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Episode 227: The Futility of Reassurance and Being on the Hook with Seth Godin
287 Plays4 years ago
"That's what the practice is. It's for people who have read enough blog posts or books to know the method, but for whatever reason look straight at the method and blink," says Seth Godin.
His 20th book is The Practice: Shipping Creative Work and it's a book for our troubled times.
Keep the conversation going on social media @CNFPod and head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter.
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Transcript
Introduction to Seth Godin and Creative Generosity
00:00:05
Speaker
I don't need to tell you who Seth Godin is. Maybe I need to tell you, he's the best-selling author of 20 books like Permission, Marketing, Tribes, Lynchpin, This Is Marketing, and now his latest book, The Practice, Shipping Creative Work. And that's what the practice is. It's for people who have read enough blog posts or books to know the method, but for whatever reason, look straight at the method and blink.
00:00:31
Speaker
He's something of a hero to me and one of the most generous people putting out generous work to level us up if we should take the baton. And he's always sharing the tools and putting the baton in our hands if we have the courage to take it. But if you realize you can turn on a light for someone else, turning on lights becomes a generous act and then people don't hesitate to
About Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:56
Speaker
do it.
00:00:56
Speaker
Hey, I'm Brendan O'Mara, hey, hey, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Now, of course, you can always keep that conversation going on social media at cnfpod across the big three.
00:01:18
Speaker
show notes to this episode and all the other 200 plus are at Brendan O'Mara.com. There you can sign up for the monthly newsletter where I share reading recommendations, cool articles, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. I raffle off books and I include an exclusive CNF and Zoom happy hour link. Oh yeah, I hosted the very first one this past Wednesday and I want to give a big shout out to Andrew, Suzanne,
Zoom Happy Hour Highlights
00:01:48
Speaker
And even though she doesn't listen to the show, what's up with that? Cheryl, I tease, I tease. I think we had a great chat talking about perspective and voice and memoir. It was great. I hope to do more. And I hope to, you know, iron out the wrinkles.
00:02:06
Speaker
And it gave me juice to improve the format and I hope to apply. And I just, I just need to, I should say, I need to applaud those three brave CNFers for taking the leap in being the first to lead.
00:02:22
Speaker
At the end of the show, you'll have my parting shot of course about what's going on here at C&F Pod HQ and a little riff about market chasing versus market awareness.
Sharing and Inspiring through Creative Generosity
00:02:31
Speaker
But in the meantime, you're going to want to stick around and listen to this guy, this guy named Seth Godin.
00:02:38
Speaker
He's the voice behind the akimbo podcast, one of the few podcasts I listen to the minute it hits my feed. He's a creator behind the akimbo workshops. I'm a marketing seminar alum. You'll soon hear Seth talk about how reassurance is futile and the challenge of being on the hook.
00:03:01
Speaker
As Chase Jarvis might say, there's a creator in all of us. And as Seth might say, in order to do creative, generous work, you must ship it. And so that's what we do. We're shipping this mother. Riffa! Ooh! We're talking here. I wonder how the backyard now is.
Metaphor of Invasive Species and Growth
00:03:25
Speaker
We have this hawkweed problem. This is this base of weed.
00:03:28
Speaker
and I was trying to take care of it, and I was pulling out these weeds manually, and it kind of dawned on me. It was just like, this is kind of a Godin-esque idea here. If you let these invasive species kind of take root, they can definitely sort of ruin the landscape, so to speak. And as I'm pulling these up, I'm like, wow, this is allowing something else more fruitful to be nurtured over time. And I wondered, maybe you can speak to that, because I think embedded in that metaphor is the story we tell ourselves.
Inspiration from Community and Collaboration
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, many stories. So we'll start with the fact that invasive species is a crazy term because lots of things were in various places long before we got here. That if you walked throughout New England,
00:04:14
Speaker
hundreds of years ago, it wasn't forests, it was farms. There were no trees at all. And then they grew back, which is the natural way to do it. So the first way to get rid of an invasive species is to stop defining it as invasive and simply define it as a species. And there are lots of things in our life that we fight against when we could just simply define them as normal. And then the second thing though, is if we're going to go to the effort of clearing the decks,
00:04:41
Speaker
We have to say, well, why did we do that? There's an opportunity cost in living in whatever world we're in. What are we going to do with it? And so if I think about, you know, the magic of the Internet
00:04:56
Speaker
It took a lot of people a lot of time to do it. It destroyed a lot of industries. What are we going to do with it? Watch cat videos and GIFs? That seems like a waste to me. And yet, most people who consume most stuff on the internet, they're not creating things. They're consuming them. They're treating it like micro TV. And I think we're going to look back at this golden era and realize that most people wasted that window.
