A REMARKABLE Way to Unlock Your Inner Greatness | Seth Godin Interview

Skill Development and Taste Refinement

Skill, this is really good news, is learnable. When I started in the book business, I had bad taste, and editors didn’t like what I thought they would like. Over time, my taste got better because I practiced the work enough. Amazon just broke me, and I haven’t read my Amazon reviews in seven or eight years, and I don’t miss it. I could juggle for you right now, just because why not, but no, I’m terrible.

Sponsorship and Introduction

Today’s episode of Model the Monsters is brought to you by TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy is your best friend on your road to YouTube success. I use it every day on my channel to get more views and subscribers, automate the boring tasks, and split test my thumbnails and titles. I’ve done over 3,800 split tests, which have led to results like taking this 5-year-old video that was getting 250 views a day, and just by changing the thumbnail, it blew up to 15,000 views per day. You can get started on TubeBuddy for free at tubebuddy.com/evan.

Introduction of Seth Godin

Introducing Seth Godin, ladies and gentlemen, we have a legend in the house, author of a new book called “The Practice,” which is all about finding your creativity, unleashing your voice, and nothing counts until it ships. Mr. Seth Godin, welcome aboard, man. Thanks, Evan, great to talk to you.

Discussion about Duncan Hines

I don’t know if you remember, but back in 2010, I asked you who your favorite famous entrepreneur was of all time, and you said Duncan Hines. Duncan Hines, and I got the card here, I am right behind me. Do you really? Yes, so I was making a line of entrepreneur heroes trading cards, which was just trying to, I love baseball cards growing up, and I thought, hey, entrepreneurs are heroes. And I asked you who your favorite entrepreneur was. This is a decade ago, and you said Duncan Hines. He built his personal brand and his books around the simple idea, “What’s good for my readers?” And we used these cards to raise $160-something thousand dollars for entrepreneurs through Kiva, doing microloans too, anyway. Why Duncan Hines? I mean, people know him as the cake recipe guy, but he was so much more than that, and you make me dive down to a story. What do you love about Duncan Hines?

Duncan Hines’ Story

Duncan Hines, his autobiography is a hoot, and basically, he was a real person, he was a good eater, and back in the day, you couldn’t go to a strange town and eat in a restaurant and not get sick because locals didn’t go to restaurants. They were greasy spoons, they were for people who were from out of town. He was a traveling salesman, and he kept getting sick, and then he would keep notes as to which restaurants he could visit that were safe. And he was also a little cheap, so one year for Christmas, instead of actually giving everyone a present, he was in the printing business. He printed up his list of safe restaurants and he gave it to people, and they loved it. And so year after year, that list got longer. It was like there’s a god’s restaurant guide. And then he started selling the restaurants the right to put a sign up front with his name on it, saying, “Duncan says this place is okay.” And then canned food came along, and he was really in the forefront turning canned food into something safe. And then someone called him up and said, “Can I put your name on cake mix?” And that company, the last time I checked.

Duncan Hines’ Success and Lesson for Entrepreneurs

Sold for a billion dollars because one person showed up and said, “What do people want when it comes to this thing?” So he didn’t hustle anybody. He didn’t try to make himself famous; he simply said, “There’s a connection to be made here. How can I show up and narrate this connection in a way that people would be glad I was?” Biggest lesson for entrepreneurs today, here, I love it. What do you think the biggest lesson entrepreneurs, creatives today could take from Duncan Hines’ story?

Seth Godin’s Insights

Well, you know, in my previous book, “This is Marketing,” I talk about the smallest viable audience. And the problem with the business media is they lionize the home run hitters, the people who build a trillion-dollar company. And I gotta say, I don’t think Tim Cook has done anything noteworthy except make investors rich. I think what we really need to do as entrepreneurs instead is say who can I serve, and instead of saying how many people I can serve, we can say, “What’s the smallest number of people that if I overwhelm them with the generosity of what I’m making, they would tell the others and it would be enough?” The smallest viable audience. So in Duncan Hines’s case, it was a hundred people who wanted that list, and then it was a thousand restaurants that would benefit from having the sign, and then it gets big. But it didn’t get big because Duncan Hines woke up one day and said, “I’m gonna make every person in America buy a cake mix.” Instead, he said, “What’s this group of people I could put myself on the hook for and deliver something of value?” I love it.

