Video Transcript: Seth Godin - Become a DOER!

Holy moly. Can we start by acknowledging that golf is just a really bad spectator  sport. Now, I've never actually been to a golf tournament, but I have been  subjected to golf on TV, which even saying it out loud is a little tricky. One of the  reasons it's such a bad sport is nothing really good ever happens. And the other  reason it's a challenge is because if something good does happen, you're not  supposed to applaud raucously. If something good happens, there's this sort of  anemic, wimpy golf applause thing. So if you could just humor me for a minute,  give me the worst, weakest golf applause you can muster. That was terrible.  Thank you very much. Now, can you double it? Pretty good. Double it one more  time. Thank you. And finally, double it one last time. Beautiful. OK, stop. That's  what we do for a living now, and that's what I came to talk about. What we do for a living now is not assault strangers with our latest widget, hoping that they'll  turn around and buy it from us. What we do for a living, as David has written so  beautifully about the Grateful Dead, is find little bits of threads, little threads of  interest, little separated pockets of people who are interested, and then we  connect them, and we amplify them, and we take them to the next level. And I've been talking about this for a couple of years, but what I don't usually talk about  is, what does that mean you have to do, not your organization, not your strategy, document. What do you have to do? And that's what we're going to talk about  today. And I brought a couple stories with me, and I think we'll start with this one. I don't know if you've ever seen this before. This is a I'm shaking just holding it.  This is lamb chop. Lamb Chop was a popular TV sock puppet, probably the  most popular TV sock puppet of all time, and lamb chop played a big role in my  life. I've spent 30 years making projects, and at the beginning, some of the  projects I did were software, some of them were videotapes. And I did a  videotape for kids that was published by Kodak, and then I got the big news that it had been nominated for an American Film Institute Award. Now the American  Film Institute is just like the Academy Awards, except not nearly as good, and it  was in the children's video category, so we thought we had a good chance. The  only other thing that was nominated was lamb chop, a sock puppet. So I rented  a tuxedo, flew out to LA it was a very big deal. Bruce Jenner was there, Kathy  Rigby, Gary Coleman, these were the hosts. And they get to my category, and  they say, and the winner is, and I stand up to start to give my speech, and they  say lamb chop. And I was just crushed, because in the moments before that, I  said to myself, finally, I'm going to get picked. Finally, I will have this badge of  approval. Someone will say, yes, you're the one. And then all the projects after  that would come easy, because then we'd have this badge, we'd have this ability to say, Yeah, we're the ones who won that award, but we didn't win the award.  We lost to a sock puppet, and it was a very long flight home with a plane ticket I  really didn't have money to afford in the first place with a rented tuxedo  crumpled up in my bag. There's a quote from Leonard Bernstein that I wish I had coined, but it came to me somewhere along the way, and what he said is, I'm 

not exactly sure what the question is, but I know that the answer is yes, and  what happened to me after that was an understanding that over time, I was  going to have the privilege if I wanted to to do the work I wanted to do, without  wondering whether I could get picked without wondering whether An authority  could say, Yes, it is your turn to do this right now. Go ahead and do it. My friend  Michael Schrag has written about what great organizations do, and his term for  it is, who do you want your customers to become? And I've rifted into what  change are you trying to make? So if we think about Harley Davidson. Harley  Davidson is a fabulous brand worth billions of dollars, not because they make  great motorcycles. Their motorcycles, by most measure, aren't great. They are a brand that matters because they have turned a group of people from outsiders  to insiders, a group of people who used to be disrespected, who when they  come together around the brand, feel something they have made change  happen. A whole bunch of people are going to get in line a week from now to get the latest phone that isn't even a good phone, because Apple computer has  changed us into people who have good taste about digital goods, and part of  what it is to have good taste is you need the next thing. Part of what it is to have  good taste is when you walk into a store that isn't there, as you feel just a little  off. So if we are going to do this work that matters. The question is, what does  that mean for us and for me? It comes down to a very difficult decision that we  have to make, and that's the decision I want to talk to you about today. So that's  the second thing I brought this is a spot. And what it means to do this work is  that you have to be on the spot. You have to be the person who says, I am going to do this. Not the person who says, This is my job