuses on hiring people with autism and other atypical neural pathways.
00:22:00
Speaker
Well, the car wash is insanely profitable. He opened a second one. It turned a profit after 90 days. Customers happily drive past two or three or four other car washes to get to his car wash. And there are a few reasons for that. One reason is because it makes the customers feel good. The other reason is that by being forced to accommodate the needs and the desires of the people who work there, he built a better car wash.
00:22:30
Speaker
by every objective measure. The turnover rate is lower, employers' safety is higher, and the way the job gets done is actually better because it's not machine first, it's people first. And so if you could do it with a car wash, tell me where you can't do it.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, you wrote this piggyback on what you just said that in the lesson of this manifesto is simple. An organization of any size can effectively move forward by asking, what do humans need? What will create significance for those who interact with us?
00:23:05
Speaker
And I think what you're saying there in this particular car wash, I think you said, if you can do it in a car wash, you can do it anywhere. It's like, how can you sort of change your rubric and make it people-centric to create that significance?
Defining Significance: Beyond Expectations
00:23:17
Speaker
And I guess, in a sense, how would you define significance?
00:23:23
Speaker
Well, you know, the indoctrination runs really deep. I've done a few podcasts talking about the book and people are sort of astonished and incredulous as opposed to saying, well, that's obvious.
00:23:35
Speaker
And it's only obvious after you explain it and what it means to find significance. And I polled 10,000 people in 90 countries and they all agreed around the world. To be significant is to do more than you thought you could, to be missed if you're gone, to be treated with respect, to be proud of the work you do.
00:23:57
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's obvious, except bosses think that what people want is to get paid a lot and not get fired, because those are the two levers they keep turning.
00:24:07
Speaker
But in fact, I gave people 14 choices and those were the two at the bottom of the list. So there's the disconnect. And the reason we've been indoctrinated is because bosses pushed for schools to teach kids that there's going to be a test and that they should obey. Because that's what bosses needed in employees. Compliant workers weren't very smart, but were willing to follow instructions.
00:24:31
Speaker
Yeah, and anyone who's read your blog for years or listened to your podcast, it's like when you pull that curtain back, you all of a sudden feel at one point, you feel like kind of sad at what has happened for a century plus.
00:24:50
Speaker
And then I think, I'd like to say that there's optimism there, but on the other hand, you almost feel powerless because that bear is so big and it's like, how do you poke it in a way that it doesn't, well, kill you? But you want it to run away and be like, okay, how can we build a new bear here? It does feel, in some ways, dispiriting and you just kind of surrender to the well-worn grooves of the last century.
00:25:20
Speaker
Well, here's the good news. 1984 isn't quite here yet. And you don't get imprisoned by realizing you're in prison. When you see how the system is designed,
00:25:34
Speaker
Not only don't you get in trouble for insisting on a different set of rules, you actually come out ahead. So the people who get into Harvard but don't go end up living lives just as happy and just as successful as the people who go.
00:25:52
Speaker
because they are seeing pathways that other people have been blinded to. I don't write my blog and my books to make people sad. I write them to show people that there's a man behind the curtain.
00:26:08
Speaker
And the magic, and I could talk about Dorothy all day, but the magic of that movie, besides the fact that it was anti-misogynistic and a young woman had agency throughout, is that Dorothy had what she needed the whole time. She just had to realize it. And I think that's the world that we live in.
00:26:28
Speaker
Yeah, and also the agency of leadership, and when you realize that you do have it in you, you just need to exercise it, or find it, or just lift up a rock in the corner of your heart and be like, oh, there it is. Let's use this.
00:26:43
Speaker
There's a wonderful quote that you cite from Ben Zander of the Boston Philharmonic where he says, the conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. And what I love about that is how ego-less that is. But these days, given social media's insidious tendrils, oftentimes if we exercise the principle behind a quote of that nature, we're like,
00:27:13
Speaker
We want to we want to let people know about it. So it's like, I guess, how would you maybe cultivate an egoless posture so you can exercise that and get the most out of just the most satisfaction for people that you're working with in a team? So I've known Ben for years. He's a dear friend. He would never say he doesn't have an ego in the common way that that word is used.