Akimbo Workshops: Scalable Change
00:05:21
Speaker
And also, I think a lot of people, of course, myself included, point to you and you empower a lot of people with the generosity of which you put out so much wonderful work and well thought out work. And the over the air TV here, there's this new, I don't know if it's new, but it's new to us. It's just 24 seven Bob Ross painting.
00:05:43
Speaker
And it's one of those deals where you watch him and it's so soothing, but he also is one of those people that makes you feel like just about anything is possible. And I wonder if I'd extend that to you, like who do you look at and kind of puts that kind of fuel in your tank and makes you feel like just about anything is possible.
00:06:00
Speaker
My biggest inspiration of the people who have been reading my stuff for a while, because watching them take ideas and doing things with them I never expected helps me think more broadly. When I see people who didn't come from privilege, when I see people who have been fighting against caste, when I see people who didn't have a head start, figure out how to show up for other people,
00:06:24
Speaker
That's really what inspires me. We don't have a level playing field, but even despite that, human beings figure out how to do work that matters.
00:06:35
Speaker
And that's the crux of the akimbo workshops too is seeing that those cohorts of people to really like rise each other up and in so doing they rise themselves up. But it's just one of those things I guess you as a chaperone there and along with your amazing coaches like Dave Bates and Stacey Bolden who are kind of my wing man and wing woman.
00:06:55
Speaker
throughout the marketing seminar like it must be just like you said inspiring just to just to witness witness that the community and the cohorts you know rise all the rise all those boats yeah I mean when you're an author you put a book in the world and then 10 years later you meet someone who had had an impact on and that's really cool because you're making change when you sleep when you're a public speaker you're either on stage or you're not
00:07:21
Speaker
And what we've built with akimbo is an institution where people like Dave and Stacey and the content and the structure and the cohort are making a difference in your life. And I'm not even there. And if you're going to do anything at scale, you got to go deep because you want to change people, but you also have to figure out how to do it persistently. And that means it can't be about me.
00:07:44
Speaker
And some people show up in our workshops, particularly the Alta MBA and say, well, where's Seth? And our answer is good news. He's not here.
Generosity Reduces Anxiety
00:07:53
Speaker
Because if you were depending on me to make a difference, I don't scale. And the fact that I'm not there is a bonus.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, and ahead of this, ahead of a lot of interviews, I always get a little nervous, a little jacked up, and this one was no different. And as I was reading, rereading the practice, the generosity comes up time and again. It's like your biggest section of the chunks of the book.
00:08:20
Speaker
When I got to thinking about my nerves, it ends up being about me, but when I start thinking generous, when I start thinking of, I hope Seth has a good time, but I also, I want the listener to have a good time when they're listening to this around November 3rd. And when I put the generosity hat on, sort of the anxiety of it kind of tamps down. Is that something that you've noticed too? Like if you can just look outward with that kind of empathy and generosity that you can kind of get out of your own head, so to speak?
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, that's the secret message in the book. Imposter syndrome goes away. Hesitation goes away. Good people want to do good stuff. Good people don't want to hustle. Good people don't want to cause a commotion to call attention to themselves. And so if we're talking about shipping creative work, talking about marketing, talking about art, talking about writing a book, all of those things, you get paralyzed if you think you're doing it for yourself.
00:09:19
Speaker
But if you realize you can turn on a light for someone else, turning on lights becomes a generous act and then people don't hesitate to do it.
Pioneering Email Marketing
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's awful addicting too and when you can see the light go on as a result of something you've done and then it's kind of like a perpetual motion machine, right? Where you can kind of have this power and this ability to turn those lights on and then you see it illuminate away from you and lighting paths for other people.
00:09:51
Speaker
especially if those people then light paths for other people beyond that. So in 1992, when I started one of the first internet companies, we pioneered email marketing. Well, I haven't been in the email marketing industry for a really, really long time.
00:10:08
Speaker
but MailChimp and all the other people are there doing that thing. And when it's done ethically and well, it creates efficiency and connection and all those other things. I am thrilled that I don't have to do it because I'd rather have other people who learn from me do it. And the same thing is true if we write a nonfiction blog post or a book because we're teaching something that doesn't degrade if the next person teaches it to someone else.
Pedagogy vs. Taxonomy in Creativity
00:10:34
Speaker
And the book is broken up into about seven key sections. So I think the first part is more like a long introduction, but then it breaks up into generous, generosity, the professional intent. No such thing as writer's block, make assertions, earn your skills, seek out constraints. So what was the logic as you were synthesizing this book to break it up into those chunklets?
00:11:00
Speaker
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the expression of nonfiction information and taxonomy. So taxonomy is an essential element of understanding a science or the natural world. That we know that mammals and reptiles belong in their own categories. That it doesn't make any sense to organize the natural world alphabetically because we shouldn't have an elephant
00:11:28
Speaker
right next to whatever worm starts with the letter E, just because they start with the same letter. So the taxonomy of the natural world teaches us something about the natural world.