to do it. Not the person who  says, The dummies book said I could do this. Not the person who says, Well,  this is what everyone else is doing. Because the work that matters, the work we  have the opportunity to make, is never work that other people could do. It's  never work that's being done by lots and lots of people. It's work that's being  done when we would miss you if you were gone, we would miss you if you didn't do that work. And there are a couple elements of this work, of being on the spot, that I want to talk about. The first one is this, most of us work in organizations,  and organizations are obsessed with authority. Can he do that? How come he  didn't ask me if he could do that? Can I do that? Who has the authority to do  this? Who has the authority to spend for this? Give me a raise so I can tell other  people what to do. And this search for authority informs most of the  bureaucracies in our life. If you only had more authority, the thinking goes, then  you could get on the spot and do this work. No one's giving you more authority  anytime soon, but there's something else that's available, and you can take it  anytime you want, and that is responsibility. People who take responsibility get  responsibility. We don't give it to you. You take it, and what comes with it is the  willingness to give away credit. If you are giving away credit and taking  responsibility when things go wrong, there's a long line of people out the door 

who want to work with you, and this is super hard, because not only you have to go on the spot and say, I am going to do this, but then you have to be  responsible for what happens next, which leads to this huge idea about change.  Because I said two minutes ago that when we're doing work that matters, we are changing other people. There are two challenges when we change other people. One, other people don't want to be changed because it might not work. And two, we don't want to be responsible for changing other people. So it creates tension, tension in us, tension in them. Think of a great artist right now, a great artist who lived in the last 100 years. Can you visualize this person? This person created  art that was almost universally hated when it first came out, whether it's John  Cage or Jackson Pollock or somebody who's making an edgy opera, all of it is  hated, and that person stands up says, no, no, no, I'm making it anyway. So  when my friend Amanda Palmer stood in Harvard Square dressed in a bride's  dress for three years, people came and they spat on her and they yelled at her,  and they threw things at her, and they drove away. And then she started making  music, and sometimes people would walk out. But that was okay, because it was her responsibility, and she wanted to make a change, and that tension that she  was willing to create, that tension is now available to more of us than ever  before. The Internet could save your life, not in the sense that it could keep you  alive, but it could save your life because it could keep you from a lifetime of  being a drone, from a lifetime of drudgery, from a lifetime of doing what you were told. Because here we have a new economy. It's not an economy based on what can you make. It's an economy based on who can connect, who can trust you,  who can listen to you. So if we all go all the way back 16 years. Ago to  permission marketing and go forward. It's all been a progression about can you  be heard? Can you be trusted? Can you connect? Can you do this work that  matters? So there was a study done a couple years ago. I want to make sure I  get the statistics right. Jake Halper did it for a book 650 students in Rochester at a high school. Turns out Rochester is demographically to Rochester, New York,  demographically perfect, just like the United States, overall income, gender,  race. They surveyed 650 high school students, and one of the key questions  they asked them was, here are five jobs that you could have when you grow up.  Which one do you want? The choices are chief of a major company like General Motors, a Navy Seal, a United States Senator, the president of a university like  Harvard or Yale, or the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star.  43% of the people surveyed picked the last one. 43% of our future. 43% of  these high school students said my number one choice is to be the assistant to  a celebrity. And if you think about it, the reason is obvious, because you get all  the credit of being able to brag about who your boss is, and none of the  responsibility you can go run and get coffee, and no one's going to blame you,  because you know how to get coffee. That what we were raised to do again and  again and again is do things that work. Which leads to the next thing I want to 