00:27:38
Speaker
He's the person who's on the podium in the tuxedo. He's the person who's doing the talk for an hour beforehand. He's the person who's on the poster. But this is the huge but. That's the way everyone in the orchestra wants it to be. Part of creating the conditions for the magic of his orchestra is that Ben is willing to offer himself as the front man to take some of the applause and all of the criticism
00:28:09
Speaker
so that the people who have chosen not to be conductors can do the thing that they want to do. So what Ben understood, he had an epiphany years ago, because he was a bully in the European conductor tradition. And he was haranguing somebody in the orchestra for some reason, I can't remember. And the day before the concert, she quit. And she said,
00:28:39
Speaker
I don't need this." And he begged her to come back and she did not. And they had to play the concert without her. And he realized that it wasn't the Ben Zander show, that it was an entire orchestra that needed to be present, significant and connected for him to benefit.
00:29:04
Speaker
The learning from that transformed the way he runs the orchestra. Every rehearsal, they have sheets of paper, blank sheets of paper on every music stand. And everyone in the orchestra is encouraged to write their thoughts down about anything, how the conducting is going, the pacing. If they were the conductor, what would they say? And these white sheets, as they're called,
00:29:30
Speaker
change the way people in the orchestra behave. It's the opposite of a typical unionized us versus them dominant European white guy conductor orchestra.
00:29:43
Speaker
because Ben understands that he gets what he wants by helping other people get what they want. What courage from the musician who left, given the scarcity of positions of that nature in a prominent orchestra to leave, and even upon being lobbied to come back, she still said, you know what? No, forget this.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah, and I think in the long run, she did come back because she saw how Ben was transformed. For me, I thought the generosity of her criticizing, not Ben, but his behavior.
00:30:19
Speaker
was really magnificent and all too rare. Yeah, I imagine hearing you say that too, it reminds me of kitchens in high-end restaurants and maybe even some low-end restaurants. But yeah, certainly the charismatic mega chef at the heart of so many things. And it's been applauded and lauded that you have to be this kind of bully. And I'd like to think that there is something of a pivot happening in that culture too.
00:30:49
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I mean, Danny Meyer is the most successful restaurateur of all time. Shake Shack is now worth over a billion dollars. Most of the most beloved restaurants at a certain tier in New York are run by him. He doesn't even know how to cook. And there is no drama in a Union Square restaurant. That's the rule. But what there is, is connection and opportunity and significance, whether you're a busboy or dishwasher or waiter. And when he got rid of tipping,
00:31:20
Speaker
His customers pushed back. And that was also fascinating to me when you think about status roles and what people go to a restaurant for. Because the customers, without saying it, said, we need to show off to our guests and we need to get certain kinds of waiters to kiss up to us. And you just took away our power to bully the staff.
00:31:44
Speaker
And he stuck with it for a long time, but sooner or later, the system is going to shift or it's not. And maybe you cannot wait it every time.
00:31:53
Speaker
And speaking of pivoting, there's one of your several enumerated chapters or sections about pivots and new paths. Starbucks didn't used to sell beverages, only beans. Nintendo made playing cards. Why call this a pivot? It's the point. All great stories involve pivots. They are pathfinders, not excuse makers.
00:32:16
Speaker
I wanted to get a sense of how important it is to recognize when it might be time to pivot.
Creative Pivots: Staying True to the Mission
00:32:23
Speaker
And maybe a time where in your creative work you've pivoted, be it how you approach the blog or the podcast or any number of things that you're involved in. This is another great question, Brendan. Thank you. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
00:32:42
Speaker
If you are somebody who is, say, in the world of jazz, where you are living on a frontier, then if you're not pivoting, you're failing. If Miles Davis just kept playing kind of blue over and over and over again, he wouldn't have become Miles Davis.
00:33:03
Speaker
If you are, on the other hand, working on a journey, training a couple of kids, figuring out how to help a community get from here to there, you might need to stick with it again and again and again, long after you are bored.