00:11:39
Speaker
But there are lots of things we need to learn where there isn't one taxonomy. And that's when a pedagogy kicks in instead. And a pedagogy says, how will I teach somebody this? Because my taxonomy of it is not the most important part because it's going to be different for different people.
00:11:59
Speaker
The pedagogy is, how do I start to set the hook, to reel them in, to have them understand, and to repeat? The answer, and a lot of people get stuck on this when they try to write, is sometimes the order doesn't matter that much. Mostly what we're doing is telling a story.
00:12:22
Speaker
We have to go to where people are because that's the only place to begin is to begin where they are and then take them on a journey. I've worked with some of the greatest non-fiction editors in the business and a really good one can say chapter three needs to be chapter seven and chapter six needs to be deleted, but finding someone knows how to do that is rare indeed.
00:12:44
Speaker
And what I've practiced doing is teaching people before I write a book. I practice teaching the idea, see what makes people's eyes light up, stack it in that order, repeat. And so what you're seeing in the organization of the practice is the result of me teaching hundreds of people the ideas in there and putting it in that order for a reason.
00:13:09
Speaker
And when I read the practice, it made me want to read This Is Marketing again. And then when I finished This Is Marketing, it made me want to go read the practice again. It was one of these weird things.
Embrace Peculiarity
00:13:22
Speaker
They seem to feed off each other and fuel each other. Was that something you were kind of aware and cognizant of, how finial these books were while you were writing the practice?
00:13:32
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I've been feeling badly for George Lucas for a long time because people think that when he made Star Wars, he knew what all the other eight movies were going to be like. And maybe he did, but I think that's unlikely.
00:13:46
Speaker
And when I was writing Permission Marketing or Purple Cow, I did not know that the practice would be my 20th book, but it fits. It fits inside the jigsaw. And it is peculiar and idiosyncratic, but also in and of itself, that some books I do are about, here's what you should do.
00:14:07
Speaker
But other books are about, here's why you're not doing it. Here's why you might be stuck. Here's the story you're telling yourself that's getting in the way of what you actually want to accomplish. And that's what the practice is. It's for people who have read enough blog posts or books to know the method, but for whatever reason, look straight at the method and blink.
00:14:28
Speaker
And you say peculiar, and that's a word in there that rings a little bell every time you hear it. And that's definitely something that I think you've hung a lot of the theses in this book on and how it's defined, not as something weird, but as something specific. So how did you arrive at peculiar as this sort of little grace note that kind of goes through the book?
00:14:50
Speaker
So it's a really cool etymology, which is peculiar comes from the Latin for cattle, private property, something you could brand, something that you own. And so now it's got a little bit of a shameful connotation if we say someone's a little peculiar, but what it actually meant was that person is specific.
00:15:10
Speaker
They are themselves. They are their own private property. They are not a copy of someone else. So the problem with trying to be the next Kim Kardashian is we already have a Kim Kardashian. There's no room for a second one.
00:15:23
Speaker
What we need is the one and only you. And that is something society does not encourage us to do. It encourages us to fit in, not to stand out. To bring that individuality to the world, it's like when you write, for the work we'd like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee that the path isn't well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it's going to work.
00:15:50
Speaker
And that industrialized nature that you talk about all the time, it really drums that out of people. So how can we tell people to get comfortable with that discomfort of it might not work. So we might be able to get to a point where it does. And we can get that individual first and foremost into the world where their ideas can be shared and hopefully like those paths we were talking about earlier.
Accepting Discomfort in Creative Work
00:16:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer is we can't.
00:16:19
Speaker
You don't go to a coach and say, please teach me how to run a marathon without getting tired. That would be absurd, right? The only way to finish a marathon is to figure out where to put the tired. If you can't figure out where to put the tired, no amount of coaching is going to help you. Well,
00:16:35
Speaker
If you can't figure out how to embrace the fact that it's uncomfortable being uncomfortable, then it's going to be really hard for you to do important work, because important work is always uncomfortable. I cannot make it comfortable for you. I can insulate you, but if I do, then you won't be doing important work, will you?
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah, and in the book, too, you write about a lot of a list of several surprising truths of which like skill is is not the same as talent, attitudes or skills, leaders are imposters. How did you arrive at this list? It's a very helpful list. And it definitely it gives gives you a lot of grist for the mill to think about for sure.
00:17:14
Speaker
Well, I wish I could tell you I came up with the list the way that the scientists of the 1800s and 1900s figured out the table of the elements through experimentation and a rigid understanding of the structure of the atom. None of those things are true. You have something you want to teach and you figure out which things land with people.
