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Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, I'm happy today. I'm happy because I get to have a conversation with my friend, Seth Godin. Seth is a frequent flyer on this podcast. For those of you who do not know who Seth is, Seth, Godin is the author of 21, count them, 21 International bestsellers, you eclipse, the fingers and the toes 21 International bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and much more. I'm going to add that on my addendum. His books have been translated into 38.
Images and Seth's books include tribes. Purple cowl linchpin, the dip. And this is marketing. Seth writes, one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world and it covers much more than marketing, I should say. And two of his TED Talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the alt MBA, the social media Pioneer squidoo and yoyodyne. One of the first internet companies. So he's seen many chapters, many moons. His new book is the song of significance. A new Manifesto for teams you can
All think Seth, Seth Godin.com and Seth's dot plug. Seth so nice
to see you. Hey, Tim, this is a great excuse. I would rather cook you dinner, but this is a close second.
I'll take you up on both and I thought we would begin with what is present for me at the moment and you were very gracious and being flexible. With our start time I went in to see a an ophthalmologist for the first time in many years. He also happens to
to be a surgeon but I wasn't going there for any type of surgery. And I did not anticipate when I had all the drops put into my eyes that I would be completely incapacitated for two to six hours. I couldn't see anything within 12 inches of my face, they gave me some throw away glasses, basically, just to get the job done. So I could at least call an Uber and get home and we pushed our start time and the net, net of it was your eyesight like, everything else is
Aging. It's still very, very good. At least my distance is 2015, which is fantastic, but it's not what it once was 2010. And I had, I want to say a moment of crisis when he basically took a card and put it in front of me while my eyes were blurry and he said, this is where your vision is going, just so, you know, so his bedside manner could have used a little bit of work, but I wanted to ask you, how you think about or relate to aging and the changes that come with aging.
What a great place to start. I was on the internet in 1976, before many people listening to, this were born and when I started one of the first internet companies, there was no World Wide Web. So the world keeps changing and so do we. And it's very tempting because the stars in front of us, keep changing and getting younger to imagine that we are sort of fading away. And so my analogy, my dad taught me to ski when I was 12 and I was terrible at Ball Sports. Not very good at hockey.
See, I hated getting hit, I broke my nose, I put my arm, but skiing, I was a maniac. There were no helmets in those days, but I know one could get down the hill faster than me. And when I was 16, I fell under the chairlift of Sugar Bush on the ice and skidded the whole way from the top to the bottom face down headfirst dislocating, both shoulders and ended up needing surgery on both. The first one was botched by a neighbor of the second. One was by the doctor for the US ski team.
And I said I can't ski anymore but when my kids came along I taught them to ski and I got back into it with my dad and then I realized when I hit like 35 you're just going to have to keep confronting the fact that you're afraid and you're not going to get better at this. So I switch the Telemark skiing which is twice the work in half the speed and I did that for 10 years and then I switched to skate skiing with Nordic skis.
And I get to still do that and it's very easy when I think about my lack of recall that I used to have. Or I could run a 7 hour session without repeating myself to my inability to ski anymore. 217 other things that I'm walking away from and to feel a sense of loss to feel like we need to grieve that were not that person anymore but I guess after
My first bout with covid. It was more like what a gift I have today to be in the shoes of somebody who at 62 gets to do things well but only because I'm walking away from things I can't do anymore and instead of focusing on what I used to have, I'm really working hard and getting satisfaction out of focusing on what I do have when I can do and that just raises the stakes for things. And the reason of this is
Thing I think is because Boomers and I'm a little bit, a lot older than you. But Boomers have driven our culture. Since the day, I was born that when we were draft age that was when the draft really mattered. And when we were listening to rock and roll, that's when music really mattered. And when people needed to make money for their family, that's when Wall Street really mattered, and now boomers are dying. And so, we are living in a culture where there's an overhang
of all these people with loud voices, talking about the end of the world because it's the end of their world, but it's not the end of the world. I
thought you might have a few things to share. That was a random to get us started. My goodness, you just bought permission to talk about whatever you want that. Put a salve on my existential crisis wound that I had earlier today. But before we move on, let me ask you on a day-to-day week-to-week basis, you strike me and have struck me for a long time as a, let's say.
Default optimistic, generally, if we consider Baseline to be emotion neutral, generally above Baseline person. Are there times when you catch yourself, perhaps focusing on noticing dwelling is too strong a word but ruminating on the loss of something. And in those cases, what do you do? I'm just wondering what the intervention looks like. What the self-talk looks like anything like that.
So, I really wish you would had a chance to interview Zig Ziglar.
Me too. Zig was my friend. He was one of my first teachers and one of the things I took away from dick as someone who had gotten himself into a pessimistic cycle for five years earlier in my career is the world is going to be whatever. The world is approaching it, with a positive energetic attitude, probably will make your experience of the world better. Then girding Yourself by being a pessimist and maybe getting what you're hoping for. So I find myself coming.
Back frequently particularly in the last bunch of years when there's been so much Doom and Gloom to this idea that we get to pick our attitude. And in fact, it's the only thing each of us truly gets to pick and it doesn't mean what happened to you is what you deserve. It just means that that happened. Now you get the one and only choice, which is how to process that. So that's not the answer to your question but
That's my Approach. But I find myself in - ruts when I'm confronted, by too much media, when I first started organizing the carbon Almanac, there was a full two months when the cataclysm that we have created was confronting me really directly and it was hard to find my footing
speaking of response and choosing response and I don't want to
shuffle the deck in such a way that makes things difficult. But we spoke a little bit before we began recording about the several thousand things that we could discuss. And one name came up, which was Viktor Frankl and it would this be an opportune time we can always hit snooze and come back. Shh actor. But would this be an opportune time to invoke the name Viktor Frankl and let you run
with it? There are a few books that have been brought up on this podcast. More than that
one.
You and Viktor Frankl story, survival of for concentration camps just generous heroic. The thing is a lot of people stopped reading halfway through the first book, get a touch of his because the story is really powerful, but then you get to this stuff about Lobo therapy and some people say that he was part of the Triad of Austrian Pioneers in the way we think about the mind, there was Freud who focused on sensuality
and sex there was Adler who focused on status dominance and then there was Frankel who focused on meaning and meaning as far as I can tell from my limited reading of Frankel's work is when a human being finds a thing, that means something to them a chance for a path forward, a pathway to Hope
Everything in their life gets better and that his work, he lived for another 70 years after he got out of the camp. 65 years his work, he and suicide, prevention was extraordinary from the statistics. I've read because he understood that for many people. I'm not generalizing everyone, but for many people, finding a path toward hope of, meaning of realizing that the struggle is the struggle, but you get to decide what?
Do with it is really profound and I think as our industrialized world has gotten more narcissistic which basically says marketers need to make you uncomfortable so that you will buy more stuff to feel better about yourself and you're standing marketers are trying to push people to find meaning in purchases. And the problem with that also, when friends and likes and social media, not sent the problem with that is, it doesn't scale.