talk about. This is the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man, I know you've been waiting  for him to make an appearance, and after all these years of you coming, here he is now. I brought the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man, for a reason. I want to talk  about the famous marshmallow study. Here's how it went some evil scientists  took three year olds. They did this in 20 countries around the world. They take  three year olds, and they put the three year old in an academic library, and they  sit her down at a table, and they walk up to the kid and they say, here is a  marshmallow. I'm going to leave this room for 15 minutes, and when I come  back, if the marshmallow is still here, you can have two marshmallows, but if  you eat the marshmallow, sorry, no more marshmallows, and they leave the  room, some kids eat the marshmallow. Some kids don't eat the marshmallow,  and they videotape the whole thing, and then they wait 15 years, 15 years, they  find the kid, and they look him up, they look her up, and it turns out that the kids  who didn't eat the marshmallow, by every measure, more successful, better SAT scores, go to a more famous College, report themselves to be happier, have a  better future ahead of them. So the first question is, did the test change the  kids? If so, let's do a lot of tests. Probably not. What happened? Probably what  happened is the test is a symptom, a symptom of the ability to keep two ideas in your head at the same time. I want the marshmallow. I want two marshmallows.  People who can keep those two ideas in their head at the same time, at the age  of three, have the grit and the self determination to do other things that are  difficult. So here you are. Now. Almost everyone in this room is more than three  years old. What are the two ideas? The two ideas are, it might work and it might  not work, and the only way you can do something new is if you can hold both of  those ideas in your head at the same time. Only a fool does something brand  new and says it's going to work for sure, and only a failure refuses to do  something that isn't guaranteed to work. When we do our best work, we have to  walk into it saying, it might work and it might not work. So Bob Dylan comes  along. Bob Dylan gets to a great start, but then he stops getting picked. He  doesn't become the Beatles. He becomes this guy who some people are  obsessed with and other people want nothing to do with. And Bob Dylan again  and again and again, reinvents himself every seven years. He gets booed off  stage, right? He did a gospel record. He gets booed off stage. He does a, you  know, an oddball Christmas record. He gets booed off stage over and over  again. Bob Dylan says to himself, I'm going to do something new to change the  people who are going to listen to this. It might work and it might not work at the  same time. A lot of you are familiar with Mark Marin's work. Mark Marin started  the arc of his latest career by being rejected by Saturday Night Live, he's talked  about it at length that getting turned down by Lauren. And to be a member of the cast, put this giant black mark on him. He didn't get picked. So how is it that all  of a sudden everyone knows who Mark Marin is because he didn't wait to get  picked. What Mark Marin did instead is hold two ideas in his head at the same 

time. He doesn't do the same show every time he does a show that might work  or show that might not work, both of them at the same time. Now it's easy to  have a narrative in our head that says, Well, this is for other people. This is for  gifted people. I need to stay within the range. I need to tweet at certain times of  the day, because they have been scientifically proven to have the most efficacy.  And I make sure that I use these magic seven words, because I read that once  in a manual, being in the center of the pack is a lot safer. So I was in India a little while ago, and I am in love with the people and the spirit there, but I'm still  amazed at the driving. So let me explain a little bit about the driving, because I  had to go from Delhi to Borelli, and that's 300 miles. First, everyone drives on  the wrong side of the road. They should fix that problem. But the second thing is  people honk. They honk when you're going too fast. They honk when you're  going too slow. They honk when they're right behind you. They honk when  they're not right behind you. They honk when it's your time to go. They honk  when it's not your time to go. So there's an enormous amount of honking. So I'm in this van, driving on the wrong side of the road on this 300 mile long trip, and  my driver is in a hurry, and it's a it's a two lane road, so, you know, people are  doing this and zigging and that, and again, my life is passing before my eyes on  a regular basis, and he's honking, he's honking, and he's passing every single  person he can pass, passing and passing and passing. And finally, after two  hours, there's no cars in front of us. After two hours, he has passed everyone he could pass, and there's 10 miles of straightaway right in front of us. You know  what he did? He slowed down because there was no one to pass. So we let  other people define our agenda, because it's one thing to say, Well, yeah,  because these people are doing I'll just go almost as fast as them, or I'll go even a little faster than them. But if we look at the pioneers, even in social media, all  the people who went first didn't go first because they were going faster than  someone in front of them. There was no one in front of them that the art that's  available to us isn't the art of Jackson Pollock. It's a different kind of art. It's the  art of changing other people, and the way we make change happen is by being  human, by being connected, by being generous, and by doing something that  might not work, that changes someone else for the better. So no one waits in  line to go see copies of paintings that happen to be in the Isabella Gardner  Museum. They want to see the original one, the first one, that one, the original  one that made it into the museum. Why did it make it into the museum? It made  it into the museum because some people didn't like it, because it went to an  edge, because it touched us, because it changed us. So here's part of the  challenge. Part of the challenge is we spend a lot of time shaving Yaks. Yak  shaving, if you haven't been on the internet for 20 years, is a simple concept.  