Video Transcript: Seth Godin- The Art of Enterprise

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Brian Elliott - Hi. I'm Brian Elliott. Welcome to another edition of Behind the  brand today. I'm here with author, entrepreneur, thought leader, Seth. Godin  Seth, welcome to the show. Thanks, Brian. Seth, you've written this new book,  Icarus deception. I can't wait to talk to you about it and find out kind of your  thoughts on how it got started and where it's going talk to us a little bit about art,  becoming an artist. This is an amazing book, and you're telling everyone that  they may not know it, but they're an artist. What's that about? Well,  

Seth Godin - you know, writers, we work with words, and sometimes we make  up words, like Purple Cow, and sometimes we have to repurpose them. I  needed a word to describe what human beings do when they act like humans,  not machines, what we do when we are out there putting our stamp on  something, something that might not work, and most of all, I needed a word to  describe the generosity and human connection that this kind of work makes. So  I called it art because we can agree that a playwright is making art and that  Jackson Pollock was making art, but it's also art when you go to a restaurant  and they serve you a dish made with care just for you. And it's also art when  your insurance broker says, you know, there's a guy down the street who can  sell you something better than I can let me go walk you over there, and I'll  introduce you to him. That is not in the rule book. It's human. It's something new  and fresh. And so what my work has been about for the last little while, is the  distinction between the mechanics of doing what other people tell you to the  mechanics of the dummies guide, the mechanics of this is what I do all day. How do I do it faster and cheaper? I'm not interested in that to how do we become  artists? Because when we were four, all of us painted a finger painting that had  never been painted before. We were seven, we told a joke that had never been  told before. When we were nine, we walked up to someone and showed them  we cared about them. And then, over time, it gets burnt out of us, and I want to  bring that back, and we start asking for a road map too, don't we? Oh, yeah, we got brainwashed into asking for road maps. That's what the SAT is. Of course,  that's what they test you for in school, that someone who's good in school is  actually someone who's good at following maps. Then we get to work,  particularly at a bigger organization, and it's not them saying, figure it out, use  your best judgment. It's them saying, look on page 37 and do what it says that  map reading mindset is putting us into a real bind now, and I think we need to  figure out how to train our kids and train ourselves, instead of looking for a map,  to look for a compass, and instead of asking for directions, giving directions. 

Brian Elliott - And that's the thing about art, right? It's organic, and unless it's  paint by numbers, it's often undefined, and it might not work, and it might go a  totally different direction from where you started,  

Seth Godin - right? Well, yeah. I mean, there's a village in China called Dauphin where they paint 1/3 of all the oil paintings in the world every day. This is  probably from there, over and over and over again, as fast as they can. That's  not art. That's painting. Painting isn't worth very much. Art is worth a lot.  Sometimes, when people hear this, they recoil in fear because it's so scary and  alien. But most people who hear it, you can hear the sigh of relief, because it's  what they've wanted all along. What they've wanted all along is for someone to  trust them enough to say, Go, Go, make something. Have you had any  

Brian Elliott - backlash from the artists? Because I personally,  Seth Godin - you mean the painters, I guess people  

Brian Elliott - who call themselves artists, because you're redefining art, the  term, you're expanding it, of course, and applying it to not just that medium, but  life in general. I'm just curious whether you got any background  

Seth Godin - that's interesting. First of all, I'm not redefining art. This is what Art  has always been. Art was always for amateurs. Until Andy Warhol Vincent van  Gogh, had never had any illusions that he was going to become a famous rich  artist, because there weren't famous rich artists. You became famous and rich,  and then you became an artist, not the other way around. So the other thing is  that painters are angry at everybody, right? That the people who are toiling in  the gutters of banal poetry are angry at everybody, but true artists, they're too  busy to be angry at someone who's using a word in a way that they don't like.  That the internet is filled with people who are using this opportunity to make the  best thing they can, and filled with people got nothing better to do but whine  about how somebody uses a word  

Brian Elliott - that's awesome. Talk to me about the comfort zone, because you  mentioned this in the book a lot, and I thought it was a great distinction of the  safety zone and the comfort  