And after you've got one storage room full of stuff, buying more things doesn't seem to help you find more meaning and I really feel like we're in this moment in our culture this moment in time where people are waking up and say thank you very much but I don't need to buy another thing. What I need to do is find something to care about and I'll finish this with a two-parter about. I went to see a community Orchestra last week, my friend is in it all volunteers and the
About Community orchestras is there are violinists and flautists and oboist who get paid money to do it. But no one in the community, Orchestra saying, why aren't I getting paid? Because that's not why they're there. In fact, they often paid to be there and I'm guessing with no data whatsoever that if you surveyed people who are in community orchestras, they probably index happier and more engaged in life than people who aren't. So the question is, where we going to find our community Orchestra for me,
The last year and a half. It was the carbon Almanac. I have 1900 friends in 90 countries around the world. I ran into a bunch of them yesterday, Union Square and they're not doing it for money. None of us got paid. They're not doing it for me. I wasn't even there until I showed up. At the end of the day, they're doing it because the meaning that they get from, it is so valuable. It gives them a reason to put up with all the other stuff to have to do every day.
I think we should take a moment just for those who are not familiar to provide a little bit of background, just a brief description of what the carbon Almanac is and then we can navigate from there as you. So generously said, I've written 20 books, I wrote permission marketing, which Infinity business of email marketing, and I wrote a book called Purple Cow.
But I don't need to write books. I don't wake up in the morning. The way I used to say, what I do for a living is write books. What should I write about now? I only write one. When I have no choice and two and a half years ago, I read the Magnificent Ministry for the future, by Kim, Stanley Robinson, and it completely
upended, the way I saw the world it was astonishing to me how much I didn't know about what was happening to the climate and I realized that I wasn't talking about what marketing and corporations were doing to the climate because I felt stupid and the reason I felt stupid as they wanted me to feel stupid that they want us to be confused and I thought, well, if I'm under informed, I bet other people are too
And I used to make almanacs for a living. I did the business Almanac to People magazine. Celebrity Almanac, I know how to make a complicated long book but I realized hey we take me too long and B would be really lonely. So what an opportunity I downloaded discourse, set it up, invited some people to join me. And within a month we had 300 volunteers, most of whom I have never met in person. And in 150 days, we built edited footnoted
He searched, copy edited Illustrated a 97,000 word book with no errors in it. Holly's, volunteers around the world, 24 hours, a day, trading ships, and the process of building, it found solace for all of us. And I learned so much, which I Incorporated in the new book about what a community can do when people are enrolled. And I also learned a lot like plastic. Recycling, is a fraud and Exxon knew long ago about
What was happening to the climate? And my favorite is the carbon footprint. The concept was invented by Ogilvy & Mather for their client, British Petroleum as a way of getting privileged people to feel guilty about their behavior and she feel like a hypocrite, maybe you won't speak up.
So where should we go? Here, we find ourselves at a multi-pronged fork in the road. We can talk about industrialism. We could talk about building Community which is something that is certainly on my mind but I don't want to hide.
Hijack. I can try to coax and direct but I don't want to hijack if it's not a natural place to go, we could talk about creativity. Trust enrollment. Choosing a few words here and there that come to mind, a, I of course, on many people's minds,
but perhaps
you could speak to
The antidote to nihilism and I want to preface that. Just by saying when you talk about marketers and corporations, I would like to say. And I think it's fair to say that you come from the place of someone who has worn the head of marketer. You come from a place of someone who has worn the Hat of founder of executive and therefore I give it much more.
Ability than I would someone with 27 bumper stickers, from 27 causes driving around in Berkeley has never really worked in an office or in a business of any type who's spouting off about the evil corporations. In the same way that someone might talk about the evil Illuminati so that I want to establish with that backdrop. Could you speak to how you think about?
Nihilism and addressing nihilism because certainly even in my audience and particularly among younger people. But I have seen it bleeding upward into my generation, even people who are older than me, it would appears to be this creeping nihilism, the sense that nothing means anything, you can't sort true from false right from wrong? Everything's too confusing, we have deep fakes misinformation, disinformation
You just can't sort anything from anything else. And on top of that, it seems like the Titanic has already hit the iceberg. We're on the way down, you can't really patch the hole, so is the best we can do playing violins on the deck while she goes under or is there anything else to do that
is
Maybe an overstatement
but not much of one. This is something that I really do sense in many interactions that I've seen and felt and I would just love to know how you have thought about that because I have found myself similar to where you found yourself. Perhaps, at one point with the carbon Almanac in amylase and some would say well it's a Well warranted malaise. So what are you going to do about it? And I would love to know what you suggest we do about it or what you
You have done about it aside from the putting together, the carbon Almanac itself? Longest question of all time. Thank you for listening to my TED
talk. It's a great question and you should be driving because, you know, exactly what's going on. I'm going to start by saying I'm a hypocrite and so is everybody else so I don't have to point out that I'm more pure than other people because I'm not. And now after just a few minutes of the podcast we have to put onto the table a very simple statement which is we're all going to die.
But that was true, 50 years ago too. And there's a great book that I loved called the last policeman and I'm not sure I'd say it's a great book, it's a great concept and I really love reading it. Imagine that there's an asteroid that's going to hit the earth in a year and Destroy and kill all of us. It's not don't look up. It's just starts with that premise and then it's a police procedural book about the last policeman left in a little village in New Hampshire because everybody else says
As screw it, we're all going to be dead in a year. So marriages break up why would you go to work to clean the fryer? If you know you only have a year left to live supermarkets fall apart but he goes to work every single day because we're all going to die maybe not in a year but no one listening to this is going to be alive in 100 years. Even some Silicon Valley billionaires were getting blood. Transfusions are going to be alive in them, right? And so the only question is are you going to die in a year or 100 years?
And when we look at the data on the climate, it's very clear that they're going to be 10, 20 30, 40 million, climate refugees, every year. That whole swaths of the Earth are going to become uninhabitable. It's not going to be pleasant for many people. Can we quote fix it and go back to? I don't know when no.
Is it a problem that we should address, definitely, but that doesn't mean we could do anything to live forever so given that we're all gonna die. The question is, what's the point of tomorrow? And for me, I think the key question coming at this is so new to Stanford Business School, very long time ago. His some people believe that the purpose of business is to enable culture to enable humanity and some people believe that
The purpose of humanity and culture is to enable business and I think those people have too much influence right now and they are raw and Milton Friedman just made up this nonsense. About the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize its profit. It lets people off the hook and they become tools of a system that grinds stuff out. So if we think about Amazon, Amazon is had turnover as high as 30% in a 90 day.
. 30% of all the people, they hired across the whole company, quit in less than 90 days. The data that I quote in the book is it cost Amazon, a third of their profit, a third of their total profit because of turnover. And the reason is simple because when you get there to work in a warehouse and more than half of all the warehouse injuries in the United States Appetit, and Amazon warehouse. Last year, they don't treat you like a person. They say your job is.
To beat the numbers on this sheet of paper or on this iPad screen and then beat them again. Tomorrow, it's Frederick Taylor on steroids with a stopwatch jerking people around the expression. Jerking people around came from Ford's assembly, plant in the 1920s because Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford used a stopwatch to measure every single motion and a visitor to the Ford plant said it looks like everyone here is wound up. The way they are jerking from left to right with strings pulling
It's a wonder that they can even live and when we think about tomorrow or the tomorrow, after that given the damage, we've all done, we still live in culture. We still have this miracle, you and I are talking while, thousands of miles apart, we have access to every piece of information. We have magical computers. That can understand us and talk back. We can reach out to someone in. Need we can connect to people who need to hear from us and if you want to just give up because the world
is going to be different in 20 years, that's your choice, but given that we've got this window, it feels to me like we need to up our focus on humanity and connection and possibility and Improvement of the condition and maybe not worry so much about public demonstrations of power, firing people, online being brutal in the service of profit because we don't have a profit shortage. We have a meaning shortage
So what can someone listening do? You could personalize this to be? If you like I'm always looking for. Meaning seems to be a perennial subject for me. What can someone do if they are listening? And thinking it is not my path or I don't have the bandwidth or fill in the blank to become say, climate activists, not to say that's what you're implying. But what else can I do to be part of the light? Not part of the
Dark, so to speak.