00:17:36
Speaker
And what I discovered is that I was saying a bunch of things to people in a Kimbo and the rest of the world over the last few years that everyone felt uncomfortable with until they thought about them. And when they thought about them, they said, I never thought about it that way before. And I realized I was one of the only people.
00:17:54
Speaker
talking about this, that reassurance is futile, that there is no such thing as writer's block, that leadership is an act of being an imposter. All of these things are true, but by saying them, by naming them, by giving people a chance to hold on to them, I think I give people power.
00:18:11
Speaker
And through the podcast, I imagine that a lot of the lessons that you want to teach that might turn into blog posts, that might turn into essentially book chapters, probably stems a lot from the questions that you feel. And of course, you curate just a few of those. What are some of those questions that you hear come up time and time again? You're like, oh yeah, that's almost like a crowd-sourced way to write a chapter, if you will.
00:18:37
Speaker
Okay, well, you know, the biggest objection, the biggest fear, the biggest challenge people have is they want reassurance.
Accountability Over Reassurance
00:18:47
Speaker
They want to know that if this work is going to be worth doing, it has to work. And then I have to explain why reassurance is futile. And once they understand that, then most people say, well, I'd rather not be on the hook. And then I have to explain that being on the hook is the best part. Being on the hook is the point.
00:19:07
Speaker
And once you acknowledge that you want to be on the hook and that reassurance is futile, then you can begin to do the practice. Then you can begin to show up whether or not you feel like it to do the work because the subtitle is shipping creative work. Because if it doesn't ship, it doesn't count. The power of I am is really overlooked. If someone says, I am a writer.
00:19:33
Speaker
How did they get to claim that? Well, to get to say I am a doctor, you have to go to medical school, but all you have to do to say I am a writer is write.
Claiming the Title of 'Creative'
00:19:41
Speaker
How many times do you have to write before you can feel good about saying I am a writer? Well, the same thing is true with being creative. How many times do you have to create before you can say I am creative? And I think you can just create the smallest viable breakthrough just a couple times and then you're allowed to claim that you're creative because you are.
00:20:05
Speaker
And there's a really word crafty thing that I like that you do in the book too, where you essentially take like ourself or yourself and you cleave it into where you're speaking to your self. And how did you arrive at that? And like, because they really, it shines a light on you in a way that is, I don't know, it's a kind of a warm light, but it splits it in a way that allows you to really examine things.
00:20:31
Speaker
Oh, it's super cool that you noticed that. So the original title of the book was Trust Yourself. And the word play with the word self was on almost every page. And my editor, the brilliant Nikki Papadopoulos, persuaded me to change the name of the book and to downplay the word play because it can get in the way and confuse us.
00:20:51
Speaker
The point I'm making is when you talk to yourself, which is something most people do, who's talking and who is listening? Isn't that weird?
00:21:02
Speaker
Well, in fact, we have two selves. We have the one that's talking, that one's really good at words, that one is really good at hiding, that one's really good at rationalizing, and then we have the other one, the one that's sort of listening, the one that's not that good at words, and the one that's an artist, the one that's creative, the one that dreams.
00:21:23
Speaker
And if we let the verbal naysaying voice drown us out all the time with its rationalization and its excuses, then along the way we forget that we're capable of being creative. So what it means to trust yourself is to say that other voice, if you let it out, I can't guarantee it's
Trying Without Guarantees
00:21:43
Speaker
going to work. It probably won't work, but it will work better than any other alternative you've got.
00:21:51
Speaker
Yeah, and the great horse trainer, Nick Zito, who's someone I've covered a bunch of times when I was covering horse racing in Saratoga Springs, New York, 90 minutes north of where you are.
00:22:02
Speaker
He's the one who trained Birdstone, who upset Smarty Jones in 2004 when he was going for the Triple Crown. He has a reputation of saddling long shots to beat the big horse. A lot of people wouldn't saddle a 30 to 1 horse to go up against a 1 to 2 favorite, but he's just like, he's like,
00:22:27
Speaker
I'm going to tell you something. The only way, the only way you are sure to lose is if you don't run the race. And I was like, well, sure enough, you know, he's, he's putting it out there. And so much of what you're saying here, it might not work, but the only way you will know one way or the other is to put it out there. I love hearing you talk about horse racing. I could hear you talk about horses all day long. Half of that went over my head, but I totally get the idea of what you were getting at. And
00:22:55
Speaker
The other key piece is you can't be a great horse trainer if you're only in it for yourself. You got to be willing to believe in the horse, the jockey, the syndicate, the people who are counting on you. And so out of an act of generosity, you are willing to take this long shot because if you're just doing it to hustle and hype so that you come out ahead, you're going to burn out.