Seth Godin - zone. So all creatures need. A shortcut, because we don't have  time to reevaluate the safety of everything. So if you take a mouse and put it in  the middle of the floor and the light, it will run away. It won't say, Oh, I'm in a  Disney movie. This is great. It will just run away because it's uncomfortable 

there, because it's unsafe there. And so in order to succeed organisms,  particularly humans, have to build a comfort zone that matches the safety zone  so they don't have to worry about whether it's safe. They're just worried about if  it's comfortable. Because it's comfortable, they're fine. It's not comfortable, they  run away. And I came to this realization because I was talking to a friend really  talented, and she was looking for a job, and I brainstormed 20 different things  that she could do to get on the radar the places that deserved her. And she said, you know, Seth, that's not really in my comfort zone, because the last time she  looked for a job was 25 years ago, and there was a method. So in her mind,  comfort and safe were the same thing. What I said to her is, you know what,  your comfort zone isn't working because you only want to do things that feel  safe, and they're not safe, they're dangerous. They're going to leave you  unemployed. You're going to have to do this other stuff that feels uncomfortable  but is actually safe. So the safest thing you can do is take a risk, or what feels  like a risk, and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe that it used to be. You  know, 10,000 people went to Ford Motor Company one day to do their job like  they did the day before, and they all got fired on the same day because they had played it safe, they thought, but what they've really done is played it  comfortable. Wasn't their fault. They got fired. It was the idiot bosses who made  ugly cars that screwed up. But they got fired. What would have happened in  1987 if the UAW had gone on strike, not for more wages, but to insist that Ford  make better looking better designed cars, think about how that would have  completely changed the course of automotive history and saved the jobs of all of those people, right? But that wasn't the mindset that didn't feel comfortable, so  they didn't do  

Brian Elliott - it. So the message is, if you're standing still, the world is moving.  You're actually losing ground, yeah,  

Seth Godin - and if you're not, you know, there's two kinds of labor. There's  physical labor, which we did for a really long time, and then there's emotional  labor, and that's what most of us get paid for, right? If you don't have calluses on your hands and you don't have dirt on your jeans, you're getting paid for  emotional labor. And instead of hiding from it, I think we need to embrace it. If  what you did today wasn't hard, then you probably didn't create enough value,  because you probably didn't expose yourself to enough risk and fear, because  that's what we're paid for. We're not paid to fill in TPS reports because we don't  need those anymore. That if you have a job where someone is telling you  exactly what to do, they can find someone  

Brian Elliott - cheaper than you to do it, right? You talked in the book a lot about  becoming more personal. You say that we need to bring more humanity back 

into the work that we do, and that's that's a part of being an artist. But how do  we get more personal when HR department doesn't want anything to do with  that, right? Or the attorneys?  

Seth Godin - Well, let's be clear. First of all, about personal I don't need to know how many kids you have, and I don't need to know, you know, this transparency  can be taken way too far beyond what we need. I don't know anything about  Pablo Picasso's life. I don't know anything about, you know, Edward Albee's life.  I don't need to all I need to know is that when they made their art, they opened  themselves up because they put an emotion on the table. Now, if you work in an organization that insists on keeping you in a tiny, replaceable box, you have to  make a choice about whether you have a future there or not, because one,  organizations like that aren't going to continue to thrive, and two, you're probably not going to reach the next level there, because they'll just find someone else to  put in your slot. So the example that's pretty simple is three years ago, the  difference between Apple and Dell is no one could blame Michael Dell for the  products he was making. They were obvious, they were cheap and they were  plentiful. Whereas Apple would come out with something and someone would  say, I hate that. That's personal. It's personal. Say here I made this, and for  someone else to say I hate that, we're too focused on, how do I avoid criticism  and not focus enough on, how do I make a difference? So you think  

Brian Elliott - that's the stumbling block. You think that's where people are  getting stuck because they're not willing to be vulnerable to take a risk. Is that  what this is about?  

Seth Godin - Yeah, so Brene Brown has spoken about this more eloquently  than I but vulnerability means putting something into the world and being willing  to let the world respond or react if you come out with something that's polished  and has no edges on it. And you can say the committee made this it's not my  fault. There's no vulnerability there, right? Whereas, if you know it's sort of, I  don't use a lot of sports analogies, but the difference between Vince Lombardi  and the typical corporate football coach today, win or lose, Vince Lombardi is on  the hook. You. Today, it's a system. It's a process. We you know, it's very  Moneyball. Yeah, exactly. And that's not personal. There's no vulnerability there.  The highs aren't as high and the lows aren't as low. In a world where we can  connect to whomever we want, why would we connect to someone who is  boring and selfish? We're going to connect to people who are interesting,  walking the tightrope, and generous.  