Your husband says You promised you were going to mow the lawn, and you  didn't. He bothers you a few times. You realize you got to mow the lawn. You go  to the garage to get the lawnmower. It's not there. You remember why you 

loaned it to your neighbor. You go to your neighbor to get the lawnmower, and  you say, I need my lawnmower back. The neighbor says, I'll give you your  lawnmower back, but first I need that sweater you borrowed from me three  months ago that you never gave back to me. Well, you go home to get the  sweater, but you realize you lent the sweater to your daughter and you don't  have it anymore, and the sweater was made out of yak hair, and therefore you  find yourself in the middle of the night breaking into the zoo to find a yak and  shave him so that you can weave it into yak wool and what and knit a new  sweater so you can get your lawnmower back. Basically, what you're doing is  getting all your ducks in a row, and we are spending an enormous amount of our time, you and me in social media world trying to get these ducks in a row. You  know, I just need a little bit more juice on Facebook. I need some more  followers. Our funnel needs to be adjusted. We need to figure out how to have  more interactions with these people. Like, if you watch Mad Men, it's positively  relaxing. They make an ad, they run it, they're done. And we, you guys, are  constantly getting all these ducks in a row. The question is, once you get them,  what are you going to do with that duck? What's the duck for? Who are you  trying to change? Are we trying to win this tiny little race, or are we trying to  make a bigger difference in the world? Ellen Langer writes about the idea that  some people are walking around with a giant bowl of frogs, and what they're  trying to do is keep all the frogs in the bowl. And if you're sitting there focusing  and wondering about your boss and your boss's boss and all those people are  following you. And how do I keep those ducks in a bowl? You can't possibly do  that work that you are actually here to do that sometimes we've got to let some  frogs jump out, because keeping the frogs in the bowl isn't the point. The point is to make change happen. And somewhere along the way, when you try to make  change happen, someone's going to come up to you and say, You're not as  good as you think you are. Someone's going to come up to you and say, How  dare you do that? Who gave you the authority to say that, or make that or do  that exactly when Brene Brown wrote her first book, she had never written that  book before. When Brene Brown gave that magical TED talk, she had never  given that talk to that audience before that when we think about anyone who has touched us, who has moved us, who has made something that mattered, that  person was completely unqualified to do the work they had just done because  they had never done it before. All the things that get you hired for a job, the  resume, the proof that you've worked for the famous brands, the proof that you  can follow instructions. None of those things are actually relevant to you. Doing  great work. We spend hours every day in meetings. What are we doing in those  meetings? What we're doing in those meetings is waiting for someone else to  take responsibility. It's a whole bunch of people sitting in a circle waiting for one  person saying, I'll do it. And then the other thing we do is we compromise, and  then we compromise again. So I want to talk for a minute about the difference 

between quality and deluxeness, and then contrast it with its enemy. Deluxeness means super fancy, expensive. That's not what quality is. Quality means  meeting specification. Quality means being good at what it's supposed to be  good at. And all of us would like to believe we make a quality product and then  we go to meetings. And what happens in meetings is our quality product  becomes crappy because crappiness is about compromising so you can get it  out of the meeting. Crappiness are all the edges we sand off to make everybody happy, but we make everybody happy. We don't do anything for the people at  the edges. We don't do anything for the people who care. And when we sand  those edges off, we lose my friend, Michael Landau and his sister started a  chain of stores called dry bar. And if you go to dry bar and say, Would you cut  my hair, they will say no. And if you go to dry bar and say, Can you please give  me a blowout, the place next door is half the price, can you give me a discount?  