So in a second, I want to talk about the bees but first significance. So I surveyed 10,000 people and I said, tell me about the best job you ever had. And I gave people 14 choices about what made it to best job they ever had. Including they paid me a lot of money, and I didn't have to work very hard, and the results were the same, no matter which country people came from, no matter how old they were the results were. I accomplished more than I thought, I could people treated me with respect. And I
Work. I was proud. If we feel significance, we start to feel optimistic. We start to feel meaning, we start to feel human, where does significance come from? It comes from making a change happen, can you be really clear about the change you seek to make and who you are making it with and for. So, when I think about climate, most of the people who showed up to work on the carbon Almanac said, well, I'm doing fine. I recycle this
I compost that I don't do that and this is the myth of the carbon footprint. There is nothing you can do personally as a privileged person of the colonial world to fix the climate. But what you can do is organize that if you can figure out how to get 5 or 10 people together, you can probably ban gas powered leaf blowers in your village and that will have 50 times the
packed of you switching to an electric car. Plus the idea of banding together with five or 10 or 15, other people creating the conditions for other people, to find something to care about, and succeed at it, will fill you with meaning not with despair, but leaving the climate aside for a minute. When we think about our days, where we go to work, who we work with whether we're in a community, Orchestra or not,
Is it significant, is it about you and the change you seek to make or you quote? I'm just doing my job. So I'm doing a talk for Harvard and they said, what do you want to call it? And I told them and they renamed it, which I got them to unrwa name to having your employees feel significant as if it's some sort of hand waving that you get to do with the free snacks and that's not my point.
My point is we built all these systems so we can actually be significant so we can actually point to what we made. So, let's go back. How long ago was, the first breakthrough book for your 10 years, give or take fifteen, last breakthrough, or the first breakthrough book? The
4-Hour Work. Yeah. So far, we're here for our Cooper's 2007. So let's call it 15 years
ago, right, 15 years ago. So what you said, two people to a lot of tidying in disbelief
Is that you as an individual have access to tools so that you can find some thing or somebody or some system that can do the grunt work so that you can actually do human work, that is valued by others and that opened the door for what so many people are now capable of doing. However, there's still all this pressure to race to the bottom. If you put your freelance work on up work, the race is to be the fastest cheapest person.
Well, if you're the fastest cheapest person, you're just in Mechanical Turk, you're just cranking it out and no one cares about you because the minute someone's faster and cheaper than you, they'll switch. And what we're looking for, is to find work where our work is, unmistakably us where our work is something we can point to and say given who I am. And what I see I made this I made this for you, can you please help me make it better? And when we can do that,
That our days are totally different than when were. Basically sure that an AI is going to take over our job for free, as soon as the boss can figure out how to write down, what we do all day.
So, let's just say, is a thought exercise that you came across through, doesn't have to be through all the MBA, you end up taking on as a mentee. The 25 year old current day version of you, similar background, similar,
Education. How would you help that Seth to do this?
So I haven't run the ultimate be a for a long time. I'm very proud at there's a b Corp and it runs and lives happily without and I don't have any official mentorships. And you've heard me talk about this before because it just doesn't scale and it becomes this bottomless pit of
repair. Yeah, this is just a total thought exercise, right?
So I need to say it because sometimes people hear your thought exercises and then they send me notes,
That's taking mentees. The
subreddit Seth's mentees. The point of my
work is for me to be able to be a mentee without showing up in person and I'm thrilled when that happens. Yeah, when someone sends me a note saying, I'm 25 years old, how do I become a marketer? Where do I get a job? Where do I train? My answer is you do it by becoming a marketer, go find a charity that you care about and go raise ten thousand dollars for them. Go to a garage sale by forty dollars worth of stuff and sell
On eBay, for $100, go figure out how to tell a story to somebody else, that changes them. And if you are a receptionist at an ophthalmologists, you can do the same thing. You can figure out how to take that patient or just came in, or is on their way out and make them feel 10% better by saying something doing something interacting with them, not because it's in the manual. Not cuz you memorized it but because you see a way to connect to
To another person. If you can do that, just a little
You can do it again and that is the Breakthrough that Industrials do not want us to understand that they invented public school. So we would say, will this be on the test? How little can I do and still get picked? And all three of those things are wrong. And the option instead is to say is there are human somewhere connected to you in person or online. Can you connect with them in a way? That makes things better for them. At least a little and
Can you do it again?
That's what culture is that's what we've been doing for 10,000 years, that is what fills people with meaning and you don't need tips or tricks or hacks, like someone sending me an email saying, Seth what your favorite color because then if I write back somehow we've built this sense of mutual connection. No, that is not marketing. That's hustling and hustling doesn't work anymore because everyone's doing it and just wait till the AI spam shows up. Yeah, I spam is going to make your head explode because can be so,
Effective until you end up. Not even trusting that
putting a, I spam aside. I agree with you. I mean, honestly, I'm just enjoying my current level of spam while I can.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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Tim.
If people are listening and they want to, as you've outlined create meaning, do human work, not succumb to a race to the bottom where they end up replaceable by the next fastest, cheapest film. The blank give any other guidelines besides get started. Do the thing that you are aiming to do or any other reasons to be optimistic at think that might be helpful. Also just to not level the scales a little bit, but I feel like
Optimism is often a precursor to action or prerequisite in a sense. How would you speak to that? And I want a footnote. I did take a note on paper. You said, I think we're going to come back to the bees. If I heard you
correctly, we're going to come back to the Beast. Yeah, let's talk about the boss, okay.
It is entirely possible that you work in a place where you have no options, you have no agency, you have no significance. If that is actually true, you should quit because you don't get tomorrow over again my guess it is not actually true. My guess is you have more agency than you are prepared to embrace and so go start a book club at work. Start with one and Tim's books, read it with four other people. And so get
On the customer service line after your shift is over and answer three questions and so figure out how to engage with someone in the organization in a way that is not part of quote, your job and figure out how to lead and connect. You can do those things without getting fired or after work. A friend of mine got married at a old folks home and the person, the witness was 97 years old and two days later she passed away.
So do you think that that's going to be a magical marriage to have honored that person? The one thing that she was staying alive for that, she got to see before the end. Where do you think it? Makes more sense to be a bridezilla and to just make sure you're part of the wedding industrial complex and everything matches. Everybody else's wedding, right? So in all these elements of our life, we are pushed to do something. The normal way, the profitable way, the way where we are blameless or we can choose
To do something that matters. So now the bees, if you don't mind, I don't mind. I am fascinated by the beasts. So the story, it's more personal than most stories they tell but I have been hoping to share it with you so I'm glad we're getting this chance to talk. I got a note, I don't fly for work anymore because airplanes feel like cannibalism to me after working on the climate. Think I feel like I can do my work without doing that and after 1000 in person speeches,
I've earned the right to say. No, I'm not going to get on a plane anymore, but I need to get somewhere for family reasons, and so when we reached out and said for family reasons, I have built a firm, that's remote. I'm really remote in Australia because my daughter who's 10 was born with some health problems. And I've tried to organize our lives to support her and having most magical life that she can. And I'm running a conference for the entrepreneurs by venture,
Backed my Venture firm funds. They're all in regenerative work. They're all dealing with the climate problem from a commercial point of view. Will you come help run a two-day seminar for them and I happen to be somewhere near there so I said, yeah, I can do that. And so for free, I showed up to do this two day workshop. Well, the day before he reached out and said, I'm not going to be there in person because my daughter is not feeling very well, but
Sure, it'll go great.