Brian Elliott - I kind of feel maybe just because I relate with this, it kind of takes  one to know one. And so I wanted to maybe get a little bit personal with you and 

talk about some of this. Talk more about vulnerability, because it's it's not easy,  and maybe I'm over generalizing, but generally, I think for men, it's difficult to be  vulnerable, to put yourself out there. I mean, we take risks. Sure, you know, we  soldier through and do whatever right, get bloody and beat up, but to show our  

sensitive side. And Brene Brown talks a lot about this too, or she says it's a it's  seen as a sign of weakness. So did you ever have a time where you struggled  with this, the being vulnerable? Talk to us about, well,  

Seth Godin - I think it's something I deal with every single day, and have for a  really long time, that part of what happens if you're going to be an entrepreneur  or even a freelancer, someone dancing on the edge, is you're paying attention to the audience. You want to know if you're making a sale. You want to know if it's  working. You're not just phoning it in, right? So, you know, in the old days, it was  one phone call a day. Could make or break your day. Now it's one email every  10 seconds. Could make or break your day, right? So you have to decide. First,  are you open to letting the world have at your work 17 books in, I think I am  4800 blog posts in. I'm sort of hooked on this. Then the question is, what are  you going to do with it when it comes back? Because it does come back, you  touch people and they touch you back. So I have no comments on my blog. I  don't read my reviews on Amazon, and the reason is, self preservation has  nothing to do with vulnerability, because I've put it into the world, yeah? But I  realized I'd never met an author who said, you know, Seth, I read all my one star reviews on Amazon, and now my writing is a lot better, right? It's just not what  happens? Yeah, so those don't exist. If someone sends me an anonymous  email, I'm going to delete it. But if someone, and there's 1000s of people who I  have some sort of digital connection with, has some feedback on something I've  done, I'm going to listen to it, and I'm open to it, and there's an exchange that  goes on. And more important, millions of people are talking to each other about  my work, you have to be open to that. You have to be ready for that to happen. I  am not saying you need to become some magic little echo chamber, and that's  why I don't use Twitter, because I realized if I got sucked into Twitter, it's like  playing tennis with 150 people at a time. You hit the ball once and then a whole  bunch of balls come back. You'll never be able to keep up with that. Yeah. So  part of this discipline is not becoming JD Salinger and living isolated in a cabin,  but figuring out how to be in the world. Learn Enough in the world that your stuff  gets better, but continue to make things, continue to put these ideas into the  world. I want to add one last thing on one topic, because it's something I've  thought about a lot. I was really fortunate before his illness, and then when he  passed away, I got to be on stage once with Zig Ziglar, one of my teachers, and  it was 10,000 12,000 people in a actually, it's more than that, in a big stadium in  Milwaukee, and backstage, I said, So tell me, Zig, what do you do about that  guy in the third row who's asleep like because I'm standing up there and I've 

flown halfway across the country and I've practiced this thing, and that guy, he's  asleep, or he's not paying attention, and Zig I'm giving him everything I've got.  I'm aiming all my photons and tachyons at him, and he's just not responding,  and I can't do Zig's voice anymore, but Zig turned to me and he said, it's not for  him. It's that woman sitting next to him on the edge of her seat, the one who's  came a long way to hear you speak, the one who's listening to what you're  saying is going to do something. It's for her. Don't take it away from her and give it to this guy. He doesn't deserve it. It's for her. And once we learn to shun the  non believers, once we learn to be comfortable enough to say it's not for you,  then we free ourselves up, because no one can make something for everyone,  no one. There's no product that everyone wants. So you can either spend all  your time trying to get the last person to like you, or you say, I'm sorry. It's not for you. I'll go talk to these guys instead.  

Brian Elliott - It's amazing. The light bulb, I think, has gone on for so many  people that that's what it's about. I mean, I think you mentioned in the book too,  there's this great example of is it Joshua Bell, who's the violinist, and it's just.  About playing to the right audience or not, and it's what you challenge us to think about is, you know, if you're not getting the attention that you're looking for,  possibly you either A are playing to the wrong audience or B, you're not making  good enough stuff, right? Yeah, and Joshua Bell's a great example. The  Washington Post, I think, wrote this up  

Seth Godin - he stood in the subway with a baseball cap on, and 1000s of  people walked by.  

Brian Elliott - Nobody cared, right? And yet you could pack a concert hall a few  $100 a ticket, right? And it's just amazing the difference. Let's talk about picking  yourself. Okay, this is something I think you've gotten good at, but were you  always good at it? Let's, let's maybe unpack it a little bit. Talk about what it  means to pick yourself and then give us some, some personal story.  

Seth Godin - Well, all of us are surrounded by people who can't wait to get  picked. Authors used to need to be on Oprah Clive Davis's autobiography just  came out. What could he do for a living? He picked people. We want to get  picked by the local political party. We want to be picked by our boss, we get  picked, which authorizes us to do this art. So I'm just waiting for Poetry  Magazine to call me. I sent them my stuff two weeks ago. I don't know where  they are. I'm waiting for this job to come in, right? And what happened is that  these gatekeepers, all at once, lost their power. If you want to make a record,  make a record, put it on iTunes. Pick yourself. If you want to write, write, build a  blog. Pick yourself. If you want to start a software company, you don't need a 

