What It’s Like to Work With Seth Godin (#200)

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In my head, when I’m sitting there to write something, whether it’s a blog post or a book, I’m visualizing someone like you and saying, well, this person, they don’t necessarily believe what I believe. They don’t necessarily want what I want. They certainly don’t know what I know. How can I bring stories and images to the table that help them go where they’ve always wanted to go? My work isn’t to repeat what I did yesterday because I already did it. It’s there. My work is to say, here’s this other place that people want to go. Here’s this other thing I could do that might not work here’s this interaction with someone that I’d rather not have, that’s what we do when we do our work now. We don’t dig ditches. We have to do emotional labor. Voluntarily showing up in places where the work is emotionally difficult because we want to help somebody. So the hard part was I made a decision 18 years ago to write a blog post every day. That was hard. Ever since then, I’ve just been doing that thing the same way I made a decision 57 years ago to brush my teeth every day.

Everyone has overcome some obstacle. Everyone has done difficult work for someone else. And if I can honor that and shine a light on it, it will encourage people to do it more. So I honestly believe that. Yeah, getting out of bed in the morning and showing up when you don’t have to, that’s special.

Hi there. This is Fewu, and I’m the host of this Phase world podcast. It doesn’t sound special if I call every episode special, right?

But this one really is.

It’s episode 200. I’m very proud and feeling a little nervous at the same time. We have new listeners joining the show each week, and I hope more of you will stay and become subscribers. I’d love to connect with you and hear what you’ve learned as well as how we can improve the show, make your time better, spend and worthwhile. As I’m recording this, I’ve got a rush of feeling approaching. Episode 200 makes me appear as an experienced podcaster, which I’m confident to say that I have definitely learned a lot since four and a half years ago, and I’m still learning every week. But at the same time, I’m such a rookie in filmmaking, I’m about to launch my self funded first docuseries with A Team of Friends. When I showed the series to literally an Oscar Award winning filmmaker and producer over the weekend, I felt like punching my gut. While she couldn’t be more supportive, the ways of emotions while being a maker is a blessing and a curse sometimes. Over the past 15 years, I’ve had many ups and downs in my life, and the one grew I kept turning to without ever meeting him in person was Seth Godin.

As soon as I’m blocking myself having serious doubts, I will pick up a book by Seth Goton. And it almost didn’t matter which one I chose. By the way, as a special Episode 200 celebration, I’m going all out with my Seth Gon book recommendations on the blog, and I’m listing my favorites on Faceworld.com. Years after I discovered Seth and his work, I found myself joining his Alt MBA session number eight in early 2017, which was quite early on and friended people I still speak with every single week. In many ways, Seth is a teacher who will always be incomparable and irreplaceable. Turns out it’s the case with most people who follow his work. In 2018, I decided to make our first docuseries. The intention behind doing all of that is to show other people, especially women and first generation immigrants, workers, students, that they can do this too. Or at least try to do something like this. Make their own film, tell their stories, look awkward on screen and learn new things and feel like an idiot and proud of themselves at the same time. That’s really what I’m going for. Among twelve guests currently living across the US.

And originally came from different continents of the world, seth Godin was one of them in our docu series. Seth was very kind to accept our invitation. My production team and I drove from New York City to Hastings on Hudsons to interview Seth. My podcast producer Herman and I fought. How wonderful would be to share the entire conversation with Seth on Phase World Podcast. In episode 200, Seth has been interviewed by hundreds of people, networks and needs little introduction. But for those of you who haven’t been exposed to his work, here’s a bit on Seth for more than 30 years, he’s been trying to turn on lights, inspire people and teach them how to level up his blog. Seth Daublog has been appearing daily for more than a decade. He’s spent most of his professional life as a writer. He’s published 19 bestselling books. These books are a great way to go deep into a concept, and he thinks many of them stand the test of time. More than 600 people have taken his online courses, including the Marketing Seminar and several on Udemy. His favorite oneliner. Go make a ruckus. My favorite of his, embrace emotional labor.

Dance with fear. Now please join us a conversation between Seth Godin and me on the Phase World podcast to check out a preview of my project with Seth and other guests, which is the Phase World docuseries. Please make sure to visit Feisworld.com documentary.

You know, I tell people truthfully. You are the single person who has had the most impact in my personal and professional life. You’re this super successful person. Yes. Someone like myself could relate to your work? I mean, is that intentional? And how do you do that? Why do you want to do that?