00:33:18
Speaker
in order to make the change you promised you were going to make. So I think what it comes down to is what's the promise that we are making? When I think about book publishers, in 1980, five or six or seven book publishers controlled the flow of an enormous number of ideas in our culture. And Google started 15 or years or 20 years after that, only had two people.
00:33:46
Speaker
Tell me why Random House didn't start Google. Random House had everything they needed to start Google, except for one thing. Random House decided that they were in the business of chopping down trees and they decided that their customer was the bookstore. They had all the world's information or access to it. They had access to people who could program a Google, but they didn't think that it was appropriate for them to do something that felt like a pivot, when in fact,
00:34:15
Speaker
it would have been the right way to maintain their mission, which is to organize the world's information. So I think we need to be really clear about who's it for and what's it for. Part of the thing about my blog is it benefits me. I would write it even if no one read it. But also,
00:34:32
Speaker
My blog's resiliency and power largely comes from the fact that I do it every day. So if I got bored with it and stopped, then I wouldn't be able to restart it. So it maintains its own momentum. On the other hand, I have pivoted the media, the tech, the focus of my career 20 or 30 times in the last 40 years, because I love it. And I have to in order for me to stay interested in it.
00:35:00
Speaker
That old two-prong question that you always pose, I think it comes from this is marketing. I hear you say it frequently of who's it for and what's it for. For some reason, I always get mildly hung up on the what's it for. Who's it for to me?
00:35:18
Speaker
If I'm using myself as an example in the show of talking to people about writing and telling true stories, I'm like, okay, it's primarily for writers doing, be it memoirs, essayists, narrative journalism, and so forth. That's the who. But sometimes I always get hung up on the what. And for people who- Let's talk it through. Let's talk it through. First of all, the who you just described is a demographic who that I could tell from the outside. I think the who is more nuanced than that, because it begins with that.
00:35:47
Speaker
But it's also the people in that community that are searchers, learners, listeners, and agile enough to change their mind. Because if they're not those things, they're wasting your time in there. And then the what's it for is my hunch is you are trying to turn people who feel a little stuck or a little timid or a little behind.
00:36:13
Speaker
into people who are leaders, who are on the frontier, who are feeling significant, who are changing the way they do things into things that they are even more proud of. That's the change. And if that's not happening,
00:36:28
Speaker
then you either have the wrong people or you need to change the way you do your podcast. Yeah, that's really beautifully put. And also it's to, writing, as you know, can be something of a lonely endeavor. And this show kind of stemmed in it. It just turned 10 in March, believe it or not. Wow.
00:36:46
Speaker
And so it stemmed from a lot of bitterness and resentment I was feeling back in 2013 about just the trajectory or the lack thereof of my career. And so I was kind of working through that in a way to celebrate people's work instead of doing the opposite, which was a fuel that wasn't burning clean.
00:37:09
Speaker
But also like it just kind of what you were saying it echoes this wonderful quote from Gabrielle's Evan that you cited in the in the book to that It's the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us But it's only because we are isolated that we think we're unlovable And I think the pod and in some way and I think the ones that do a good enough job They they kind of put the arm around the listener and feel like well You know what you're not alone. You've you've got a you've got an advocate here. You've got a buddy. Yeah, you know I'm doing this and and so can you
00:37:37
Speaker
Exactly. Once people see, then they can model. If they can model, they can change. For me, the finest compliment people pay me is, 10 years ago you said blah, blah, blah, and now I teach other people that and it has made our lives better. I don't even remember saying the thing they said I said.
00:38:02
Speaker
But I'm not trying for a magical, perfect pearl of wisdom. What I'm trying to find are people who will teach other people to make the changes that they are proud of.