permit, you don't need anything. You just start it. And so we see authors and  writers and singers and entrepreneurs and physical therapists and anyone who  wants to, because we're all now collect one click away from each other, raise  your hand and say, I'm in. Here's what I make, here's what I do. That doesn't  mean everyone needs to be self employed. That's not what I'm saying. You can  work for a big company and you can organize the weekly lunch book club. Why  not? There's no rule against it. Even HR doesn't care if you do that. Send a  memo out to 50 people you meet once a week, and you all read a book  together. That idea of picking yourself is available now because communication  is so easy, and what frustrates me to no end is, you know, some people read my blog and I'll get notes, 10, 20, 30, 40, a day, saying, pick me, put me on your  blog. Now, I've never done that for anyone. I don't make careers. That's not what I do, but they still are so desperate to be picked and I'll I've written a blog post  called first 10, and what the Post says is, give your work to 10 people, and if it's  good and they're the right 10 people, they'll tell 10 people. Now you have 100  and if it's good, they'll tell 1000 once you have 1000 true fans, you're in right. If  the first 10 don't do anything with it, your work's not good enough, or they're the  wrong 10 people. So I send this link to the people who say, Pick Me. And about  80% of time, I never hear from them again, because they don't want to pick  themselves. They want the security and the deniability from someone else  picking them. Right? That if you don't have time to do it right, when are you  gonna have time to do it over that if you've got time to be rejected? To be  rejected by 400 media outlets, you probably have time to build your own media  outlet in the meantime, right? But we don't want to do that because it doesn't  feel safe. And I love  

Brian Elliott - the way you compare post industrial revolution to where we are  now, which is the connection economy, right? And I'll talk about that in it. But I  want to go back to the reason people are afraid to pick themselves. I think it's  because they're afraid to fail. I think they're probably stuck doing it the same  

way. You know, status quo. This is the way we've done it for the last 30 years.  This is the way we need to keep doing it. What are your thoughts on that?  

Seth Godin - Well, I mean, you know, I'm looking here, and I don't see Al Roker  in the building or Katie Couric.  

Brian Elliott - Let me tell you, I did invite Steve Martin tonight, really, and he  declined. He was either doing Saturday Night Live this last week or something  else. But I loved the, you know, homage you gave.  

Seth Godin - Oh yeah, so many cool things there. And I invited him and he  declined. Well, next time he and I don't speak anyway, you picked yourself, 

right? I mean, two really great cameramen sitting here, it's going to be seen by  more people that are going to see the average local TV show you did that you  just chose you didn't have to, but you decided you can. Now, why wouldn't other  people do it? Well, it's not fear of failure, because if no one sees it, so no one  would know you failed because no one saw it. It's not like everyone's waiting for  you to have this giant pratfall. It's the fear of fear of failure. What we are afraid of is having to admit to ourselves that we did something that didn't work, that we  think that that is when the universe will call us out as the fraud, that we know we are, that everyone is carrying around this little chip, Steve Martin, especially that they're fraud, and that to not get the response people. Gonna laugh you like they did in high school. No, that's not the problem. The problem is in your head. You  say, See, I told you, is that where shame starts to play, play and shame part the  art killer? Yeah, shame is what, especially women, girls, use, is used on them,  right? To say, How dare you. You know, we come up with words to describe  people who are who have the hubris to be vulnerable and to make art, and we  use shame to undercut all of that. And so this black cloud of shame is at the  heart of this. It's the partner of the resistance. Steve Pressfield, great term. And  when shame and the resistance get together, you're in trouble. The answer, it  turns out, is not to fight it. It's to acknowledge it. It's your compass. For me,  when the resistance kicks in and says you shouldn't do that, that's how I know  I'm on the right path, right that I look for that feeling, and instead of fleeing or  fighting, I listen to it and do it anyway. Yeah, and that is where we're going to  make the impact that we deserve to make. You've  

Brian Elliott - talked about it before, leaning into the curve ball, running at the  dog, embracing uncertainty, all these things completely not intuitive to getting  through that kind of thing, right? Because ordinarily it's a brick wall. You let  words of other people, or the applause or the lack of the applause determine  your worth, or how valuable your project is. And most people just quit, yeah,  

Seth Godin - because it seems so comfortable, which we think means safe. And so now there's this bitterness of people who persuaded themselves that the  world owed them this stable, risk free life, and now that the industrial age is  going away and it's not being given to them, they think it's someone else's fault.  Well, no, they just didn't read the manual, because the manual has been pretty  clear for a few years, which says we're not going to keep doing that. Sorry,  

Brian Elliott - yeah. I mean, I sort of understand why people would feel that way, because the rules of the game have changed. Sure I get it, you know, go to  college, get a graduate degree, get a fantastic job. You're done. You're set,  right? And that's all gone. 