So the percentage of running it with is beekeeper from Australia and he started talking to me about the bees and he told me the story of Jacqueline, Freeman's song of increase. And the song of increase is just such a great Tim Ferriss story. So here's what happens. A typical Hive. Not the big honey Hive. We could have a whole conversation about big honey, but a typical Fierro beehive at the end of a Long Winter. Will have barely made it through. That's what the Honey's 4.
To supply them with food during the course of the winter. But if they made it, the Council of Maidens will meet, they're the ones who really run the hive and they will do a couple of things. The first thing they will do is build a vertical egg chamber and instruct the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg which is very unusual because there's only one Queen in a high. And the second thing they will do is tell the rest of the maidens to go get as much pollen as they possibly can. And
The money supply this happens in May and June in the Northern Hemisphere and so what will end up happening is the hive will? This is 20,000 bees will be back in shipshape condition by June and then based on the weather because they know what the weather is going to be there. Very good at this, they will organize without an organizer lead without a leader. Twelve thousand bees will leave The Hive in a 10-minute period of time. They will
leap out of the hive singing, the song of increase and Jaclyn has written beautifully about this and then they end up in a tree, a hundred yards away in a tight ball because bees have to maintain a body temperature of 98 degrees or else they fall apart. They get into a torpor and now they only have three days to find a new place to live.
And each one of the bees is doing what the be does. Almost everybody except for the queen is only 3 weeks old, which I didn't know, I thought Beast little really long time. So the Scout bees are doing their scouting and the maidens are doing it there. That HP is doing their thing, but the hive is basically a human brain inside out. There are neurons all working in sync to create this Leap Forward.
And hearing the story. I was completely transfixed by what the song of increased could mean two people. And then I realized people aren't bees and we're looking for something with even more internal meaning than simply this Leap Forward. So I ended up driving then really far hundreds of miles to visit a friend and early. The next morning I went for a swim with all this, forgive the pun, buzzing going on in my head and
and there was a someone who swims almost every day. There was a very Fierce, a Riptide and I came as close to Drowning as it is possible for a person to come. And as it happened, I was
Pretty, okay. With the fact that that was the end of that.
I would miss my family, I would miss so many things, but it was like, well, if that's the end of that, that's the end of that. And then this mission of talking about significance just flooded over me and I somehow figured out how to get back to Shore. And then the next day, I heard from Dan and his daughter, Frankie had passed away and the combination of all those things, helped me realize that the world probably doesn't need another marketing book for me, but probably could benefit from thinking about all of
Those things at once and realizing that we have so much more power than we want to acknowledge.
Thank you for sharing that Seth, that is more
personal
than most stories you've
shared, and
I'll just take a beat on that and would love to hear
What happened? After that swim after that phone call, what did the next week or two? Look like for you or feel like for you with respect to this germinating seed? Maybe it was beyond the seed of significance and shifting, perhaps to a focus on that with your communication with your thinking, what did the subsequent week?
Look like
it's funny because no one's ever asked me that, but it fits right into the question. You asked little while ago, but what can people do? I wrote a whole book in two weeks, I said, how can I honor Frankie? How can I honor Jacqueline? How can I honor all of the people who are being brutalized by billionaires in Silicon Valley? How can I honor the climate refugees? How can I honor everybody who has something to lose?
By doing the thing that some people think I'm good at. And what could I do for Frankie? That would be better than this. And so that's why I did it because writing a book, as you know, is more of a lift than is rational. And I could have just written a few blog posts, but having people see, you do this irrational, lift helps them understand that you have something important to say and that maybe they'll
Share it with somebody else.
I'm going to throw out a few terms. Actually, I'll give you two, two choices and we can go down a path. You choose or option, C, which I don't present your all you're good at choosing option C. When people say, you can choose between A and B. So that may be where we go wooden tiles or Quakers. Where would you like to go?
So let's say, but I learned something, fascinating about the Quakers, the Quakers invented solid
Confinement. Hmm. And when we think of Quakers nonviolent, Etc, the whole idea. Think about the word, Penitentiary. All right, it's where you go to be penitent to repent. And the idea of solitary confinement was to create the conditions for people to get comfortable with their sins and to repent from them. And then across in England, they built the panopticon.
Which was a prison where you were under constant surveillance, so this is super low Tech, you just put the guard house in the middle and make sure the windows are all lined up. So everyone feels like they are being seen all the time when we add solitary confinement to the panoptix on, we end up with surveillance capitalism. We end up with this idea, not to surveillance capitalism of consumers being surveilled, which is what the book is about, but more about workers being surveilled.
That we isolate them from each other except when they're in a zoom call where the meeting was designed to make sure they weren't picking up their dry cleaning when they were home and counting their keystrokes and measuring their output and Counting the clicks constant surveillance and for many people, the equivalent of solitary confinement. Well, why are we surprised that turnover is high and work satisfaction is low because we stripped meaning from people, when they go to work, is we don't trust them.
To be people, we need them to be resources. And that's why the very phrase human resources. His such a challenge because after you've optimized the machines, the next thing to do of course, is to optimize the people and you know the whole measured self-movement about how can you get better on your bike with Strava but that's happening to at work whether you want it to or not. So let's just say you're the
Founder of a small company and maybe it started off as a solo operation or husband-and-wife team and good news. You seem to have created something that people want or need and it's growing. So you hire, you hire people and you have the best of intentions you believe yourselves to be moral people. Ethical people and that husband and wife team are listening to this podcast.
They have four employees, maybe they're in a fast-growing Bakery, who knows. And it could be any type of business. They have the tiger by the tail. They're growing quickly. There's not a lot of room for under
performance
because a lot of people are wearing a lot of hats. How would you talk to those people? Because they may hear this and say, Yes, Seth, I want to value my employees as humans, not just resources and the
He Is We have pretty tight margins. We're attempting to grow quickly. We have a lot of inventory. We need our employees to really perform at the highest level possible and if they're not performing we do need to let them go or replace them.
Okay? So we're going to do it aside in a minute.
In my old voice about Freelancers and entrepreneurs and growing a small company. But before we do that, I want to highlight, I am not here to say, we need soft to replace hard. I'm not here to say that workers benefit when the boss goes easy on them. In fact, I'm talking about the opposite that the significance of what can be built by Cesar Chavez or what could be built by the carbon Almanac team for no money. Has nothing to do with soft or hard.
It has to do with the idea that you make a promise and you keep it and you need to have a lot of rigor where you are relentlessly, criticizing the work. But you are not criticizing the worker, you earn enrollment on the change, you seek to make. Either. The original Mac was built by 13 people at a pirate flag, and they worked harder than anybody in Silicon Valley has ever worked before.
For or since and they didn't get paid very much. And if you talk to Susan years and years and years later, I don't know if she's been on the podcast but she's great. She will talk about it as being a seminal moment in her life, right? Because they got something done. So that's why we need to have the aside about Freelancers and scale freelancing is Magic. I am a freelancer. I used to be a freelancer in between I was an entrepreneur, they are different job.
Oops, Freelancers. Get paid. When they work, they do the thing and it has their name or something like it on it. It's very hard to scale. Freelance work. What you need to do is strip away, the busy, work Outsource it. And what you need to do is get better clients because better clients demand better work and pay you more. But what usually happens? When a freelancer starts to succeed is they hire Junior versions of themselves and try to push those people to read their mind.