Finding Your Genius

So, the new book, talking about, called “The Practice,” helping people find their creative talent, their genius, that everybody has it. It’s not reserved for the special few. I like to say in my videos that everybody has Michael Jordan level genius at something, and chances are it’s not what you went to school for, what your parents did for a living. But you have to find it; otherwise, you live a life of mediocrity, and chances are not being too happy. I think a lot of that’s been addressed in “The Practice.” So how does somebody find their, what I would call, Michael Jordan level genius, in your words?

Talent vs. Skill

I often talk about interesting talent and skill, and I’ll say basketball players have to have talent because I will never be able to dunk in basketball. I was not born with the DNA that will make me tall enough to do that. However, you are correct; there are plenty of tall people who are not Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan isn’t Michael Jordan because of talent; he’s that because of skill. And skill, this is really good news, is learnable. And if it’s learnable, what I have to ask somebody is have even once you said something that someone else wanted to hear, even once done something remarkable, original, creative, generous? If you’ve done it once, then it’s not a talent; then it’s available to you. And the way you get to do it again is by practicing your skill, getting better at your skill, even if it doesn’t work right away, especially if it doesn’t work right away.

Imposter Syndrome

So is it lack of belief people just don’t think they have Michael Jordan level genius at something? Well, you know, imposter syndrome is real. Imposter syndrome is an epidemic that says, “I feel like a fraud. How dare I show up in this social media or start a podcast or be wherever? Who am I to do this?” And people say, “How do I get rid of imposter syndrome?” And what I say to them is, well, the reason you have imposter syndrome is that you’re an imposter. And you can’t make it go away because we’re all imposters. If you’re leading well, then you’re trying to do something that’s never been done before; that’s why we call it leadership. And we have to embrace that. We can embrace it by saying, “Yeah, of course, I feel this way; it means I’m onto something.” And that idea that I’m onto something, I can dance with it, is a little bit like saying, “I know I’m running the marathon because my legs are tired. If my legs weren’t tired, something would be wrong. That’s a feature; it’s not a bug.” So even getting to the place of imposter syndrome, I would presuppose they’re—they’ve created something; they’ve already made something, and now they feel like an imposter talking about it.

Overcoming the Belief System

What about even just the belief that you can be creative? A lot of people never even get imposter syndrome, at least in my head, because they don’t even think they have the creative gene inside them. Like how do you overcome that belief system with people? Yeah, well, the indoctrination runs deep. It runs deep around racial injustice; it runs deep around economic separation. It’s been something that’s been talked to us from an early age. So I’ll give a talk back in the day when people came together for talks, and there’s a hundred people there, a thousand people there, you’ll say any.

Overcoming Fear of Contribution

Questions, and no one will raise their hand, and then when the talk is over, people run up to ask their secret question. Well, why couldn’t they ask their question in front of everyone else? Because they were taught not to because it might be stupid, it might waste someone’s time, it might not be a contribution. And so it runs really deep inside us to say, “I don’t have any good ideas.” Well, no, what you’re really saying is, “I’m afraid of my bad ideas. I am so afraid of my bad ideas; I’m not willing to say them even though a good idea might slip in.”

Recipe for Overcoming Fear

And so what’s the recipe to overcome that? Well, if it doesn’t ship, it doesn’t count. And the only way you get better at anything is by shipping the work. And to ship the work, we need two things: one, we need to do it from a place of generosity. You can’t run around hustling people and hope that it’ll work because no one wants to be hustled. No one wakes up in the morning saying, “I hope someone will come hustle me.” And then the second thing, which is related, is if you’re doing it in the right spirit, you need to be completely disconnected from the outcome, that it is about throwing not catching, that it is about putting your best work into the world regardless of whether it works or not. And then if it doesn’t work, learning from it so you can do it again. But actually, what people say to themselves is, “Well, I’ll pitch, but if it’s not a no-hitter, I’m never going to pitch again.” And that just doesn’t work.