Seth Godin - Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And, but, you know, some of the people  who are whining about it, people in the newspaper industry, what you just heard, I'm not buying this. You're in the newspaper industry. You've been hearing about  it. Hearing about it for 14 years. The first time I spoke to the newspaper  publishers of America was 14 years ago. If you were in the room, you heard it,  and then you've seen it, and then you saw Craigslist, and then you saw this. You saw and for you to be sitting here whining that too many people are on Buzzfeed and not enough people are reading your paper that you delivered to their house  in a truck. Yeah, I don't want to hear it, yeah, so it's selective listening or denial,  yeah, because all creatures, particularly humans, will do almost anything to  avoid fear. And so when someone shows up, you know, the magic of the  Industrial Revolution is the Henry Ford's of the world showed up, and they said,  You don't have to be afraid. You merely have to do what I say. I will take  responsibility, and then I will make you rich. That was a really cool deal, and  generations gave up their spark in exchange for richness. But now the New Deal shows up, and it says you have to be scared out of your mind. You have to feel  like you're risking everything, and then some of you will get rich, but all of you  will actually have a better life, because you're going to be human, not cogs in a  machine.  

Brian Elliott - So how do we get organizations to change? I mean, is it start with  us? Is that what it's about, or is it about educating the people who are in charge? Because people are in charge are the ones that are pointing the fingers and  laughing and trying to shame us.  

Seth Godin - So here's the thing, you needed people in charge if you wanted to  build a giant new factory to make a new kind of chemical or a new kind of bottle, you couldn't innovate without the big factory. The connection economy rewards  little things, little connections, little followings, so that if a programmer has 2000  

people who read her blog and she's good, she doesn't need her company  anymore. If she gets laid off, she'll get 10 job offers before tomorrow, because  she is connected to people who trust her. So one by one, as individuals, build  these webs of connection and trust. The guys on top have way less power than  they used to, and that's going to force them to start to innovate. And we see that  starting to happen in Hollywood, and we it already happened to the music  business. It's happened to the insurance business and the shoe business. You  know, Tony Hsieh built a billion dollar shoe store, and he did it one bit of trust at  a time, no fancy buildings, no authority, just one person who trusted him and told another person, I  

Brian Elliott - love the way you talk about trust and attention as currency, and  that's part of the new connected economy. Correct. 

Seth Godin - Yeah, correct. The. Because there's a race to the bottom to make  things cheaper. But if you look at the prices at Walmart, they have to level off,  because soon they'll have to pay you to buy stuff otherwise. So as that stuff  levels off, I can't grab a huge amount of market share by being 10 cents  cheaper. It's just not worth it. So how am I going to grow? I'm going to grow by  being 10 cents more trusted, not by being 10 cents less expensive.  

Brian Elliott - I think that's an amazing bit of advice for entrepreneurs. People  are starting their own company. And I think it's subtle, so I want to, I want to  underscore it, because the mindset is, I need critical mass, you know, I need a  gazillion whatever. Yeah, right. And you're saying the connected economy? No,  that's right. I mean, it depends, I guess. I mean, if you're Facebook, then you do  need critical mass, but you don't need it for most of everything else.  

Seth Godin - Well, please understand, Facebook ended up being worth a billion dollars when they only had 2 million members. That's what one out of every  3000 people on the planet? That's not critical mass. That's not how many people drink Coke. This is tiny, tiny number, because what the investors saw is it led to  trust. And you know, in today's news, we see that that app mailbox just got  acquired by a company called Dropbox before they earned $1 in revenue, right? So what did they have? Anyone could have copied their design. What they had  was the ability to bring something to the market that people would trust with their most precious digital information, their email, and wait in line for weeks to get a  hand on right? So they demonstrated that they could do it for most people. For a chiropractor, it's 100 people, right for somebody who's selling insurance, it's  1000 people who truly trust you. So the question I would ask the entrepreneur,  the freelancer, the consultant, the person who works at a big company, is, do  more people trust you and pay attention to you today than six months ago? And  what are you going to do between now and six months from now that's going to  radically going to radically change the number of people and how deeply they  pay attention and trust you, because if all they're doing is tolerating you, if the  only level of attention you have is you own a piece of real estate and have to  walk past your office, doesn't count, right? That? You know, there's a financial  broker I know in California, not far from here, and he makes a great living with  clients all over the world, not because they've met him, not because they've  been into his building, but because he acts in a way that makes people say to  other people, I trust this guy. Yeah.  