They will say no. And if you go to dry bar on a Thursday afternoon without an  appointment, they'll say, We're sorry. We're taking care of people. There are a lot of edges at dry bar. Dry bar flies the same architect that built the first door to  every single city they build a new one in. If you talk to Danny Meyer about how  he built Shake Shack into a billion dollar company in just a few years, he didn't  do it by figuring out how to be McDonald's, but cheaper. He didn't do it by  figuring out how to be Chipotle, but hamburgers. He did it by being Danny  Meyer. He did it by making something that some people won't wait in line for,  which is how you make something that other people will wait in line for. And so  now we get to this key fork in the road, which is we would like to be let off the  hook, the hook that says you're responsible. We'd like to say, well, this  organization does this, and I apologize, but my boss won't let me. Of course,  your boss won't let you. Your boss won't let you, because you're coming to her  and saying, I got this crazy idea, I want to do this really big thing. If it works, I'll  get the credit, and if it doesn't work, you'll get the blame. Because you said,  Okay, can I start what boss would say yes to that. Nobody. Instead, what we see in organizations is it someone who cares starts with connection, right? They  start with this idea of saying, I can talk to that customer or that engineer or that  process person, and then they do something for which they will take  responsibility, but have no authority. And as soon as it works, they tell somebody else they can take the credit, and then they do something again, and then they  do it again. And bit by bit by bit, these people, whether they're a company of one or a company of 100 or a company of 1000 show up. They show up for the right  reason to make change happen, to change the person they are working with to  look at them in the eye as a human being, and say, I am not here as a celebrity  assistant, right? I am here to make change happen, and the only way you can  do that is by being the best in the world, the irreplaceable one, the linchpin, my  friend, the late Lionel Poulen, baked bread in Paris, and it was a scandal,  because his father had been a bread Baker, and Lionel refused to make French 

baguette because the regulations meant that the baguettes he would have to  make would be crappy, and he said, I don't want to make a crappy product, even if it's the only legal way to do it. So he refused. He made a different loaf of  bread, a loaf of bread that stood for something in a bakery that did it a different  way. When he expanded, he refused to expand the normal way. Instead, he  replicated his bakery 12 times in a circle so there would be a big pile of dough in the center and 12 bakers, with each Baker responsible for what that Baker did,  responsible, not just authority. At one point, almost half the two and three star  restaurants in all of Paris sold Lionel's bread. This was a man who stood for  something that when he had a chance to open a store in New York. He said, I  cannot open a store in New York because by the time the bread comes to me,  for me to taste it, to see if it's any good, it will be too late. This wasn't about, how do we get bigger? This wasn't about, how do we win some race? How do we get more likes? How do we show up number one in some pile of results? It's how do we choose to matter. That choice is in front of you, perhaps for the first time  ever, because you don't need to own a retail establishment. You don't need to  have dozens of employees. If you have a laptop or a smartphone, we just gave  you a Connection Machine that connects you to more than a billion people, the  very same connection machine the biggest companies in the world have to work with. I almost didn't make it here today because there was a huge accident on  the merit, fortunately, it was going the other direction. So those people definitely  did not make it here today. But if you get Thank you, I'll be here all week. If you  get caught in traffic on the merit you're doomed, because there's only two lanes.  It's not like India. You can't honk your horn and go around everybody. But now, if there's traffic, you can just go around if you don't get picked by Lauren Michael,  go around if it's not working in this venue. Go around if people don't get the joke. You look them in the eye with utmost respect and say, it's not for you. I made  this it's not for you. Go look at the reviews of any one of the top 100 books on  Amazon. Every one of them has one star reviews. What's that about? What it's  about is, of course, they have one star reviews because they can't be for  everybody, because they're best sellers. The only things that go to the bestseller list are things that are for some people. So here we are. We built this system for  you, and you tell me you have writer's block. You tell me you don't know what to  say. You tell me you can't think of anything good. Well, as DMS just mentioned,  where is he? He's in here. Not David. This. The lizard is present, right? The  lizard brain, the amygdala, right back here is the source of you being stuck.  Here's what we know. There is no such thing as writer's block. We know in the  1800s people wrote the word writer's block did not tend to appear in the  literature until the 1940s where did it come from? Where it came from is  suddenly writing became a profession. Suddenly, writing could make you  famous. Suddenly, Ernest Hemingway, suddenly, Harper Lee, of course, you  have writer's block because you're not qualified like Harper Lee was she, after 