Quality vs. Quantity

And they want to no-hitter on their first game, yeah, exactly. People asking about quality versus quantity, and I usually tell them, “Well, the quantity leads to the quality. Like it’s not either-or; like the more you do, the better you get at the thing you’re trying to learn.” And to expect to suck at the beginning of anything, writing the book, writing the blog, making YouTube videos, is that in alignment with how you’re thinking? Yeah, I mean, walking, talking, riding a bicycle, if you can ride a bicycle, I would say, “Do you ride it better than you did your first day?” Right? At what point is it appropriate for someone to say, “I will never be able to ride a bicycle,” and give up? If you have, you know, fairly standard motor skills, the answer is never. It is never okay to say that. But some people do because they couldn’t ride a bike perfectly the first day. I’m not sure there’s a difference between riding a bike and writing world-level copy or leading a non-profit or writing a business plan that’s actually going to work.

Business Plans and Action

And speaking of business plans, having seen the business plans for organizations like Yahoo and Google, I can tell you there’s nothing in common between their business plan and what they actually built because the bus, that’s why no one publishes their business plan because they look like idiots. It’s just this was enough to get us started. It’s not this is the roadmap. And so is it just a matter of like you do with your blog if I’m going to write something every single day and put it up? I love the idea of streaks. So I’m 7,500 blog posts in a row, and there will be a blog post tomorrow, and it won’t come out because it’s.

Consistency and Decision Making

Perfect, it will come out because it’s tomorrow. I only decided once to write a blog post every day, and then I don’t have to decide anymore. The decision has been made; now it’s just go ahead and do it the same way you decided a long time ago to brush your teeth every day. You don’t have to have a meeting with yourself about whether I should brush my teeth or not today; you just brush your teeth. One of the things I’ve admired the most about you is that consistency of writing the blog post and creating the books, and there’s always something new coming out. I’ve tried to do it with my YouTube channel. Six thousand plus videos on the channel now, wow. Yeah, over 10, 11 years. 2019 was my first video upload. One of the things that really terrified me was being the aging rock star, of having some big hit in when you’re 20 or 30, and then you just keep repeating the same hit every time you’re going on tour, singing the same songs and not creating anything new. And what I love about what you’re doing is always something new. You might reference an old book or no blog post, but it’s like you’re creating something new right now, and tomorrow there’s something new coming out as well. So for the people who may feel like, well, I had some hit that worked, but then now nothing else seems to match up, so I’m, I guess I just keep repeating that same record, and that’s basically the death of creativity. What would you tell them, counsel them, advise them to do?

Avoiding the Death of Creativity

Well, you know, that it’s fun to dissect that, so let’s talk first about hits. I have never had a blog post that won the internet, right? I’ve never had a blog post that everyone read, and I’m thrilled by that because that sort of hit, when you fall off the power law curve, really messes with your head because then you try to recreate it. So if you think about Joni Mitchell or Ricky Lee Jones, they, it took them many records to get over the fact that they had had a monster hit because they were trying to reproduce something they had never set out to do in the first place, which was the market wanted them to play covers of themselves, and they decided they wanted to go down a different path. But on the other hand, genre matters, and when we show up in the world with our work, our audience wants it to remind.

Genre and Creativity

… of us that we are always playing covers of ourselves. And you know, in Dylan’s case, you can’t even recognize the old songs when he sings them today because he intentionally mumbles them. But if you buy something from Nike, you don’t want to buy a candy bar from them because it doesn’t remind you of Nike. And when you go and watch Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new play, you want it to, at some level, remind you of Hamilton because genre matters, and coming up with something that rhymes with itself is a discipline that gives us boundaries to be creative.

Recognizing the Throw Not the Catch

When you talk about recognizing the throw and not the catch, it’s not about the results. Are you then just tying your self-esteem to the effort you’re putting in, like did I show up today and give my best? Is that how you’re doing it internally? I don’t think so. So, juggling, right? If you want to learn how to juggle, what most people do is they focus on catching because it’s when you drop the ball that it’s so embarrassing. When you watch a juggler and they drop the ball, you go, “Oh.” But if you try to catch it, you’re gonna lunge, and lunging destroys everything there is about juggling. You cannot lunge and continue to juggle. And so, everybody who knows how to juggle focuses on throwing. They are intending to end up being a good juggler, but they understand throwing is the secret to the whole thing because if you get good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. And what I’m trying to say by disassociating myself from the outcome is this: if I try to imagine what the critic from Publishers Weekly wants and imagine what this person wants and I’m willing that person to like what I wrote, all the juice will come out of the work. All come out of the work. All of the good stuff will be eliminated because I will be reverse engineering the work. Instead, I focus on throwing. Is that a good throw? Is that a good throw? Is that a good throw? And if you get good at throwing, the catching will take care of itself. And so, just to pick an example, Publishers Weekly has hated every book I have ever done that has succeeded. Now, it’s interesting to note, their only job in their reviews is to tell booksellers what books are going to succeed. So clearly, they are bad at their job. But if I was worried about that negative feedback and I was reverse engineering for it, I never would have written the books I wrote. And so when they say we don’t like this book so much, I’m thrilled because it means that one of the things I’m looking for in the marketplace actually happened, which is I wrote a book that didn’t pander to Publishers Weekly. How good is your juggling?