00:38:13
Speaker
Yeah, and isn't that, like, embedded in that compliment is, well, like, sure, there's the superficial thing, hey, you said this great thing, putting it into the practice. But even better is that it might be something from 10 or 15 years ago that you wrote that was evergreen enough, that's resonated with them and is timeless enough, that is putting fuel in their tank, you know, in the current age. And I have to imagine for you as just a thinker and a writer and a communicator and a teacher,
00:38:41
Speaker
that that's got to be all the more fulfilling that some of the things that you're sharing are enduring. It is. And as we start to cycle down the drain here, I wanted to just highlight, we haven't talked about AI at all.
AI and Creative Nonfiction: The Human Element
00:38:57
Speaker
And I just wanted to highlight a key tension that is perfectly stated in the title of this podcast because all AI can do is write nonfiction. Sometimes it makes mistakes, but it can write nonfiction. It can't write creative nonfiction because what makes nonfiction creative is that the map is not the territory and the art
00:39:23
Speaker
of drawing a map of something that is in the world is in what you leave out and what you highlight and how you take a risk in bringing it to others knowing that it might not work. And it's the tension of this might not work that actually makes this work worth doing.
00:39:47
Speaker
Because if you work making French fries at McDonald's, there is no question it will work. You press the red button and the fries go in the oil.
00:39:56
Speaker
But when you are doing creative nonfiction, the whole idea is that you're dancing in the liminal space of, this might not work. I want to talk about Anne-Marie Cruz and the page 19 principle that was something that brought to the brilliant carbon almanac that you collaborated on and led and what that principle is and what that can mean to a team in a creative endeavor. I will probably come up with a way for a soloist to do it, but let me talk about teams.
00:40:26
Speaker
We knew there were 300 of us in 40 countries. We knew that when the almanac was done in five months, there would be a page 19. But there wasn't one of us who could make it all by ourselves. Someone who could think of what the page was about, write it, edit it, fact check it, footnote it, add graphs and charts, typeset it, et cetera. But we knew it was going to get done. So how are we going to get from where we were to there? And the answer was,
00:40:53
Speaker
simply begin. Don't ship junk, but write a paragraph and say to somebody else, I wrote this paragraph. Could you make it better, please? And after it's 10 paragraphs, say to somebody else, could you fact check this, please? And at every step along the way, the standards go up. We criticize the work. We don't criticize the worker. And then we do it again.
00:41:13
Speaker
And so page 19 thinking makes it so that it's not life or death. Page 19 thinking is that's what we do here. We lay bricks, one brick at a time. No brick is a building, but brick by brick by brick, you have something. So one of the things that I say to people who tell me they're stuck writing their nonfiction book first time, I have helped a lot of first time authors, they say, look, go to some soon to be out of business electronics store and
00:41:42
Speaker
buy a $19 digital tape recorder and then find a friend who trusts you, who is curious and go for a walk with them and spend an hour teaching them what you want the book to teach people to do. Because if you're not trying to teach somebody something, then don't write the book and take that recording, send it to rev.com, have it transcribed. And now the first draft of your book is done.
00:42:10
Speaker
That's page 19 thinking. It's not the last draft of your book, but in one day, you got 40,000 words. Just go do that.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah. And the sort of the four, oh, I don't know, the the tiers of that, if you want to call it that is simplify, clarify, triage and decide. And I think that I think that's a feedback loop because you can keep keep doing that over and over again. And eventually you'll reach, you know, the best possible version. You know, perfect is the enemy, but you'll get pretty darn close if you just keep following that feedback loop. Right. Let's be very clear about what good enough means.
00:42:46
Speaker
Good enough by definition means that the thing you did is good enough to meet your standards. That's all you need. Better than good enough is a waste. Good enough by definition is what you need.
00:42:57
Speaker
Excellent. And the last thing I'd like to ask people, Seth, as I bring these conversations down for a landing, and I regrettably, I don't think it was prompted because it's in my Calendly confirmation, not a different one. But I love asking guests for a recommendation of some kind. And that can just be anything that you're excited about, be it a brand of coffee or a fanny pack. And I would just extend that to you, whatever you're excited about, what might you share with the listeners?