Well, first, I’m just so moved that you’ve gone on this journey, because it’s not a selfish journey. It’s a generous one, where you show up and you say, how can I be of service? How can I connect people? How can I end up leading? How can I share ideas? And that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. How can I help other people do what you have done? And I made the decision a long time ago to write like I talk. I just want to teach people, so I write like I talk. Then I had to work at talking better so I could write that down. And in my head, when I’m sitting there to write something, whether it’s a blog post or a book, I’m visualizing someone like you and saying, well, this person, they don’t necessarily believe what I believe. They don’t necessarily want what I want. They certainly don’t know what I know. How can I bring stories and images to the table that help them go where they’ve always wanted to go? And that’s the key to the whole thing. I can’t change someone who doesn’t want to be changed.

So you were enrolled in a journey, and even if I hadn’t been there, you would have been going on that journey, and I was just lucky enough that you found me.

Could you talk about the concept of enrollment? And why is that important?

Well, in the United States, we talk about mandatory education, which is an oxymoron. It’s almost impossible to educate someone against their will. On the other hand, if someone voluntarily enrolls who says, I’m going where you’re going? Then they’re listening, then they’re paying attention. One way to think about it is there are millions of baseball fans who know all these ridiculous statistics. There are way more of those than there are history fans who know all of the years and the dates. Why is that? Not because baseball is easier. It’s not even that baseball’s more fun. It’s simply that they enrolled in that journey, and they did it voluntarily. So what we’ve got to figure out how to do is create a culture of enrollment so that people like us will choose to do things like this, and that cultural bias will move us forward.

And at some .2 years ago, near to three years ago, I started my company, and I said, is there something else that Seth is offering that I can experience firsthand? And I think l ten BA is just, I think, one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Not only because the four weeks were so intense and I met friends of my lifetime, and it was just an incredible experience, and many of them stayed with me for the past nearly a year and a half talking weekly. So when I share these stories, people are like, who are these people and why are they doing this? And what is LNBA, which really brought them together? So could you maybe share your thoughts on Ltmba and why you created that?

Sure. The goal was to reinvent how adult education works because the old model is based on school. It’s compulsory. There are tests, there’s a certificate, there are grades. What if we got rid of all of those? But the online model, which is the voluntary MOOC model, has a 97% dropout rate. 97% of the people who start an online course don’t finish it, which is absurd. Try to imagine going to college where there’s 60 people in your lecture class, and at the end of the semester there’s two. You’d fire the professor immediately. So in the AltMBA, I’m not there, as you know, there’s no videos of me. I’m not lecturing people. In fact, there’s not a lot of content. Instead, there are projects, more than a dozen projects done by cohorts of people, five at a time. And the purpose of the AltMBA is to train people to realize that they can do more than they thought, to see the world as it is, and to be able to persuade people of their point of view. One of the things we push people not to do, which happened to you simply as a side effect, is get clients.

There’s no pitching at all inside the authentba. That what’s happening instead is you’re going on a journey with people like you. And the thing about it that is hard to explain is what does it mean to be people like you? Because there were people who have gone through it who are head of tech for the Smashing Pumpkins, senior executives at Amazon, solo entrepreneurs, people in 45 countries. What do they have in common? What they have in common is they all want to level up. They all want they’re thirsty for the next thing. My feeling was if I could connect those people with each other, then a chain reaction would happen. And that if we build it on generosity as opposed to selfishness, that idea of paying it forward would create new value.

One of the quotes, I think you’re someone who’s so easy to quote. What’s special about your quote? It’s never about you and it’s about so, for example, one of my favorites is embrace emotional labor and dance with fear. And what I’m doing right now, and perhaps in the past three years were a lot of that.

Sure.

Do you still dance with fear these days?

Only on good days, when I’m working hard. If I’m having a lazy day, then it’s easy to hide from the fear. But what’s my work, right? My work isn’t to repeat what I did yesterday, because I already did it. It’s there. My work is to say, here’s this other place that people want to go. Here’s this other thing I could do that might not work here’s this interaction with someone that I’d rather not have. That’s what we do when we do our work now, we don’t dig ditches. The ditches have all been dug. We have to do emotional labor, which has come to mean a different thing since it first got coined by sociologists in the early 60s. But emotional labor is voluntarily showing up in places where the work is emotionally difficult because we want to help somebody else.