Teaching Juggling

My juggling is by most standards very weak, but I’m one of the best juggling teachers you will ever meet. I have taught more than a thousand people how to juggle. Wow, all right, cool. And I do it by teaching. We spend the first half-hour; we don’t catch one ball, and it’s very frustrating, particularly for 10-year-olds to do that because they’re so… it will make you cry to watch 10-year-olds become…

Juggling and Showing Up Daily

So obsessed with catching the ball, and first we have to strip that away, and then we get to the next level. But one of my projects for 2020 is to actually get better at juggling. I’m just good at teaching. All right, like I could juggle for you right now just because, why not, but no, I’m terrible. I’m just good at teaching. So, show up daily.

So breaking down that analogy with Publisher Weekly, you’re not trying to get them to say this is the greatest book of all time. Otherwise, you’ve read a different book. You’re showing up every day in service to your audience to say, hey, how can I make something that people would like but it’s still distant, you know, to get that reaction back from people still, you know, months or a year away?

What are you telling yourself on a daily basis to say, am I proud of myself for showing up? Is it that you block off x hours a day and like I sat there and I tried writing? Is it like the effort of showing up daily that then you’re… that’s how you pat yourself on the back and say, I’m proud of myself what I did today?

No different people. So I was friends with Isaac Asimov years ago. I did a project with him. He wrote, uh, 400 books. He invented robots as we know them. If you’ve ever seen a robot in a movie, that was Isaac. And I said, Isaac, how do you publish 400 books? And he said, well, I get up and I sit at this manual typewriter, 6:30 in the morning, and I type till noon every day. And it doesn’t matter if you type good stuff or bad stuff. Sooner or later, good stuff would slip through. So that was his approach, which was a volume-based approach that eliminated the thing that was holding him back.

In my case, what I am looking for is a glimpse of something that scares me, a glimpse of something where I notice something or make a connection, and then I say, that’ll never work. No one will get the joke. That’s going to be a dead end. But something about it has a spark to it. And then the second half, which is almost never happens on the same day as the first half, is did I do service to that notion by showing up and showing up and showing up until it was polished enough to share. And those are both halves of my work. And I can’t make either one of them happen on demand.

So you schedule it in to show up and do the work. So I try to strip away. I don’t go to meetings. I don’t watch television. Um, and I don’t use social media. So if I’m bored enough, I will find myself doing one of those two things to entertain myself. Got it? As you’re talking, uh, the word good taste, you know, self-esteem just keeps popping into my head. But people tie their self-esteem to getting the positive reviews or to get in the Instagram likes or to get. So it’s replacing what we tie our self-esteem to instead of the likes and the shares and the number one seller but then to what to service to showing up every day to doing the difficult thing that you didn’t think you could do. Like what are we switching what we tie our self-esteem to? Yeah, yeah. So these are great questions, Evan. Okay, let’s think about what it means to have good taste because it’s something that people talk about all the time but what does it actually mean? And I have a proposed definition which is good taste is knowing what your customers want before they do because copying isn’t good taste and furnishing your house to look exactly like a picture of Martha Stewart isn’t good taste. That’s just copying, right? But if you’re able to go just a little bit ahead so that when the people you seek to be aligned with look at it and say, wow, you have good taste, what they mean is you’re a little bit ahead of where I am. And that is what I am keeping track of, not that they told me I have good taste but…

Developing Good Taste and Intentional Practice

That I told myself that it is quite likely that when someone sees this thing I polished, it is just far enough ahead of the way they see the world that it will turn on a light for them. And if it doesn’t, then I say, “Oh well, that didn’t work. What can I throw next?” But I have enough genre experience to know when it looks like it might work, and that came the hard way. When I started in the book business, I had bad taste. And editors didn’t like what I thought they would like, and they didn’t embrace what I thought they would embrace. And over time, my taste got better because I practiced the work enough and intentional practice.