Work ever harder and faster for less money than they get paid and then pass it off as their work. That's super stressful and it almost never works. And so if you really are building something bigger than the two of you, I would say, tell me you this thing, you're building and why some customers will pay more for because you added human value. Because if you're trying to out Amazon, Amazon, you got troubles, even Walmart, can't out Amazon Amazon, that's not a race.
You can or want to win. So, what we see is if someone is going to build
A bakery or a wedding services business or a physical therapy facility. They can win by racing to the Top by saying, there are people here who do work. You cannot find anywhere else, but do not expect that. You're also going to get that work faster and cheaper than you can get it other places because you can't have everything. And if you could make a promise to your customers and your employees can see their contribution to that.
Promise.
You're not going to have any trouble at all getting your employees to do what they need to because you created the conditions for better. You didn't try to manage your way into getting them to give you a bargain.
So let me take a step off the highway onto the footpath, the bike path on the side for a second because this is related and very self-interested, but I'll ask it anyway since I guess, this whole podcast is pretty self interested. I get to have conversations with people, I like and respect.
But you've known me for a long time. Now I would say that's think well I think that's a fair way to put it. We've known each other for a decent stretch. I consider you very good at being aware of your own assumptions. The constraints that you've applied to your life, choosing the rules choosing. For instance, a story about money past a certain point past the requirements past your basic needs and wants money is a story. So choose a story, you can be happy with etcetera. Is there anything you've observed?
Over time with me, where you're like, it's funny, you know, Tim has this sort of conceptual limitation stuck between his teeth all the time and you can't seem to see it when he looks in the mirror, to always got that spinach between those two teeth, and it bothers him, he's always picking at it, but he can't quite get it Loose. This is a very long-winded way of asking what are some of the baby questions or issues that you seem come up, repeatedly with me, is there anything that comes to mind?
I was completely wrong about my first impression of Tim Ferriss and that's because I based it on people who didn't understand what you were trying to do, trying to do that to me. And so I was getting hustled by people who said that you were the person who is teaching them how to hustle. Hmm. And I didn't bother to spend the time to understand what you were actually doing and that's completely on me.
And you have developed a voice and a contribution to the culture and your community faster at a younger age than almost anybody. I've worked with and way faster than I did. And
I don't see any spinach in your teeth. I think that it's unlikely that you knew 16 years ago, that you would be having conversations like this, that you would have built this platform and leverage. You have to teach so many people things, but at the same time, when the opportunities have Arisen, you have been really smart about saying no, I don't want to be a judge on Shark Tank. And no, I don't want to figure out how to hustle people to pay me on Cameo. You're saying I have
Have something to narrate here for people whether or not, I know exactly what tomorrow's going to be like and it's not easy to do that regularly at the level that you do it with the amount that you put out. So I know you weren't fishing for me to say this but I've needed to say it in public because in private in my head for the first nine months that I sort of knew you, I didn't really know you.
Appreciate that's us and it should provide a little
Context for folks. And the context is when we have dinner together on the East coaster, I guess it's always on the East Coast because you're very good at setting your Geographic pounds.
I
ask you for a lot of advice and you're very forgiving and tolerant of be asking many, many questions which I really deeply. Appreciate. So that question came from a genuine place and thanks for the very kind words. I love
I love doing this. I love having these conversations and there's absolutely no way I ever could have foreseen this being my quote unquote job. 16 years ago. No way, absolutely not. And I think probably for five years from now. Whatever I am doing. Then I will have the same statement for. There's no way I could have predicted. Now that I would be doing that five years from
now and let's just to broaden that out. Parents who have a sticker on the back of their car.
Have been indoctrinated to indoctrinate their kids to do the same thing to say, oh you studied mechanical engineering. So you're going to be a mechanical engineer for the next 70 years, and then you'll die. And that's not what Youmans are capable of. What did Joy to be able to say, I have no idea what I will be saying and doing in five years. What a privilege then it is I feel really for we talk about false proxies for a Miss talk about false proxies, I'll let you lead the way, okay. So people might be
Knowing about the wooden tiles. So, I have a 70 watt laser cutter in. My basement, doesn't everybody. And so I make these things that are like, I Ching cart and so instead of having notes or something, I just really like the texture of it. So that's what the wooden tiles are. And so, there's a wooden tile right here. This is false proxies false proxies, we need proxies when we go shopping at the supermarket, because if you're going to buy ketchup, you're not allowed to taste the catch up before you buy the
ketchup. So,
The label on the bottle is a proxy for what's inside of it. And we're even capable as consumers of figure out. We haven't had this particular flavor of salad dressing before, but we can guess from the other clues that it can be good or not. Good. And we use proxies to pick which restaurant to go to and proxies to figure out what book did because you're not going to read the book until after you buy it. Judging a book by it's cover is a very common and important thing.
At work, we developed proxies because we have to hire people for a 20 30, 40 year career before they work for us. So, one proxies did you go to a famous college? One proxy is. Are there any typos on your resume? One proxy is, are you good at interviewing? But, of course, unless you're hiring someone to be an interviewer, being good at interviewing is a false proxy. Yep. And the thing about false proxies is they lead
To caste systems to social stratification, to Prejudice to misogyny. Because we are quickly making decisions on who to swipe left or right based on clues that aren't actually related to whether the person can do the job or not. If someone is in a wheelchair, they might be a great programmer, whether or not, they're in a wheelchair, is irrelevant to whether they're a great programmer and yet it's 2023 and it's still happening. So there's
Of this information that's now available to us, where we can look at the work instead of looking at the proxies. So The Simple Solution which I've been lucky enough to adopt his, I won't work with someone unless I've worked with them before and that means I will pay someone to do a short project and I paid them whether they do a good job or not. But if they're good at that project now I know that they're good at the project because they did the project and
With all of the stuff that's happening in our world, with the rate of change that's going on with the need for people not who know something they learned at school because they can look it up online. It stackoverflow in two minutes what we need are people who are resilient and risk-taking and honest and transparent and connected and loyal. And all these other words which don't match up with the proxies we usually use when we decide
A higher who led into an institution who to reward who to follow online. So I think it's important to just name it. There are false proxies in our life and they're expensive. They get in the way of our output, and they also steal our souls and they denature or culture because when a proxy becomes important, when for example, celebrity gets the benefit of the doubt. What we've done is we've handed this person leverage that isn't really helping anybody
did I
I hear you correctly Seth and if so I'd love to hear you expand on this a bit that you only work with people you've worked with before. Did I hear that correctly or was that a different line?
Yeah, I know. So what I mean is if I'm going to do a project, the old way to do it was to look at the 10 million viable people pick the one who has the shiniest set of easily, measured proxies and hire them and I have hired hundreds of people that way.
And for a while, I told myself I was really good at it and then I thought about it, I realized, I just thought I was really good at it because of all the people I didn't hire because they didn't match, my perception of what I was looking for. And what I learned particularly working on the carbon Almanac is everyone was a volunteer. Everyone got the keys to, you know, take the car for a drive. And if you did something that was really good, we asked you to do more and if you didn't, we asked you to do something different because
The work was the point. And so now I'm working on this interesting software pilot thing. And I went to people who I've seen do projects, and who I've danced with before, not based on where they live. When lived in Nigeria, when lives in London, one lives in Portland. I've seen your work, I don't know. You personally, the personal stuff is an interesting proxy but it doesn't usually match. So let's dance again. And once we can see
Enrollment once we can say to the world, I'm looking for a freelancer who wants to make this change in the world. This project is this size and I'm going to pay you this much to do it. We can use our human judgment to decide who to offer the project but then when the project comes back, this one hour, one week project, yeah, pay them fairly and then decide based on the work product. Whether it's useful, this is exactly the way Matt builds.