all, had written, oh no, books before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. And so we  run into Stephen King, and we say, Stephen King, you're one of the most  famous authors of all time. Please, please tell me what kind of pencil do you  use? Because if we just knew what kind of pencil Stephen King used, we could  get that pencil an amola skin, a or some other clever Italian notebook in which to write, and then we'll be fine. There's no such thing as writer's block, because  there's no such thing as talker's block. Yeah, the reason that you get writer's  block is because the lizard brain doesn't want you to be responsible. The reason when someone says, Are there any questions, most people don't raise their  hand isn't because they don't have questions. It's because they're saying to  themselves, well, if I raise my hand and ask a question, my boss might hear  what I said, and she might realize I said something stupid. And then she would  check my resume and see that one thing I said in the resume that wasn't true.  And then my phone would ring, and it would be her, and she would call me into  the office, and she would fire me. And not only that, I'd have no references, and I would never get another job. And then I would lose the place I'm renting, and  then I'd be homeless, and then I would die, all because you raised your hand.  And so what we do is we seek reassurance. We seek reassurance. Please tell  us it will be okay. We go to our coach, and we say, Coach, I want to try  something new. Tell me it'll work out. We go to the pre VC meeting and say, Tell  me what to say, so that when I go to the meeting, it will all be okay. Reassure  me. Reassurance is futile. There will never be enough reassurance for your  lizard brain. Never it doesn't make sense to look for it, because the work you  need to do, the most important work you can do, the speaking up at the  meeting, the writing what needs to be written, the looking people in the eye that  work, the less reassurance we can give you, the more important The work is that what is going on here, in this new, revolutionary time we live in, is that the only  thing we are keeping track of is not docs. We are keeping track of trust and  connection and the stories we tell ourselves, and it's all invented, the story you  are telling yourself about your competence and your incompetence, the story  you are telling yourself about the outfit you wore today, or the way people think  about you or what money is, it's all invented. We invented a story because it  worked for us. And the people in Bareli India have a totally different story about  themselves or their money or their future than you do, and your story is totally  different than his story, and it's all invented. And so the question we have to ask  ourself is not, where will I find the reassurance, the foundation, the gentle hand  on my back to guarantee me it's all going to be okay. Where can I find the  authority so I can hide from the repercussions? These are the wrong questions.  The right question is, who needs to be seen? What change can I make? What  connection can I make? What can I build? Excuse me, I've been ranting at you a long time. Okay, so I want to talk now about this idea called infinite games.  James Carson wrote a book about it. You all are familiar with regular games, 

finite games, things like football games, soccer games, presidential elections.  These are games that exist in our world with several attributes. There's a time  limit, and somebody wins, and there are rules. Those are the three basic things.  So we have games at work. We have games in traffic, right? There's two people  trying to merge onto the highway. The person who goes first won that game.  Lots of games in our life, but then there are these infinite games. Juggling is an  infinite game. You can't win at juggling. You can just juggle. Playing catch with  your four year old son is an infinite game. I hope the goal is not to throw the ball  so hard that the kid quits. The goal is to throw the ball so he throws it back and  in a connection economy, which is different than the industrial economy, the  infinite game is the game we are actually playing. We are not playing a game to  cut someone else off in traffic. We are not playing the game to have our blog  rank higher than someone else's blog. We're not even playing an SEO game,  because that game's sort of rigged and we're not going to be able to win it for  long anyway. No, we're playing an infinite game. I'm throwing this ball to you so  that you will throw it back. I am connecting with you so you will connect to her. I  am weaving together the fabric of a community, New York Tech meetup with  30,000 members. How do you win that? You don't win that, but you could weave it. And when you weave it, when you create this environment where people are  able to see each other, find each other, do things together, enormous amounts  of value are created. As Matt Ridley said, no one in this room knows how to  make a computer mouse, not one person you need a metals person, a plastics  person, a software person, supply chain together, we're going to create value by working together as we work our way through it. And it is always too soon to  take this leap that when Gutenberg launched the printing press, 500 years ago,  only 7% of the people in Europe knew how to read. This was a really dumb time  to launch the book. There were no bookstores. They had not yet invented  reading glasses, which 1/3 of the addressable market needed, but didn't know,  because there was nothing to read. This was a dumb time to launch the book.  