Brian Elliott - You wrote just recently in a blog post. I loved it. Maybe you can  elaborate a little bit on picking your clients. So oftentimes we make the product,  we rush out to market, we hope to sell it, but you kind of flip the script explain 

that, yeah. So  

Seth Godin - you know, you first crossed my path a few years ago. You told me  that you were leading a tribe in Southern California. Of how many people? 8000  15,000 now, 15,000 time it was 5000 Yeah. Well, that group of people defines  what you do all day. That group of people defines what you're going to do next.  Because you're not looking for new customers for your products. You're looking  for new products for your customers, which is a big mind shift, right? Well, if you  end up having 80 angry litigators as your client, please expect that your life's  gonna be miserable, yeah, and your business isn't gonna grow. On the other  hand, you know, if you look at like the Walt Disney Corporation, who are their  customers, they picked them. Well, if they're, you know, frustrated that four year  olds have short attention spans and throw tantrums, well, it's their fault. They  picked four year olds. So you get to pick you don't say, I have this great product. Who can I push it on? You say which group of people are open to being  connected or open to being led or open to being worked with to create art?  Those people will be my customers. I pick you now. Let's work together to make  a business out of that. Oh, yeah,  

Brian Elliott - I love that. I love that it comes it's all pre marketing, it's all pre  everything else. I love that. So Icarus, deception is an interesting title. It's a  metaphor, obviously. Talk a little bit about Icarus and some of the myths that are  out there, and then let's talk about kamiwaza.  

Seth Godin - Great. Okay, so myths are true. They're true, not literally, but we  made them up because they talk about our best selves.  

Brian Elliott - I love the fact that you referenced Joseph Campbell, by the way,  personal favorite, right? You  

Seth Godin - know, Campbell stuff is really extraordinary to you know, the same stories keep coming up over and over again the Harold's journey up exactly. So,  you know, the reason that we celebrate Thomas Edison is because, you know  the myth we talk about, Thomas Edison is the person we would like to become  at some point. Yeah. Well, the myth of Icarus, which is 1000s of years old, said  the following, Daedalus, his dad was banished to an island. For crossing one of  the gods, and Icarus was there with him, and they wanted to escape. So  Daedalus fashioned. They always use the word fashioned wings for the two of  them, and then affixed. They always say, affixed them to their back with wax. At  this point, the myths diverge. If you read the myth today or in 1950 or 1910 it  says Daedalus said to Icarus, do not fly too close to the sun, or the wax will melt and you will die. Icarus disobeyed his father and perished. Well, what's the 

lesson? The lesson is, listen to your dad. Don't have a lot of chutzpah. Do what  you're told. Don't fly too close to the sun. Hubris is a bad thing, right? That's  actually not what the myth used to say in 1820, and 1720, and 1020, and 1000  years before that, the myth said what I just said. And then Daedalus said, more  important, my son, do not fly too low, because if you fly too low, the mist and the  waves will weigh down your wings and you will surely perish. And I wrote this  book because I think we're flying too low. I think we need a lot more hubris, a lot  less obedience, and a lot more awareness that this revolution was just handed  to us. And if all we're using it for is, you know, to put up silly pictures of cats in  the pub. We're wasting it so you're encouraging people to create a ruckus  exactly because there's a difference between throwing rocks and making a  ruckus. You're making a ruckus in the service of something worthwhile, in the  service of something generous, that it feels way more risky to you than it does to everybody else, but that if you do it in the small, you'll get good enough to do it  in the medium and in the large, and that's where the next innovation is going  

Brian Elliott - to come from. And is about, I want to talk more about thinking like  an artist, because we we sort of define what an artist is. But thinking like an  artist then is, is trying stuff that may not work. It's starting someplace and ending up in a completely different place, and not worrying about what the world says or how much applause or even money you get right if it's if you feel like it's the right thing to do? Yeah, I in a  

Seth Godin - few places in the book. I try to unpack a little bit, but one of the  things that artists have talked about through the years is you must first start with  the blank slate, which is it's all on the table. The other thing you have to do is  learn how to see meaning. If Jackson Pollock had lived 200 years earlier, he  wouldn't have painted the way he painted, and if he'd lived 200 years later, he  wouldn't have painted at all that. It wasn't that he in his DNA, he needed to paint like that. Wasn't that Van Gogh had in his DNA that he needed to be a painter.  Instead, they just decided to see what was around them and go one step further, maybe two, but not three. You go three steps further, you're not making anything that anyone wants. One step, two steps. That's where the that's where art lives.  But you can't do it unless you see and training yourself to see and not censor  the thoughts that are coming to you that's critical. And then the third piece is you have to learn how to make you actually have to have the skills to do something  that matches your vision. And all too often, we fall down on one or two or all  three of those steps because we're in such a hurry we fall in love with ourselves  that we put out a piece of crap, and we say, Isn't this great? No, actually, you  might have saw something, but you didn't know how to make  

Brian Elliott - it. Yeah, and that's the dilemma we're having right now, because 

it's never been as easy to start a company, never been as easy to get up a  video, and now everyone has a soapbox, right, correct? So in my mind, quality  is the new social proof, right? You know, like that's what's going to dictate. What  gets noticed, what gets attention, what gets trust is if it's good enough for those  people, if they love it, right? That's right, you  

Seth Godin - have to it goes beyond love. To feel compelled to tell someone  about it before you go to bed, that's how good it has to be.  