What’s so difficult? What do you still struggle with? Maybe not on a regular basis, but occasionally? What are some of those things, and how do you overcome them?

One thing I have to work on regularly is ignoring other people’s metrics, because the metrics keep coming back to you. Right. So my blog traffic is down 50% in the last ten years. Why is that? Because Google doesn’t like blogs. Right. And so it’s not my blog isn’t as good as it used to be. I think I could argue it’s better than it used to be. I’ve practiced more, but if I got uptight about the fact that that traffic is going down, I would write things to make the traffic go up. I know how to do that, but I don’t want the traffic to go up. I want my blog to get better. Those are two unrelated things. Or I wrestle a lot with, oh, here’s this interesting opportunity, here’s this interesting idea. What would do it justice? How do I make sure I sign up for something I can take all the way through the dip, as opposed to just entertain myself with the fun part at the beginning. And again, I spend a lot of time wrestling with, well, am I avoiding that because I’m afraid, or am I avoiding that because I can’t do it justice?

So you said something about, for me writing a blog post every single day for that, consistency is really difficult. I don’t think I can name anybody else. Why did you decide to do that? And I’m thinking, what happens if you.

Stop with it first? Let’s agree that if you can get out of bed, get dressed, take a shower, get in a car, go to work, do what your boss says. I mean, I make a list of 25 things people do every day. Think about someone you know who missed lunch one day. They talk for hours afterwards about how they were so busy they didn’t even have time to eat lunch. One meal. Oh, my God. So writing a 400 word blog post, it’s easy. The hard part is imagining that other people are going to read it. That’s a different project. That’s a different challenge. So what I say to people is, write it under another name. Don’t promote it for a month, 30 days in a row. Write a blog post on a blog, no one knows you wrote it. How hard is that? Turns out that’s really easy. So now put your name on it, but don’t tell anybody. How hard is that? Turns out it’s pretty easy. So the hard part was I made a decision 18 years ago to write a blog post every day. That was hard. Ever since then, I’ve just been doing that thing.

The same way I made a decision 57 years ago to brush my teeth every day. Brushing your teeth when you add up all those minutes, it’s a lot of minutes. But I made the decision once.

Hello there.

This is FEI Wu, and I’m the host of this podcast you’re listening to today. We’re celebrating episode 200, and my special guest today is the one and only Seth Godin. For more than 30 years, seth has been trying to turn on lights, inspire people, and teach them how to level up his blog. Seth DA blog has been appearing daily for more than a decade.

So you started when to when did you start blogging?

So I started with an email newsletter in 1992 or so because there were a lot of skeptics of people I was trying to do business with and my family. And so the idea was, this is what I’m up to. And once a week, once every two weeks, I would just send an email newsletter, here’s what I’m up to. Here’s what I’m meeting. Here’s what’s interesting. You might want to do this. This book is really good. Just a generous boom, boom, boom. And people would write back, and that was really good. But it was also really bad if someone wrote back and they weren’t positive, it would ruin my whole day. So I ran into a guy named Joey Edo, who’s the head of the Media Lab, but then he wasn’t. And my friend Jacqueline Novogratz, who’s the head of Acumen, she had just started it. And this was 2099, something like that. And Joy was on the board of a company called Six Apart movable Type and TypePad. And I looked at what was on his screen. I said that isn’t ugly. This is the first thing I’m seeing that’s like this. It’s not ugly.

And the next day, I started blogging on that platform. I’ve moved away from that platform recently, but that moment, I said, that looks like me when I went online. I want to look like that. And the ability to have that platform. So I happily paid $19 a month, and that meant I was the customer, I wasn’t the product. And that’s something that people don’t remember about social media. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. They are selling you to other people. I like the fact that I could pay TypePad, I could be the customer. And so that combined with the way it looked and felt, so it felt more like a book than it was. And then no one sent me emails anymore because I wasn’t getting responses. I liked that very much then. I wasn’t hearing from someone who was in a bad mood. This isn’t one of your best. Like, how does that help me? Right? I just ignore shun to nonbelievers.