WordPress. Get automatic is a reading and writing culture, where if you're good at reading and writing, you get to do more stuff but there's no points for being good. In a zoom meeting, no one gets
promoted, you know, definitely with Matt no one gets promoted for Sue meetings, and you do have to do some customer service, which I think is actually a fantastic practice. Even if you're c-suite, you get to spend a couple weeks answering customer tickets question for you about employee retention, and I'd love to hear.
You speak to your personal experience. You've hired many people and this may not map directly to the writing or the principles in the song of significance, it may, but I'm wondering because hiring is one thing. Retaining is a close cousin, but not exactly the same and there are people out there. I know quite a few people who are really good at putting in the time to hire really good people, but they haven't been able to for whatever reason as
As thoroughly as effectively, think about retention. So they lose some people are very, very good. What have you found to be in your experience or observing others? Some of the key ingredients or possible, approaches to ensuring that you retain High performers.
So, if we look back, just 50 years, the purpose of a company town is if you are the landlord, it's much harder for someone to quit.
That the goal of the old-school industrialist his that your employees have no options because if they have no options, you don't have to pay him very much. Let's compare that to an ad agency. I read a book about the many years ago called st. Luke's in London, there were 30 people. They want a whole bunch of awards, when you want a bunch of Awards as an ad agency. What happens is, you get a whole bunch of fancy new clients, which means you have to hire more people, which means the average goes down. And then you get big enough that you've exhausted and you saw to Saatchi & Saatchi and then
Here done and the 30 of them looked at each other and they say we don't want to do that. So they made a rule and the rule is were never going to be more than 30 people. They then said to their clients. That means we can't take any new clients unless we lose an old client.
So they have a waiting list of clients. We have a waiting list of clients. You can go to your old clients with your best ideas, and if they give you a hard time, you can say you're fired because I got another client ready to take your place. And it also means that if you are only going to have 30 employees, if someone wants to leave, let him leave. There's a waiting list of people want to work there.
Turnover is a good thing. When we are doing human work, not a bad thing and what I would do if I was running a real company, his I would say. The first thing you got to do on your first day is update your LinkedIn page and keep it up to date. And we're going to have a resume job fighting seminar, every two weeks here. I don't want you to stay here because you can't get a better job. I want you to stay here because the conditions we've created the work we are doing is worth you. Stay here.
And then I would listen if I'm not creating the conditions where the people who I need to be dancing with want to stay, I have to change the conditions, not curse, the people who are leaving and this permeability is where the future lies. We don't have 40 year career as anymore. We have four month careers or three-year careers. So onboarding is faster because you can say to somebody
Lead everything in slack, come to work tomorrow. Ready to start because it's all there. Right? So now instead of onboarding you in a month and a half, I on board, did you in three hours? And because we're project-oriented, turnover is a little different and if I can keep somebody here for a long time because they want to stay here, this enrollment is the key. Vinod khosla has written a book called. Let's get real or let's not play about B2B selling but the lesson of let's get
Or
let's not play a simple. What promises you're going to make this week promises about your career. Promises about your learning promises to our customers, show us your work. We will relentlessly make it better. This is how we're going to treat each other. If this is the right place for you, I hope you'll stay. If it's not the right place for you. I hope we can agree that it's not, but seeking retention doesn't feel right to me. So, let me just elaborate on this book, because it's overlooked. And so,
Beautiful. If you are in business to business, selling selling expensive, committed items to large organization, large organizations can now find out everything they need without calling a salesperson. So the intelligent trained expensive salesperson benefits by saying to the prospect on the first day? Look, you've told me you have this big problem. You need to solve, you have five million dollar assembly line that's letting you down level if we can solve this problem together,
There are you ready to install our system? Because if it's not real, let's not play. Don't waste my time. I won't waste yours. You're not going to buy from me because I'm going to take you to the golf course. Not going to buy from me because RFP is going to come in cheaper than somebody else's. You want my valuable time, I'm going to engage with you and tell you the truth and you'll tell me the truth. You're going to draw your org chart for me. You're going to tell me other complicated products you've bought and why your company bought them. And I'm going to get you promoted by teaching.
NG you how to buy the thing that's going to save your assembly line. Let's get real or let's not play that kind of selling is how you sell a 10 million dollar product. You don't do it by spamming people of pretending you know their favorite color.
Very true. This is truth. I long ago in a former life when I lot more hair and was just out of college, was selling to CEOs and ctOS. And you do not sell expensive systems by
Guessing their favorite color, or even having that conversation. I, in fact, it'll be really counterproductive. The topic of sales, makes me think of Zig Ziglar, and I'm wondering out of my own personal curiosity. Were there things that come to mind where you, disagreed with sake? Maybe you respected his position or a principal, he had, but you personally did not embrace
Whatever it was that he used as part of his own script for navigating the world and people is there anything that you disagreed
on many things, and we did it as friends. So it's funny, Zig has come up twice today before you brought him up, which is weird. I sent a picture of him holding. One of my books is someone just four hours ago, Zeke was my teacher from afar for a long time. I memorized more than 72 hours of his tapes. I listened to the selling tapes until
They wore out and then I bought another set and I saw him in person a bunch of times and each time more than a letter afterwards and each time he wrote back and my letter would highlight the things that worked in talk about the things they didn't and one of the highlights of my speaking career was when he and I shared a stage in front of 22,000 people, it was pretty cool and then I got to publish his goals book toward the end of his line Zig. And I disagreed about
Astrology and yoga because he was coming at it from a different cultural point of view, from Yazoo City Mississippi, and we were like, okay, we can disagree about stuff like that in organized religion and things like that. What was interesting is, when my understanding of permission marketing, evolved and zigs key sentence of you can get everything in life. You want, if you'll just help enough other people get what they want.
Kept coming up because he meant it two ways and one of the ways didn't work for me.
He would say you can get everything in life, you want, if you help enough other people get what they want, as a way of encouraging self-interested short-term people to see that. The best way to get ahead was to do a favor for someone else because that Force, empathy opened the door to making a sale. And what shifted for me over time was how about
You can get everything in life you want and you can help other people get what they want, but they're not one gets you. The other one that what we have is the chance to hold, open the door and let somebody else go in, not because we want them to give us something in return, but simply because holding open the door, is in itself. A significant useful act that will fuel our next cycle of War.
And we talked about it a little bit toward the end of his life. But what Zig did for a lot of folks, his help them become professional instead of just hustling. And I also learned a lot about living, the life of the professional speaker, and I could go on and on. But if your listeners, haven't listened to a bunch of Zig. Yes. It's dated by, you can find the good stuff and be
glad you did. Where would you suggest people start? Or what would you suggest, they
Search for, because the universe of Zig as you mentioned, 62 hours, as a starting point, where might you suggest, they start, what should they look
for the stories in the book, secrets of closing the sale are gold. I could tell word-for-word the story of the overalls and his Original Classic. See you at the top. Also filled with stories when I was starting out, I fail for seven years in a row, it was a very long slog.
And his tapes which you can still get today on CD, also filled with nothing but stories were super dated even then but so cheesy and wonderful that if you listen for an hour a day, you can't help but not quit.