Rejection as Part of the Process
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah, and to the point of putting that out there, I love how you brought in that great image of Drew Durnovich's rejection pile versus his acceptance pile of those cartoons. And it's such a valuable thing to see that because what people don't realize is
00:23:37
Speaker
Or maybe what people know, and I've heard you reference baseball references, a 70% failure is essentially a Hall of Famer. So seeing that pile of Drew's rejections, you start to see what the batting average is for a Hall of Famer. So seeing that, it's like, oh, okay, this is removing a lot of the fear of the failure by just seeing that image alone. So you have to take a lot of swings to have a pretty crappy batting average, but that crappy batting average is actually what makes you a Hall of Famer. It was so great to see that.
00:24:06
Speaker
Yeah, well, getting a picture in a book like this isn't easy, but we decided it was worth it. Drew does not bat 300. So for those of us who are listening at home, here's what the picture is. It's a picture on Drew's desk of two piles of paper. One pile of paper is 200 pages long. It's deep. And it says no.
00:24:30
Speaker
And the other pile has maybe five pieces of paper on it, and it says yes. This is Drew's batting average. He is as successful as a New Yorker cartoonist can be, and the New Yorker is the place where successful cartoonists go. And yet,
00:24:48
Speaker
He's drawing hundreds of rejections for five successes. So the question that I ask is, is Drew better at this than you, or is he just willing to draw 200 pictures and you're not?
00:25:05
Speaker
And that's it with people who freelance. I do a lot of freelance journalism. Not very good. My batting average is pretty low, but you need to know that going in. Be like, yes, if you bat 100 here, well below the Mendoza line,
00:25:21
Speaker
You're gonna that that's kind of those are where that's where you're at and you have to be Comfortable with that and kind of build your armor around it and know that that's this is normal it rejection is more normal Than than acceptance no matter how good you are and and so like seeing you illustrate that and talk about that it It's such a great service so people can be like, oh, this is oh, I got another
Maintaining Quality Amid Rejection
00:25:44
Speaker
rejection. Okay, that's just that's table stakes That's normal to do this kind of work But at the same time
00:25:52
Speaker
You're not allowed to ship crap. You're not allowed to make junk. You're not allowed to say, well, I'll just get the lousy ones out of the way because the good ones only come when you treat each one like it might be a good one.
00:26:07
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. There's a moment too in the book a couple times where I love the instance where you're fly fishing without a hook to go through the process without the pressure of the outcome, which is so embedded in what the practice is. We have to divorce the work from the outcome just so we can at least get the work done and then get to the
00:26:31
Speaker
the brave work of shipping it. Then there's this other point too where, you know, you go to this comedy club and you and your mom leave and you kind of get heckled on your way out by the comedian on stage. And it was making me think of, you know, in these books, I don't see a whole lot of you per se. And, you know, Chase Jarvis is of the world, Maria Forleo, like you see a lot of those personal anecdotes that they use as a launching point.
00:26:59
Speaker
And I wonder if over time how you've made that decision to to receive a bit. So maybe you're putting out more of the message that stems from you, but not necessarily you per se. Yeah, it was a very intentional act about 20 years ago.
00:27:19
Speaker
what I discovered is the phrase that's easy for you to say is a really good place to hide, that everyone's experience is different. And so whatever happened to us, whether it's a trauma or a triumph, as soon as we involve ourselves, the narrator in the story, we are becoming entertaining
00:27:43
Speaker
But we might not be opening the door for possibility. So when you read a heroic tale of someone who climbed Mount Everest, well, of course they did, because they're a hero. And the discipline that I've tried to bring to this is, I don't have a talent. And I wasn't born able to do these things.
00:28:06
Speaker
describing it through the eyes of me, whether I am saying I started behind you or started ahead of you, is irrelevant. What I'm trying to do is make you the hero of it. And I'll tell you an interesting aside, which seems irrelevant, but it's not. One of the great nonfiction books of all time is by Scott McCloud, and it's called Understanding Comics. And in it, he explains why comic books work.
00:28:33
Speaker
And I was stunned by this. The reason comic books are different than any other medium is because there is that little space in between each panel in the comic book. In the first panel, the hero and the villain are doing something. And in the second panel, they're doing something else. What happens in between? In between,
00:28:57
Speaker
It's happening in your brain. Your brain is filling in the blanks of how you got from panel A to panel B. So where comics actually take place is in your brain. And what I am trying for here is something similar, which is set the table and then let the actual learning and action happen inside the mind of the reader, not with them vicariously watching me do something.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, and even just looking at the way your books are laid out and constructed going as far back as I can remember with so many of the ones I've read, you write in very short little chunklets and then there's of course a little page break.