00:43:24
Speaker
So I'm always playing with lots of new tech, lots of new books, 50, 100, 150 a year come through. But I gotta say, sitting here unprompted, the thing that I would encourage people to do, and if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you have no excuse, is to go for a walk. Probably with somebody you care about.
00:43:50
Speaker
This is an underrated way to find our footing, both literally and figuratively. After two and a half years of public health trauma and way too much division and gasping for air, I hope we can go for a walk. Well, I love it. Seth, as always, thank you so much for the work you do and for coming back on the show and having such a wonderful conversation here. Just thanks for everything you do and thanks again for your time.
00:44:21
Speaker
Well, thank you, Brendan. Keep making a ruckus it matters. Hey CNFers, thanks for listening. And thanks to Seth for clearing out some time for a dude like me. Head to BrendanOmera.com for show notes and consider signing up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter for book recommendations, a short essay, writing inspirations, and a series of links that always go up to 11. First of the month, no spam can't beat it.
00:44:48
Speaker
And as some of you know, I've started the, the writing of the gift. Yeah. This, despite being only about 40% through the research and a fraction of the interviews that I actually want to do. Fact is it's got to be done. The deadline is too short. So I've got to start laying down track, laying down road and my omnibus spreadsheet where I catalog and Dropbox the literally hundreds of articles.
00:45:16
Speaker
It also set up my timeline and my contacts with Dropbox links to transcripts. I added this word tracker tab. It's pretty simple. First column is every day from here until April 15th, 2024. Then there's a words for that day column. Then there's a notes column. Like what did I tackle during that session that day? What chapter might it be? You never know.
00:45:44
Speaker
then there's an average words per day calculator at the low end of my total word count, 85,000 words, which from now until my deadline is about 283 words a day. If I average that over the course of the next 10 months, if I did my math right,
00:46:03
Speaker
which makes me paranoid, and I'm definitely gonna go double check that number when I'm done with the script. I'll hit my deadline without too much writer stress. Just enough writing where it reveals holes in the story as I progress, but not so much where I completely drain the pool of all my research and data and all my research to date. The writing doesn't have to be linear. There are some moments like the 72 trials in the Olympics.
00:46:30
Speaker
where I have quite a bit of material. Much of it was in one of my sample chapters, so that stacks the deck in my favor. A few thousand words there. And if I want to, I can just write that section. I don't know exactly where it'll be, but it'll be somewhere in the middle of the book.
00:46:45
Speaker
But it's okay to write The Islands, something the writer Matt Bell cited in an essay of his about video game Baldur's Gate 2. This notion is from the novelist Charlie Smith.
00:47:01
Speaker
worry about the tendons and ligaments later. As Matt writes, the writer should draft the parts he or she already knows, those pivotal scenes that can be seen even before the intervening connective tissue has been imagined. Thank you to Bronwyn Dickey for sharing that with me on Twitter.
00:47:20
Speaker
If I write zero words today, I write zero in the column and perilously watch the average per day word count drop. If it dips below 283, I'm in trouble. If I just stay above, we'll be on pace. That's what this device is. It's a pacer. It's a marathon pace to finish the race. Some days will be zero, but others might be 2,000. Ideally, each day will hover right around 300.
00:47:50
Speaker
the better to sustain the pace and not flame out and not over extract the research I did and just keep things moving, let it expose the holes in the story that allow me to go back and do some other research and fill in those holes, fill in those puddles. I've added a turn of phrase tab or an ideas tab. You know how you randomly think of a cool sentence, but you don't know where it'll go yet.
00:48:16
Speaker
just throw it in your master spreadsheet also this you might never know like if say Google is gonna mothball sheets so at the end of the day download a copy as a backup
00:48:30
Speaker
Then you work on your thing the next day and then redownload a copy and throw out the old one, right? Because you never know. Google might say, yeah, we're done with this. If you didn't back it up, you're fucked. And then you might have to take it over to Microsoft. I don't know. Or some other program. I'm sure there are others. Doesn't matter. Anyway, it's all logistical stuff. So stay wild, seeing efforts. And as always, if you can do, interview. See ya.