And to give us a image in time. What were you failing at over that period of time as you listen to these audio cassettes and wore them
out. So my first job was in 1983 at a software company in Boston. I worked with
SEC Clark, Michael Crichton, Ray Bradbury. I was a brand manager. I was 24 years old. It was spectacular. And then I left their move to New York and started my own gig and just kept failing at the book. Business chip Conley and I did our first book together and then I got 800 rejection letters in a row that meant every day. I opened the mailbox in three, people had taken the time to write me a letter with my name on it and put a stamp on it saying we don't like your project and we don't like you either and it's very easy.
In the face that and then you know I was just pitching and pitching and pitching and often in a way that amused me but was selfish and I was pitching to people whose job was to be pitched. I wasn't calling people up on the phone at home, right? This was the head of Acquisitions it, Simon & Schuster, whatever was. But when the rejections feel her signal, if you don't have a way to keep caring, but understand that what they are
Rejecting his, the work not the person, it's super easy to give up and that was the transition that I needed to make. You didn't like this idea. It's not that you didn't like me. What can I learn from your criticism of the idea? So the next one will be better. You strike me as someone who's quite happy to have solo time engage in Solo projects. Maybe a project with a family member or something else like building
Is that could be a whole conversation in and of
itself. How are you building?
Are you building a community Orchestra for yourself at the moment or looking forward in the short term to doing that or I should say in the the soon-to-be present future and if so how are you approaching it? Because this is something that I've also noticed and this is not a brilliant Insight but it seems to alleviate a lot of the
Existential dread and mitigate some of the nihilism, the people feel if they simply have some type of shared purpose or activity with a few people consistently. How are you thinking about that for
yourself? This is just me. I don't know how to broaden this to everybody. So the reputation I had from the beginning was I don't miss deadlines. I never go over budget and I'm going to deliver you. What I said I was going to deliver you and no one who has worked for me has ever.
Been part of a layoff people have lost their jobs because it wasn't a good fit. But I've never said, all you guys were down sighs when Google shut down squidoo in one day with no warning and no honest explanation. As to why my eight co-workers and I all went down together, but the promises I make, I make very seriously so that's good and it's bad. It means that I hesitate to make big promises.
That might create the possibility that the big thing is going to happen.
But on the other hand, I can live with the confidence of knowing that you can count on me to keep that promise. So when I think about what am I going to do for my next 5 or 10-year gig?
I think very hard about, who am I promising? And one of my promising them. So I can't say to people what I used to say, which is we're ending this theater come and for 7 hours, I will be on stage answering questions. And by the way, I'm organizing the whole thing, with one volunteer, I'm going to serve you lunch. That's what I used to do in, 400 people would come. It was thrilling to stand there for seven hours, and weave together, all the answers. If I announced that I was going to do that, I could sell it, but I couldn't keep that.
Promise for sure. I don't want to do that because I don't want to as my career of olives and has a different pace. Try to regain my ability to ski at high speed. Not what I'm trying to do so where is that sense of community? The carbon Almanac was that and continues to be but there's going to be another one and I think about whether I needed to be in person or whether this future you and I have been describing for so long.
He's real and it won't be in person because I'm very comfortable engaging with people aren't sharing the same air as me. And most of all, is it worth doing for others? Not am, I just here to entertain myself?
The Seth, what
else?
Would you like to talk about here? We can go in a million directions. What else do you have on your on your wouldn't I'll talk
about. Okay so I want to tell the story of the piano cover at the be conference and then I want to talk about meetings. Is that okay? Sounds great. Okay. So I'm about to go onstage in front of these entrepreneurs all of whom have raised far more money that I've Ever Raised. All of whom are young whippersnappers are going to save the planet. I got no slides or anything. I'm just
Herod this beautiful Winery North to like young Feller Boonville or something. This is
an Australia or somewhere
else. No, no, this was, I haven't been Australian a long time. This is North of San Francisco. Got it. And I need a stick. I need some anecdote to get started. And off to the side is a piano. In one of those quilted piano covers can visualize them. You know, they have those special custom-made kind of comes out on top of the piano.
Is one of those little metal things. It says do not Place anything on top of this.
And on top of that is the sign, but I can't read the sign. So I walk over because that's going to be my stick, which is did you ever notice that people put a do not live in and put a sign on top of that? And on the sign it says this is the original Steinway Grand D. Piano, not an original, the original from 1884 and I had my story, I went over and I said the folks who built that Steinway in 1884.
I had no idea that 140 years later she would be working. It would be creating magic and we would be talking about it and I said there's no guarantee that what we do is going to be around in 140 years but we could act like it might be. We could say this thing we're doing together is not to say, how do we raise as much money as we can, or how do we get written up well on
This blog site or whatever, it's important. And there are lots of kinds of important. It could be important to one person, it could be important to Century from now, but this idea that the piano is still here that just it gave me chills. I love that
piano cover, that is wild to the original experience, just to be able to touch something like that or be close to it
wild. Yeah. So meetings meetings,
I've been obsessed with these for a long time and have lived a different path for meetings. Our friend Toby has Shopify. Wrote a script that deleted every group meeting that was regularly scheduled in the whole company. And then the next day sent an email to everyone in the company and said, I just bought you back your day because if you have 10,000 employees and they're all these weekly or daily meetings, we're talking about tens of millions of dollars of wasted time.
But on top of that, we're talking about the enervating rain deadening idea of watching someone talk because they couldn't care enough to take the time to send a memo instead or couldn't care enough to just record a 10 minute video and send it to everyone to watch as many times as they wanted slower faster. Read the transcript and then get back to them.
And Toby said, if you really need the meeting, go ahead and put it back on your calendar. You're welcome and what meetings have become. So Zoom is a miracle because Zoom eliminates geography when it comes to be of the connect with people and memos were a miracle because they eliminated time they are asynchronous. And when we add video to this, what we get is either we're going to have everyone get together for an hour so I can talk at you.
And I can take attendance based on you sitting there. And what we know from surveys is people hate this. It's one of the things they hate the most about their day.
And it's a form of Power Authority, status and control so conversations need to happen, more meetings need to happen, never you can have conversations all day, you can have a two-minute conversation, a six-minute conversation, talk to this person or that person, but a conversation means there are questions than there are answers. People are talking to each other. Everyone is changed at the end. A meeting is a delivery of information for the convenience of the person who called it. And
And I think it is possible. I know it is possible. We never want to had a meeting the whole time we built the carbon Amin are there were times I send a video to people and said this is what's up? Watch it if you want to but because we were in time zones around the world, a meeting wouldn't have made any sense. We had things where I said, I'm having office hours, you can come ask questions, but I didn't do that other thing and it feels to me like the future of the resilient organization is a lot.
Sir, what not does it automatic, which is how do we build this asynchronous? Geography, free institution. That doesn't depend on me. Making stuff up while I'm on camera.
Yeah, absolutely. And for people who may not have caught his name before, Matt mullenweg is his name. He's been on this podcast, a number of times and he also has been part of a podcast, and this is a believe automatic produced
Called distributed. I may be getting the name wrong but it is entirely about distributed organizations and unorthodox ways of approaching the type of thing that were discussing right now meetings or lack thereof. Different means of communication Etc. And he's been distributed first for a very very, very long time. So they were incredibly prepared, albeit, coincidentally, for everything that happened during lockdown and so
on, right? Well, but coincidentally everyone else was
Unprepared. Have you seen what his team has built with chat GPT for blogs? Has he shown you the version
yet? I don't know if it's public. I have seen screenshots but yeah. Is it
public? I don't know. It's not public but we're only talking. So we're allowed to talk. Okay,
go for it. So if you want to talk I just
gonna say it is the single best juice I have seen. Yeah, of chat GPT or whatever, they're using it being implemented in a way where it's not.