00:29:42
Speaker
mini chapter head and you know another maybe hundred two hundred words sometimes less a little sometimes more rarely more but is that kind of kind of the idea behind it that in essence you are doing a sort of image less comic book that is you know telling these stories but I am trying to empower people in a way that gives you that little space between the next one so we can start patching in our you know patching in our story over what you're writing
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's part of it. Part of it is I have a short attention span, but yeah, that's part of it. And if we think about the speed bag, which is one of my favorite things, I used to be able to do it and I can't do it anymore, where you see the person in the movies or in the gym going, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh,
00:30:32
Speaker
Whereas if I devote 20 pages to a concept and I don't land, you're just going to stop reading the book. With my stuff, people say, well, that one didn't work, but I'll stick with this because there's another one just a page away. And I'm not going to Stephen King's pencil you here, but at the heart of the practices, of course, trying to find your own way
00:30:53
Speaker
to find a routine, find a way that something that's grounding. The sun rises in the east. It's something that you can hang your hat on. The practice for whatever it is for each individual is the thing we hang our hat on so we can show up every single day. How would you advise someone to try to at least get a toehold, something, some kind of a practice so they can start bringing their best self to the world?
00:31:23
Speaker
Well, I have two big ideas and a small one. The big idea, number one, is you have to start where you are. Where else could you start? And the second idea is you need to create a conspiracy. You need to find
00:31:37
Speaker
at least one other person who's going to be your spotter, your partner, your coach, somebody who can hold you accountable because we know that community is what creates habit, not solo endeavor. And so if you can, you know, one reason to write a book instead of a bunch of blog posts is a book is easier to share in its complete form. Here, I'm doing this. Will you do this with me? And part of what you have to do
00:32:06
Speaker
is you have to turn off social media and you have to limit your intake of relentless, irrelevant criticism. And you have to decide what's important to you. And all of those things are grown up activities in a world that treats us like toddlers. And it's easier to do those things if you've got support. Would you say social media is causing more harm than good for the people that you seek to serve?
Social Media's Manipulative Nature
00:32:35
Speaker
Oh, that's so tricky to answer because if we were all watching reruns of the Carol Burnett show on CBS, I don't know if that would be better or worse. I think what social media is big problem is this.
00:32:51
Speaker
data that can be easily measured is easily measured and in an industrial competitive system metrics that can be seen are there to be improved. So a bunch of people who didn't seek out to do bad things are doing bad things now because they're optimizing for numbers that don't make humans happier and that don't make our culture better.
00:33:14
Speaker
And so if you are using social media and you are not paying them money as an advertiser, then you are not their customer. You are their product. They are manipulating you to sell your attention and trust to other people. And you need to go in with your eyes open and say, do I want to be bought and sold today?
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah, anytime I turn on, you know, I turn that on just to see what's going on. It's just, even it's things that don't mean to be insulting to me, you know, people sharing their work and sharing their very airbrushed life, that comes across as like this indirect insult to me. And it just ends up being so unbelievably counterproductive. It just makes me feel all kinds of anxious.
00:34:02
Speaker
And it's not good because then you start getting into the comparison Olympics and that does nobody any good. Over time, how have you cultivated a way to kind of run your own race and not get into the jealousy and competitive nature that can bog down so many creative people?
00:34:19
Speaker
Well, I got into the competitive nature and the jealousy at the dawn of the internet because I was super insecure about starting a company when no one in New York was starting an internet company. And then when I was spending time in California surrounded by people who were either lying or just plain bragging about their extraordinary success.
00:34:39
Speaker
And I realized it wasn't making me better and it wasn't making me happier. I still remember an evening spent with the people who were the masters of the internet universe in 1998. And I left there feeling terrible, even though I had built something pretty cool. And so from that lesson, I learned, oh, no Facebook.
00:35:06
Speaker
No Twitter, no LinkedIn, no Pinterest. Don't read your Amazon reviews. And I don't. It's not that I pretend I don't. I actually don't. And my life is better because I don't. And I've never met an author who said, I read all my one-star Amazon reviews and now I'm a better writer.
00:35:27
Speaker
Because all a one-star Amazon review tells you is that the wrong person read your book, not that your book was wrong. It was just a mismatch. And you can get all the news you need in 10 minutes without looking at Twitter once all day. Breaking news, unless you're working in a newspaper, you don't need to know the news five minutes before anybody else. It would be fine to know the news 10 minutes after everyone else. That's soon enough.
00:35:55
Speaker
We trick ourselves into thinking we need to do this to be who we are. In fact, it's more likely we can be who we are if we don't do it.
00:36:04
Speaker
And I'm sure you get this a lot. But if someone's starting a podcast or a blog, and especially if they have quite literally zero readers, and they don't have a media company backing them, they don't have classic celebrity to have that unfair advantage, a little bit of extra thrust, it seems daunting or even impossible to get that word out there without social media.