So is that self-reminder and intentional practice because when you’re doing a blog post, you get feedback right away? But when you’re writing a book, it’s going to take you a long time. So I’m just wondering for people who are doing your creative work that might… and I know your version of writer’s block isn’t just for writing, it’s any creative endeavor. So for anybody who’s taking on a big project where they may not be getting market feedback for 3, 6, 12, 18 months, is that in a daily practice to say what I made today, I think is in good taste and will serve? Like, is that an intentional practice at the end of the day to remind yourself of what you’re doing and the why? It’s a big part of it. Also, I am completely divorced from market feedback. I don’t keep track of my traffic on my blog. I have no idea how many books I’m selling. I want to hear two months, six months, 12 months later, “This thing I read made a difference in the way I worked my life.” To hear you say 11 years later that me talking about Duncan Hines contributed to something at Kiva, that’s the work for me. Not that someone put a little plus sign or that some social media product came along and said I did a good job. I used to be really focused on that, and then Amazon just broke me, and I haven’t read my Amazon reviews in seven or eight years. And I don’t miss them. It’s just all an Amazon review is or a YouTube comment is somebody telling you about them, not telling you about you. If someone posts in your YouTube comments that they don’t like you and your work, all they’re saying is, “I’m not the kind of person that likes work like this.” Okay, thank you for telling us about you, but you’re not going to change us because we make work like this.

Dealing with Negative Feedback

Anonymous negative feedback is a problem for me because I want to go to that person and explain myself, okay? I want to say, “But wait, wait, didn’t you see what it said three pages before that?” Right? And it has never worked when they’re not anonymous, and it doesn’t make me happy even if you get a glimmer of, “Oh yeah, it’s just a trap.” And so this idea that we’re going to give up our state of mind and our well-being because the stranger that we made a guess about, we guessed wrong, it’s just fraught for me. I think it’s way better to create our own standards, figure out how much enough is, and once you can get enough, then get back to work as opposed to trying to get everything.

Responding to Comments

Let me throw something out and see if you catch it. In terms of responding to comments because we’ve made the opposite where we respond to every single comment in every single.

Dealing with Negative Feedback and Responding to Comments

In the video, one approach to handling negative comments is highlighted, emphasizing empathy towards the commenter, recognizing that they might be going through a tough time. The philosophy in responding isn’t necessarily to change the person leaving the negative comment, although sometimes it happens when people apologize after realizing they were in a bad mood. Rather, the focus is on educating the audience by demonstrating how to handle negativity with love, turning it into content that benefits everyone else watching. However, the speaker acknowledges that not everyone has the resources or inclination to engage with comments in this way. They recount their own experience with blog comments, where they found themselves altering their writing style to anticipate and mitigate negative reactions. Ultimately, they chose to remove comments from their blog altogether to maintain the quality of their content. While they commend the approach of engaging with comments in a calm and centered manner, they express that it’s not a practice they personally engage in due to resource constraints. Nevertheless, they recognize the value in it for those who can manage it effectively.

The Importance of Showing Up and Creativity for Entrepreneurs

The conversation shifts towards the importance of creativity and showing up consistently, especially for entrepreneurs. The speaker defines entrepreneurship as building something bigger than oneself and solving interesting problems. It’s emphasized that entrepreneurship goes beyond freelancing or running a small business; it’s about effecting significant change in the world. This involves embracing creativity, taking risks, and consistently showing up to do the creative work necessary to make a difference. While practical skills like using Google Sheets and crafting elevator pitches are important, the core narrative of showing up for creative work is paramount. The speaker outlines their mission to help people turn creative work into a practice, acknowledging that success may not come immediately but can be achieved through dedication to improvement over time.

Outro

The video concludes with a brief outro, mentioning the book “The Practice” by Seth Godin, which is linked in the description for further exploration. Seth Godin expresses gratitude for the opportunity to share his insights and encourages viewers to “make a ruckus” if they want to change their lives. The outro also invites viewers to explore related content, such as a free 30-day challenge and a top 10 video on Seth Godin’s work.