Not just a, you know, a talking llama. It's actually. Oh yeah, I need this.
Yeah, yeah, for sure they created some amazing products. So yes that'll be the, the teaser, the teaser for people for things to come just here for the heights. That's what I think. When I say, I want to thank Seth Godin. Seth, is there anything else you would like to chat about before we
begin today? So your listeners. Love tips. I got one.
Last tactic tip that changed the lives of a lot of people. And then we'll do the magical wrap up stuff. We invented something called page 19, thinking and we knew there was going to be page, 19 of the almanac it was going to be written, copy, edited Illustrated, typeset footnoted. But there wasn't one person on our team who knew how to make page 90. And so we said to the team, we know in the future, there will be a page 19. We know that it will come from this group but we also know there's not anyone
One here who's qualified. So what should we do? And the answer is someone should write a paragraph of page 19 and say, please make this better and then someone else will add to that and someone else will footnote that and someone else will illustrate that and we will relentlessly criticize page. 19 without one saying the person who worked on it was wrong or incompetent and page 19 thinking I've always had page 19 thinking I didn't need it but so many people
They heard this felt the freedom to now speak up and contribute because they knew it was going to get better. And if you think about it, that's Apple, that's Ford. That's every company you can name, Sergey did not program, the Google you are using today. It started with a little tiny German someone in someone. And someone in someone and someone, when you feel stuck, just look for page 19 thinking
and is the way to look for page 19 thinking
To take the pressure off, by lowering your expectations, in a sense, so that you can iterate your way to Excellence, is this applicable to a solo shop or a very small shop? Could you maybe elaborate on, on, what you mean? What it could mean to embrace that thinking,
it puts the pressure on, it doesn't have the pressure off. It puts the pressure on because you can no longer be a prima donna, which is a little, a little afraid. Someone's gonna
to punch me in the nose because you have to say, my nose is not involved. Yeah. And I heard Danny's great story about my nose and it made me sad. So this is
day off are folks for people who don't know. Yeah,
after he broke my nose, he offered to straighten it out and yeah, you can see in the video it's still crooked. But once you understand that you live in a page, 19 world, the pressure is on for you to put out work.
They can generously be criticized. Don't ship junk not allowed, but create the conditions for the thing, your noodling on to become real. That doesn't happen by you hoarding it until it's perfect. It happens by you creating a process for it to get better. So now you're on the hook fish, don't like to be on the hook, people should be on the,
I love it and I was thinking of how this might apply to my own and I have
have since we last spoke been writing fiction and shipping fiction. I'm not saying it's her solo, que le Guin, but I'm happy with it. I am on the hook and I've tried to create. I haven't found exactly what I think will be most helpful later but to create an environment in which perfect is not the enemy of good. But that I also have a means of not shipping garbage, right? And actually having people review my work. How do you like to solicit feedback on?
On writing this is I know a tangent but if you reach out to people to proof read or review drafts of something, you've put together, how do you enable them to be the best proofreaders? Three words. And then some definitions. The three words are criticism feedback and advice.
I'm terrible at criticism. Don't like Chris, you're terrible at receiving, okay? With good feedback, receiving it. Yeah, I criticizing people, no problem, but being criticized, not much feedback. Good feedback is precious but advice, advice. I can handle because advice is one human. Who's on the side of the other human helping them turn on lights. Now, when it comes to writing, there is line editing.
Copy editing developmental editing and proofreading. They do not mean the same thing. Proofreading means did the changes that were instructed to be made get made. So, proofreading is sort of trivial copy-editing says, what do you think about the Oxford comma? Copy-editing says, I don't like the way you spelled this kind of thing. Line editing says this sentence would be better if you move the second half to the first half that I'm going to
To smooth your voice up and developmental editing is Magic. It's I read your work. Let's just talk in general about the change. We seek to make and why it could be made better in a different way. So, I work with the magical Nikki Papadopoulos, at penguin, mostly because her developmental editing is the best I've ever encountered. She says, the title of the book is wrong, and you need to move these three chapters to the end.
Like, what's that worth? That's spectacular, but I will confess if she's not listening that before. I send her a book, I send it to a paid copy editor, who works for me, I don't work for him and for a thousand dollars, he copy it, it's the books. He's not allowed to change any of my voice, but he fixes every one of the little things. So when I send it to penguin, they think. Wow, this guy's so good at all the detail. No, I'm not doctor.
Hagar is but you don't know he exists because I sent it to him before I send it to you. So the point is you will run into people who think that the most important thing they can tell you is you're missing a comma in the third line. This is not helpful, just work is now cheap. It's free online. You can just upload a file and some will fix it for you. But developmental editors, they're Priceless. You need to find someone who has that as a skill opinions, don't matter. That's why the whole
Logos don't show anybody your logo and don't tell anybody your new kids name before they're born, because everyone thinks they have an opinion about a logo but no one's got expertise. It's none of their business, pick your logo and do your logo. The same thing is true with your kid's name and when you show your writing to an amateur, they're going to give you logo advice. The book isn't for them. You need to engage with people who the book is for. Watch what they do with it. See what lights them up so in my
I case, after permission marketing hearing people say back to me, which parts of the book, resonated with them taught me how to write the next book, because right, I didn't ask anybody, how do I make this book better? I just said I wrote this book and seeing what they did? I give them more of that.
By extension, a zig could have taken the fact that you know, the overall story word for word and be like, okay, interesting, let's take a look at why that worked and maybe I'll give them
An extra heaping dose of something like the overall story and the next
book, exactly. And I know for a fact that that's exactly what Zeke did. So Seth
the new book is the song of significance. Subtitle a new Manifesto for teams, people can find you at Seth, Godin.com, Seth, stop log, is there anything else you would like to add any requests you would like to make of my audience, any complaints, you'd like to Lodge formerly criticisms. May be or anything else.
Yes, you would like to say before we wrap up, I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I get to do this, and I'm feeling the murmurs of generosity and abundance replacing the small-minded scarcity, that was so common for so long as people hustled their way through one thing after another over the last bunch of years. And I think as we all come out of, hopefully, come out of this.
Worldwide pandemic. People are taking a deep breath and focusing on contribution and generosity. And all I can tell you is I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for you and for the people who support my work, just making things better because if not that what? So thank you.
Thank you so much, Seth and to everybody listening will have everything that we discussed in the show notes and probably quite a bit more Tim. Blog / podcast, where you can find this and show notes on every other episode. And until next time, just to be a bit nicer than is necessary to yourself and to other people make things just a bit better. Have that extra conversation say that extra nice word do what you can it doesn't have to be huge, probably shouldn't be huge because then you can hide behind that as we've covered in previous.
Episodes make it small, make it better. And until next time. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little fun before the weekend, between one and a half, and two million people. Subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday, easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out.
Out every Friday to share the coolest things. I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles and reading books, I'm reading albums, perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks, and so on that gets sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short.
A little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. Something think about if you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim dot blog, /, Friday, type that into your browser. Tim dot blog, / Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
This episode is brought to you by Shopify shopify's, one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever and let's get into it. Shopify is a platform as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere, giving entrepreneurs to resources, once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas products and so on to life and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is
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