00:36:29
Speaker
Is that a myth? Is that a myth that we've bought into over the last 10 years?
Creating Shareable Content
00:36:34
Speaker
Or is there a way to go from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10 by eschewing that and trying to make those kind of connections?
00:36:43
Speaker
Okay, so there's two parts. First of all, it's not clear to me you should make your art and pursue your craft because you want a big audience. We could talk about that all day. Number two, if you do want a big audience, you will get it because your readers tell other people not because you do.
00:37:00
Speaker
So I started my blog with four readers, but along the way I wrote blog posts that people wanted to share with other people, and that is how it has grown. It has not grown because I am good at social media. It has grown because I gave people who like my work something to share.
00:37:17
Speaker
And in fact, if you look at just about anybody who has changed the culture, that is precisely what they've done, right? That Lin-Manuel Miranda didn't make Hamilton a hit by tweeting about Hamilton all the time. He made it a hit because he built something that other people tweeted about Hamilton all the time.
00:37:37
Speaker
And as we are coming up against our time, Seth, I just want to say one more thing that I read in the practice too that I think I really echoes this intent. I think it piggybacks off of what you just said, because if you can produce anything, if you can produce more than you know, if you are intent on doing it for someone else.
00:37:58
Speaker
And if you do that, then the hope. And if you do that enough over time, like you said, people are going to share it. And I think that's kind of a core ethos of finding a practice. And of course, the message you wanted to get across in this wonderful book you've written. So maybe you can speak to that as kind of the swan song of our little conversation and getting people to go out and purchase this book.
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's the smallest viable audience and the smallest viable breakthrough. You're not doing it to be famous. You're doing it to make a difference. And making a difference for three people is enough because you're not the selfish person who doesn't want to make a difference. Three people is enough. And if you make a difference for three people, they'll probably tell somebody else. So one of the great callings of being a human is to help other people. And the other great calling is to be creative. And they are intertwined with one another.
00:38:50
Speaker
And the only way we're gonna make our troubled culture any better is by making better things for each other. And that's why I made this book. I've been such a great admirer of your work for some time and pretty special to get to talk to you. So thanks for carving out the time and thank you as always for the work. Well, thank you. It means a lot. Keep making a ruckus, Brendan.
00:39:16
Speaker
I had 40 minutes with Seth, and I tried to make the most of it. Thank you very much to Seth Godin, and of course, thank you to you for listening. In this day and age, we get to choose our mentors, whether they know it or not, and I consider him a mentor via his blog, his Facebook Lives, his Instagram Lives, his books. My goodness, his books.
00:39:39
Speaker
When I listen or read Seth's work, I feel like success is something that I can achieve, not just those quote-unquote influencers you see out there. That's it there for me. You know, it's there for me. It's there for us if we're willing to, as Seth says, make a ruckus.
00:39:57
Speaker
When I asked him that Bob Ross question about who makes him feel like anything is possible I put Seth right up on top of my list. He's that rare person who approaches every day with that singular generosity that makes it feel like if we apply a similar sense of it we can do good things and we can radiate out and boy do we need to be radiant these days to fend off the darkness.
00:40:25
Speaker
But like Bob Ross might say, when he's laying down highlights on a happy little tree, don't lose that darkness. Otherwise, the highlights won't stand out. I think there's a metaphor there.
00:40:37
Speaker
Okay, like I said, at the top of the show, keep the conversation going on on Instagram. You can take a screenshot of any show you're listening to and tag the show at cnfpod and I'll be sure to repost it or put it up in the stories is my way of saying thanks, brother. Digital fist bumps and horns. You know how it is. I'm not sure if anyone is listening at this point.
00:40:59
Speaker
This is going to be a little bit more of a long winded one, but that's why it's at the end of the show. That's why it's here, because you can always just skip it. It's hard to skip it at the beginning. It just feels like a speed bump on your destination. But here it's just like, I don't know. I don't know what it is. I really don't know. I'm blanking.
00:41:21
Speaker
So I'm not sure if anyone listened to the end of the show last week when I talked about my mom's mental lapse. I spoke with her the next day. She was in good spirits and pretty damn funny actually. We spoke for about an hour. At the end of the hour she started to repeat some of the same things she started the conversation with which was kind of a bummer. But all in all, she's in good spirits. I think the fuse is lit on the Alzheimer's dementia bomb.
00:41:48
Speaker
So I just have to give her a shot once to twice a week. I wish I could go see her but flying amidst this pandemic when it appears that our bullshit leadership has just given up and seems and it just seems stupid for me to travel when she's 81 years old and if I go there I could kill her. So I guess the phone will have to do.