Brian Elliott - And you talk about you qualify that a little bit by saying it's also got to be personal. You got to be willing to put it all out there, to be able to accept  the criticisms, to be able to accept the fact that it may not work, right?  

Seth Godin - Well, it depends on where you are in the cycle, you know, if I look  at someone, a rock group that's paid their dues, like Indigo Girls, you know, so  Indigo Girls has 25,000 true fans. Every time they put something in the world,  they can sell 25,000 copies. Yeah, right. Amanda F Palmer, same thing. So  Amanda doesn't have to crucify herself every time now, because that group, that tribe. She knows what they're going to like and what they're not going to like.  And I'm the same. Thing happened to me three or four books ago, I stopped  trying to get new readers. I said, I know how to get new readers. I hate getting  new readers. I don't want to dumb down my work to get masses of people to  want to look at it. I mean, if I put up a blog post tomorrow. That was a list of 17  numbered ways to have something happen. It would go wild on Twitter, because you figure out how to do that. But I want new readers. I want to take care of the  readers I've got. So for me, writing a book now isn't about how do I expose  myself to a stranger and get kicked in the teeth. It's how do I take people who  have trusted me and take them further than they're comfortable with, not a lot  further, but enough further that both of us feel like we're going somewhere. And  

Brian Elliott - that's interesting, because it's been a process, right? I mean, it's  been a refining process, where you've tried stuff, you've failed, and you learn  what works, and you do that, right? And that kind of essentially sounds what,  

Seth Godin - yeah, lots of failing, you know. And but the failing is quiet for most  people. It's as loud in my head, you know, 4800 blog posts, more than half of  them are below average, right? Says, You says, Any mathematician, that's the  way the averages work. And so you look at the half that are below average, you  say, why are they below average? What did I learn from that? Where am I going  that works and that doesn't work, and what kind of language Am I comfortable  with? Or you give 1000 or more talks, and you discover in that 55 minutes you  have alone with a crowd, what will work from an intimacy point of view, and what

won't where can you go and where Can't you and so the 10,000 hours rule is  legit. What's fascinating, and what people don't understand about it is it's  possible to spend 10,000 hours to be diverse, 10,000 hours to be good at many  things, right? So what was Johnny Carson good at? Actually, he was good at  being Johnny Carson took 10,000 hours to be good at being Johnny Carson, but that's what he ended up with. So it's not just you need 10,000 hours to learn  how to paint a portrait, right? Maybe it's just 10,000 hours to be, you know, a  jack of all trades. You gotta  

Brian Elliott - work it out. Yeah, you gotta work it out. Let's talk about rejection.  Okay? A lot of people get stuck here. You know, we touched a little bit on  shame, but give some pointers. Give some tips about how people can look past  the rejection, past the critic. I love in the book, you talk about how to handle the  criticisms and how to handle shame, and you say basically that the words of the  critic belong to the critic, and shame. It can only stick to you if you accept it,  right? Talk about that  

Seth Godin - a little bit. Well, I want to start with a small public service  announcement for anyone who's a jerk, okay, which is some people take some  of this learning and use it to become a jerk that they're going to singles bars and propositioning every person they meet, that they're walking up to people  everywhere they go, and handing them a business card to sell them their thing  that they don't need, and they think that that is the path to becoming a great  salesperson, because it's about numbers. It's a lot of attrition. And they think that they're being rejected. Well, in fact, they're not being rejected. A jerk is being  rejected because they're not actually even present. They're just putting up this  facade. Anytime someone sends me a note and I politely decline, they write  back. Well, does it hurt to ask? Well, actually, it does hurt to ask. It hurts to ask  because I won't view you the same way next time. And it hurts to ask because  you didn't take the time to earn the privilege to ask. And it hurts to ask because if you'd gotten a yes by asking for something else, it might have been easier to get a yes for the next thing next time. So this idea you should just go around getting  rejected for fun kicks, because it's pretending that you're doing your work. I'm  not buying that, but not answer your question. One of the things I learned for  about eight years I was close to bankruptcy when I was building my book  business, and in my first year, I got 800 rejection letters in a row, 900 rejection  letters in a row, and it would have been really easy to give up. There wasn't a lot of support for what I was doing in the house or out of the house, and it wasn't  working.  