He should have waited until Barnes and Noble was up and running and Amazon was getting started. Then he could have invented the book, and it would have  worked great. When Carl Benz launched the car, it was against the law to drive.  There were no roads and there were no gas stations. There were no all night  drive through liquor stores. He should have waited before he launched it. And so when we dig deep, dig deep into what we are doing all day at work, the question is, what's it for? We're playing a game in our head that's all invented. Is it giving  you pleasure and sustenance? Does it matter? Or is it about watching some  ticker as the number goes up, waiting for the car in front of you to pull over so  you can pass that because the internet could save your life, because you have  the opportunity to say, wait, I can write it down. I can notice things, imagine  things, connect people, and then do things, do things that actually matter. So I  want to tell you a couple more stories. The first one is about a great charity in 

Boston and New York called room to grow. And what room to grow does is they  find underprivileged moms who have young kids, and they say to them, come  here. We will welcome you. We'll give you some baby clothes, some gently used toys. Well, baby clothes and gently used toys are important, but that's not why it  works. It works because someone in that office sees you. They would miss you.  They look you in the eye. They care about you. They don't just care about you  because it's their job. They care about you because they have chosen to do this, and over time, when someone notices you and cares about you and connects  with you, that is the original social media. That is what we are trying to replicate  with all of our buzzing and responsive mobile nonsense. What we're trying to  replicate is not clicks or page views. We're trying to replicate this idea of being  seen. So on to one of my favorite movies of all time, The Wizard of Oz. I want to  talk about a couple things related to the Wizard of Oz. The first one is this, in 75  years, I can't think of five movies that have featured an intelligent, strong  teenage girl as their hero. What a shame. But the Wizard of Oz did that, and it  did it beautifully. Second thing about the Wizard of Oz, which I think will be  instructive to everybody here who's trying to make something happen, is early in the movie, Dorothy goes to the wizard and explains what she wants, and the  wizard says, I will help you, but first, bring me the broomstick of the Wicked  Witch of the West. He didn't need a broomstick. He had plenty of broomsticks.  He was sending Dorothy away so she wouldn't come back. And there are all  these people in your lives. When you go to them for reassurance, when you go  to them to be picked, when you go to them for whatever you're going to them  with, who say, First, bring me the broomstick. First, bring me the P&L. First,  bring me a better PowerPoint deck. First, bring me a prototype. And they send  you off, not because they need it, but because they don't want you to come  back, and if you're spending your days looking for broomsticks, it might make  sense to go back into the business of making tension. Instead, you can look at  the wizard and pause, because that increases the tension, and say, really, do we need a broomstick? Or is this about you needing more reassurance? Because if  you need more reassurance, maybe I need a partner or an authority or a van  driver that wants to make the same change that I want to make because plenty  of projects have gone forward with far fewer broomsticks than you're asking for  right now, and we've got to be clear with each other about who's on the spot and what change are we trying to make. The other thing that happens in the movie at the end is this, the penultimate epic scene. The wizard turns the Scarecrow and  the Tin Man, et cetera, and says, You already had everything you needed. The  lion, you already had the courage Scarecrow, you are already smart. And the  same thing is true for you, that you will already have what you need to go to the  next level. You don't need more ducks, you don't need more permission. You  certainly don't need more reassurance. What you need instead is the decision to stop scratching imaginary itches, because they're all invented. My friend Pema 