Yeah. I did hear very similar stories during the trip from these very influential people, that everybody has received these letters, not necessarily hate mails, but your best work is in the past, and they all learn to ignore that, and that’s why they’re still here. And during those, I think, nearly 18 years you’ve been blogging, and I know you sent PDFs and printed the newsletters and actually mailed them. There are a lot of transition, and one of my most exciting ones is the fact that you start as your own podcast, and it’s you in your own voice. But if this is something that you started doing for the first time, even though you already had all the online videos and courses, what was that transition like for you?

So the podcast is called the Kimbo Aki MBO. The idea I had for at least five years, because I saw the podcasting thing coming, I knew it was real. I knew that I would probably enjoy it, but I was afraid because once you’re in someone’s earphones, it’s a different relationship. It’s not like, here’s two paragraphs for me. It’s here’s my voice. Not only to hear my voice, here’s my voice for more than a couple of minutes. I was very hesitant to cross that line. And about a year ago, some people reached out to me who I’d worked with previously, and I said, if I’m ever going to do it, I got to do it now. And again, I tried to break the rules. So I don’t read the ads. And I think that’s the future for podcasting, for sure. There are no guests. It’s just me. And it’s short. It’s 20 minutes. And at the end of each episode, I answer questions from the week before, which is my favorite part, and the combination of all of it. I edit the whole thing myself, and then my producer finishes it off. I like the craft of it, of saying, oh, I’m going to make something about some costs.

And I’ll think about it for a week, and then I’ll sit down and I’ll make it all in 28 minutes and edit out eight minutes, and it’s done. And people seem to resonate with it. It’s not really a business, it’s more of a project, but it’s one that, for now, I’m happy to make.

I love the content. That’s one thing. I know it’s out every week. I especially love the questions because I realize how powerful the rest of us are. I hear some of those questions. To think that could be a question from Seth himself, it’s amazing. And I love the fact that it’s really surprising to me how many of them are not based in the United States. And most of the questions are in all sorts of accents. I follow several entrepreneurs and Martin Grooves. But I have not seen such diversity anywhere else. But that belongs to your group.

Was this curated?

I mean, did it just happen? Why do you think that is?

Well, the first thing I’d say is I have an accent. Other people don’t. And that took me a long time to get my arms around that. It is normal to speak like Anapham from Berlin, and it’s normal to speak like Tracy from Buena Vista, California. I’m the one who has an accent. But I think that my writing style, which is deliberately nonspecific in certain elements, that takes effort. Because I’m not saying this is my only point of view. I’m trying to say here’s something that I think is sort of universal. What happens when you engage with this idea that makes it easier for someone to say, oh, I don’t have to be in New York to have this experience. I understand the attraction of, hey, I’m a celebrity, watch me getting in the fancy elevator kind of thing. I just don’t know why anyone like me would want to watch that. And I certainly don’t want to make that so you’re not me. Here we go. It’s you’re, you. Where are you gonna go? And that’s been a thread through my work for 30 years.

To watch you on stage with a very close group of people. L ten baers. And it was so powerful, and you were so relaxed on stage. I felt like we were a family. And one thing you said was I mean, you literally said these exact words that I’m not special. You are. By giving the power to the audience. And somehow I feel like I’m the hero.

Well, but you are. I mean, it was very easy to say that it wasn’t manipulative. I actually believe it that not everyone gets to win the birthday lottery. Not everyone gets to have the right parents or be born in the right place at the right time. And not everybody in a given situation has an easy path that will work. So all of the family that are in 2500 of us, in Yelp, NBA, everyone has overcome some obstacle. Everyone has done difficult work for someone else. And if I can honor that and shine a light on it, it will encourage people to do it more. So I honestly believe that. Yeah. Getting out of bed in the morning and showing up when you don’t have to, that’s special.

One thing you also said about be missed if you’re gone. I wake up every morning, I go to sleep and think about, this could all be gone. I’ve already lost friends in their twenty s and thirty s and we’re not invincible. But that really hits home for me.

What does it even mean to be missed? Right? Let’s not worry about life or death now. Let’s worry about the staff meeting when seven people come Thursdays at 03:00 p.m. On this Thursday when you can’t make it. Is the meeting going to be as good as it would have been if you were there? Right? For a lot of people, the answer is no. And for a lot of people, the answer is, yeah, it is. It’s going to be justifying without you. And that’s the question is, what does it mean to be a contribution, to be a Linchpin, to be the one we would miss when you’re not in the room? And so I’m not talking about how many people come to your funeral. I’m saying, if you’re going to bother going to a meeting, if you’re going to bother sending an email, if you’re going to bother engaging, are you doing it in a way that advances other people’s agenda, or are you just taking up space? And I think too many of us got trained in school to take up space, because that’s what schools organized to train us to do.