00:42:15
Speaker
Moving on, I got my notes back from my editor about the baseball memoirvel. It's actually a divorce book, a baseball book. What is it? A divorce book disguised as a baseball book is kind of how I see it. Whatever the hell it is, I don't know. The notes were great. I was very surprised. The very first time I had submitted this draft,
00:42:36
Speaker
Very first time I'm like I feel good. I feel like I'm in the red zone. I am close to the end and it was a turn in an embarrassing turnover on downs and I got sent all the way back to like My odd the opposite goal line and so and thus started the process basically from scratch There's only a couple things to address so we truly are in the red zone and I'd say we're probably first in goal and
00:43:05
Speaker
you know hopefully there's no illegal procedure where it's like first and goal from you know the 20 yard line or you know a nasty holding penalty and I don't know all these kind of things maybe it's some intentional grounding I'm gonna lose it down
00:43:22
Speaker
I don't know, but I think we're close. That's the good news. But my editor was like, in a nutshell, I don't think the book's gonna sell because there isn't enough sort of trauma and violence to sell this memoir to the memoir-reading public, which is to say, I guess, people under 30? Who knew? I didn't think people under 30 read, but I guess they do read bloody memoirs, and this isn't a real bloody memoir.
00:43:49
Speaker
father and son,
Pitfalls of Chasing Market Trends
00:43:51
Speaker
yay. And the mom's in there too, and my sister. He was telling me about how the market doesn't value
00:44:00
Speaker
what I've done and, you know, by extension, a lot of other people with these sort of more muted storylines, if you will. I push back a little bit in that I don't think or I don't want to be chasing moving target of markets, you know, like what's popular now won't be popular in five years. And who knows what will be popular in five years? You know, look no further than vampire craze. I'm sure people are like, oh, my God, that's hot. I need to be writing vampire books.
00:44:30
Speaker
And I briefly spoke with Jane Friedman, who's been on the show, I think episode 102, a long time ago, publishing Maven. And on her Instagram, she broached this question, like, what is the relevance of your book in the current market? And so I just started pecking away on my telephone. And I wrote saying, like, if a book will be published in two, three, four years from now, how can writers know what the market will be?
00:44:56
Speaker
This to me is always the danger in market chasing. That said, you have to write what people want to read. You need to make donuts. People want to eat.
00:45:05
Speaker
She wrote back, quote, Fortunately, the author doesn't have to make predictions about the market, only put forth an argument about what the readership looks like today or the publisher is expecting relevance, not fortune telling. And she put a little nerd emoji. I don't advocate market chasing, only market awareness. End quote.
00:45:27
Speaker
Then I was like, let's get you back on the podcast. If I'm being honest, I don't know what's in and what's out, what's in style and what isn't. All I can do is follow my taste and I suspect that's, that's really all we can do is just follow what feels good, follow our own taste.
00:45:44
Speaker
Also, that said, Jane is pretty good at looking at trends, kind of what she does. And YA nonfiction is a growing subset, and I know my book can be massaged in that direction. It can also be massaged into a YA sports novel. I'll likely try selling it in its current form as I await for responses. Then I might try to massage it into a different shape as I see if that thing will do whatever it's gonna do. And then just pitch them separately, why not?
00:46:14
Speaker
Awareness, not market chasing. I like that.
00:46:19
Speaker
Yeah. My, my editor said with this final draft that I finally learned how to write. Now I'm 40 years old, so that should give the late bloomers out there some juice. You know, it's true. There is, you try to be someone you're not sometimes in the, in the way to find your voice. Sometimes you, you sound awful a lot like people you're not. We already have a Hemingway. We already have a Joan Diddy and we already have David Foster Wallace, but we don't have his you.
00:46:49
Speaker
So this is a long ass game. Some come out shitting rainbows. Some of us have to rewrite a book 20 times over 11 years and finally reach something I like to call competence. So I'm gonna start workshopping new send-offs for this show. I'm trying to do away with the toxic self-deprecation that has stunted my growth since I was about 13 years old.
00:47:20
Speaker
Self-deprecation it gets a good laugh, but it's a it's a nasty seed that can take root in the old brain The old the can't do interview thing is it's so damn catchy and I love it And it's kind of funny, but it's also self-defeating and the fact is I can do I've written books. I've had one published. Oh this next one stands a chance. I wrote another one. That's a
00:47:46
Speaker
that one stands a chance to I wrote a long time ago I think it's better it's a horse racing bug I think it's better than the one that actually got published whatever point is I've done that kind of thing I've won awards with some journalism so you know I doing whatever this is so to say I can't do interview it's kind of a
00:48:04
Speaker
Well, it's like, well, what are you saying? You actually can't do the thing. So in the meantime, while I get to work on that, I will just say this. And some of you might know, know what I'm going to say. Or when I say you might know who it's attributed to more or less. So I'll just say it. It's a magical world out there seeing efforts. Let's go explore. See you next time.
00:48:55
Speaker
you