Chodron talks about the difference between an itch and a scratch. An itch is  something that happens to you. You didn't invent it. It's there. A scratch is  something you choose to do. I can't make your itches go away. No one can  make your itches go away. All the reassurance in the world is going to do  nothing for your itches, but scratching. Scratching is your choice. It's the choice  to take your eye off the ball, to take your eye off what it is you sought to do all  along and just work on this thing, this lizard thing, this resistance thing, this  made believe writer's block, and take yourself away from what it is you could  have been doing all along. Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about before I  start to wrap this up, is this, I've been thinking a bunch over the last couple of  months about what marketing is now. How is it that people when confronted with your art, when confronted with your contribution, when confronted with the  tension you are making, how do they decide to make a thing, to do a thing, to go forward? And I think it comes down to one simple sentence, people like us do  things like this when someone in LA is thinking of joining the Crips or the Bloods, they don't say, Well, do you have any brochures? They look around and they  say, is this the sort of thing someone like me does that when I was in Kenya  working with Western seed. We were trying to help local farmers decide, choose to stop doing what they had been doing for 100 years, which is, plant the seeds  they had saved from the year before, and instead buy seeds designed to grow  more corn. For $30 they could buy $2,000 worth of harvest, and only 1/3 of the  farmers were buying it. 1/3 of the farmers were saying, Yeah, I'll do that. And two thirds were doing what they'd always done. Because people like me do things  like this. This is what my neighbors do. This is what my dad did. People like me  do things like this. The answer is not to make better corn. The answer is not a  better label for your corn. The answer is not billboards for your corn. The answer is not tweeting about your corn. The answer is changing the culture from a  culture of, we've always done it this way to a culture of, I'll give that a try. So I  spent the day with a woman named Lucy. Lucy is now a millionaire. She keeps 1 million Kenyan shillings under her bed. She on the same amount of land her  neighbors have. She grows enough corn and has a taxi company and a tree  farm that she's put all nine of her kids through private school, and her neighbor  is a subsistence farmer. What's the difference? The difference is, Lucy says,  when something new shows up, I'll try it. You won't get much land from me, but  I'll try it. She's a nerd, and the farmers in Iowa are all nerds. The farmers in Iowa are constantly showing each other not their new iPhone, but their new yield.  Everyone in Iowa knows what everybody else is planting. It's not a secret,  because Iowa doesn't compete with Iowa. Iowa competes with Nebraska. So  everyone tells everyone else in Lucy's neighborhood, no one told anybody else.  So the job wasn't to sell corn, the job was to get people in town to talk to each  other, because people like us do things like this. Let me compare the great Ella  Fitzgerald to the disgraced Richard Nixon for a minute. In the 1950s Ella 

Fitzgerald went on tour, and she had an integrated lineup, black musicians,  white musicians. They went to Houston. It. They went to Houston. Ella said,  Because Houston needed it, she needed to bring tension to that theater in  Houston, because she wanted people to see what could happen if musicians  integrated in between the first her first performance and the second set, the  cops busted down the door of her dressing room and arrested her and Illinois  Jacquet and several other musicians for playing dice in their dressing room, and they took them to jail. They didn't do it because they were playing dice. They did it to humiliate them, because they are the authorities, and the authorities don't  like change and the authorities don't like tension. So there is the magnificent Ella Fitzgerald in her gown. You can see the photos online. Fortunately, she was  bailed out in time to make it back for the second show. This is somebody who  showed up to do some work that mattered. Contrast that with Richard Nixon.  Richard Nixon, who was certain to win re election, was so in need of  reassurance that he blew the whole thing so he could get just a little bit more  confidence. He blew the whole thing by breaking all the oaths he had taken  because he needed more reassurance. One person, even though he was the  president, was a cog in a giant system that was just measuring the ratchets, and the other person was doing everything she could to make a change happen. It is entirely possible you can find someone who will give you second violin lessons,  but they're really not worth taking that what's available to us now, because we  have this keyboard, because we have this megaphone, because we have this  amplifier, what's available to us now is the chance to play first violin before we  are qualified. That is the only time we get the chance to become qualified, when  we act as if, when we stand on the spot when we choose to accept the tension  because it matters. So let me repeat something I said early on tonight. Leonard  Bernstein said it, I hope you'll let me I hope you'll help me finish the sentence.  I'm not sure what the question is, but the answer yes. Thanks very much. Thank  you.