And I think your work became extremely powerful when I decided to bring Purple Cow with me back to China to care for my dying father in the hospital for months, and this was nearly ten years ago. I brought the book with me, so I had something to do and in the hospital. And I love your writing and just very peaceful. And I just remember him lying there, and we started the conversation. He and I did not have the best relationship. We barely talked, but there I was, was in English. I started translating purple cow. He said, what is purple cow? And he was only conscious for five minutes at a time, but we had some of the most amazing conversations on marketing terms. And he said, wow, what’s the name of this guy? And he’s a modernday philosopher. And that’s exactly how my dad saw himself. You know, it was just an incredible experience that brought us closer. And that’s what moments I remembered to be able to have a conversation with him through you.

I’m so glad I can help.

Hello there.

This is FAA Wu, and I’m the host of this podcast you’re listening to today. We’re celebrating episode 200, and my special guest today is the one and only Seth Godin. For more than 30 years, Seth has been trying to turn on lights, inspire people, and teach them how to level up his blog. Seth DA blog has been appearing daily for more than a decade.

One of the most essential shifts in our economy is about scarcity. So during the even the 60s, industrialism how do we make stuff? Was the driving force of the economy. And scarcity means it’s a zero sum game. Either you have it or I have it. Either you have the nice car or I do. There’s only one of them. Either you have this house or I do. And as the economy shifted, just as I was coming up as a professional, the shift was one based on connection, not the connection of who do you know but the connection of who trusts you and who are you leading? Because it turns out that the math there is the opposite. The math there is not the mass of scarcity, not the mass of I don’t have very much. If I give it to you, I won’t have it anymore. But it’s the mass of I don’t have that much. But if I give you this idea, we’ll both have it. And if we both have an idea, its value goes up, not down. And so I spent a lot of time in the 80s listening to a teacher named Zig Zigler.

And part of Zig’s riff was, you can get everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want. An inherent in that is a little bit of give, and then you get. But what I discovered about the connection, economy and the culture we were living in is you didn’t have to do the second part. If you could just figure out how to give, the culture itself showed up in a way that let you do it more. And so I became a teacher when I was 1718 up in Canada, and people didn’t have to come to my classes, but the kids who I was teaching canoeing to chose to come. And that act of realizing, wait a minute, this is optional. If they’re not enrolled, they’ll go sailing. I can’t tell them what to do. Compliance is not going to be available to me. I’m never going to have enough resources to be able to dictate to other people what to do. And so I was really lucky. A bunch of people who I worked with and for opened doors for me, and I’m super aware of this. I just ran into one last week.

I did a talk at a university in Washington where he’s the dean of the business school now. And if Bill hadn’t hired me that day that I was a summer intern with no job, my life would have been different. I don’t know what would happen. But throughout this journey, the authors that I met or worked with or the people who I did projects with, it always worked better when I found someone who wasn’t keeping score, when I found someone who said, oh, I got something, and if I share it, we’ll all have it. That mindset fit the way I was raised, but it was also working. And the Internet, I think, has shifted the way a lot of people think. For some people, it’s made the whole scarcity thing worse. I’m the most popular ex, or I can put people on a squeeze page to get them to do this. I can join this thing because then it’ll be a networking event. But then we look at the fact that if you wanted to build Wikipedia, you would need more than a billion dollars. How did we get it built for. Free. It’s because 5000 people showed up because they could, because they wanted to, and they got nothing in return.

Except, and this is a big except the satisfaction of knowing they did work that mattered. So my new book, the Subtitle, sort of is work that matters for people who care. And what a privilege to do work that matters for people who care. So every day I say wow, if I could do that today, it would be a good day.

Hi there, it’s me again. I want to thank you very much for listening to this episode and I hope you were able to learn a few things. If you enjoyed what you heard, it would be hugely helpful if you could subscribe to the Phase Role Podcast. It literally takes seconds. If you’re on your mobile phone, just search for Phase Role Podcast in the Podcast app on iPhone or an Android app such as Podcast Addict and click subscribe. All new episodes will be delivered to you automatically. Thanks so much for your support.