Brian Elliott - Is there a line drawn in the sand? Like, okay, we're going to give it  this much time and then go get get out and get real jobs? 

Seth Godin - Oh, yeah. I mean, I had my own line, which is, if I ran out of  money, I was done. And it kept getting closer and closer to running out of  money, dancing right on that edge for a really long time. And I got very good at  bootstrapping, very good at playing it so that I wasn't going to run out of money.  Because in my head, still to this day, I get to do this thing I love until I run out of  money, yeah. So I'm, you know, and then what you have to go get a real job.  You have to go get a job as a bank teller. That was the symbol for me of the  worst possible outcome would be a bank teller, because I'm not strong enough  to dig ditches, but it would have been like being in prison for me. And what I  came to understand is that the right kind of no isn't a no. It's a I learned what  doesn't work, or no for now, what it meant to me was the person who I had  described my project to either was the wrong person or given their worldview  didn't. Hear what I was saying the way I was saying it, because I could prove  these were good ideas, and some of them by other people went on to make  millions of dollars. So I know I was right, right, but that didn't matter. What  mattered was they didn't think I was right, and that was it's that transference of  belief that's so critical. So this idea, and we had a database. At one point, I had  nine people in my book group, and we had a database in FileMaker Pro, and if  something got rejected, there was a thing for yes, and this is when the book is  due, or no for now, right? There was no field for No, just no for now or Yes. And  we never became obnoxious. We didn't call them back a week later with to  remind them, if we had a new story to tell them about a project, we could go  back to them, right? And that idea of the new story becomes critical when you  think about rejection. They didn't reject you. They rejected your story. They  rejected the way they believed your story, right? So if you go back and do a lot  of hard work and bring in the more proof, more testimonials, more of this,  whatever it is that matches the way they think about the world. You have every  right to go back to them and say, based on what I learned from you, we changed it. What do you think of this  

Brian Elliott - story? Yeah, I have no doubt that Steve Martin will be sitting in  your chair soon. He has a new book coming out in April, I think. But really a  novel? No, I think it's, you know, it's not a book, it's a, he has an album coming  out, you know, he plays band, right? And all that. So we'll see no for now, no for  now, exactly. So what else could you share? If someone's got a new startup, you know, and they're just not getting traction, what would you whatever?  

Seth Godin - Well, the biggest mistake that people make is they build the wrong size company. If you say, I got a great idea, but I need to raise $12 million it's not a great idea, because if you knew how to raise $12 million you would have done it already. Yeah. Or you need a rich uncle, yeah. If you say, this is great, but I 

don't make money until Bill Clinton buys it, and I just got to find out someone  who can get me in front of him. Bad idea. So for me, I went into the book  business because every day, this was years ago, the people in the book  business were buying 100 books a day, every day, yeah, and they needed me  because they didn't have enough books to buy. There's a lot to be said for  selling something people want to buy when you're starting. And you know, so if  there's a tourist attraction nearby, and you can figure out how to make a t shirt  about that tourist attraction stand out front. That's a perfectly sized project for  someone doesn't have a lot of money, because you're going to find out in three  days if you were right or wrong, and if you were right, you're going to make  enough money to hire someone to sell those shirts tomorrow. Then you go back  to doing what you were doing, but you just learned how to invent a product,  create a product, sell a product, make a profit from a product in three days. Start there. Don't say you have this new app that's going to change the world if only 4  million people downloaded it. It's the scale issue. We often pick a project of too  big a scale because it's safe because, of course, it can't work. So we're covered. And the last thing I'd say about this, I got an email two days ago. It got me very  upset, and this guy, people, if you're seeing this, you should not send me email,  because it's my addiction. It's a bad habit. I don't want to read any more email.  But this guy sent me an email, and it said, I believe that everyone is born with  one good idea in life, and I have mine. I'd like to run it by you. When I get an  email like that, if there's an attachment, I instantly delete it. I never look at ideas. Send it to Mark Cuban. It to Mark Cuban, yeah, never look at ideas. But I went  right by say, I can't believe you just said that sentence, because as soon as you  say that, you've set yourself up to not being willing to fail because it's your only  

Brian Elliott - idea. Yeah, that's ridiculous in one basket, yeah, don't do  

Seth Godin - that, yeah, what you need to say is, everyone has a good idea  every hour. This is mine, and if it's wrong, I'll have another one an hour from  now. So we'll see that's a way better way. If you're sitting around saying, I have  this great idea, but I can't tell anyone, because you'll steal it. It's not a great idea. 

Brian Elliott - So the new book is Icarus deception. Seth, amazing work as  usual. Love it. Super inspiring. Keep great work.  

Seth Godin - You're very generous. Thank you for having me. It means a lot. I  appreciate it.  

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