Seth Godin
Appearances
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
But if you start doing bad ones enough, a good one's going to slip through no matter how hard you try to keep it out.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Well, thank you for having me. That's really kind of you. It's good to meet you.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Okay, here we go.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
So because we are talking about things that we have been brainwashed on for our whole lives, we need to go several steps back because a whole bunch of things that we think are true might not be true. I'll begin with the phrase, trust yourself, or are you talking to yourself? When we say that, who is talking and who is listening? Who is trusting and who is being trusted? There's only one of us.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Except there isn't one of us. There's more than one of us. There's the one, the voice of control, of compliance, the voice of the scold, the voice that's trying for safety, that wants you to not speak up, the voice that makes you feel like an imposter, the voice of resistance. And then there's that other voice. And it's that other voice that is capable of generosity and insight and creativity.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
It's that other voice that can do something that might not work. And what we got brainwashed for 16 years in school was ignore that voice. There's going to be a test. That voice is not welcome to come to the test. You're going to need to apply for a job. Hide that voice. And so one way, say, trust yourself. We're saying not, that voice is always right. Because in fact, that voice is usually wrong.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
But we're saying, if you're going to do the work, you have no choice but to trust that voice. You need to figure out how to let that voice make its point. And then your other voice, the loud one, will have plenty of time to undo it if it wants to. But for right now, finding your voice means what do you sound like when you sound like you? Not when you sound like an imitation of someone else.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
That there is a difference between you. being standard and being peculiar being being idiosyncratic because in a world where people have choices they're not going to choose someone who's a slightly more expensive version of someone they can already get they're going to pick somebody who's peculiar and worth choosing worth following worth seeking out and that is the hard work of the practice
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
That's right. Now, I don't know if you like foreign food, but if you've ever been to the International House of Pancakes, when you walk down that aisle to the restrooms in the back, there's a plaque that says Employee of the Month. And you'll see that they give you a little tiny thing if you are the most compliant. That is not how you make an impact in corporate America or anywhere else.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
That the people who get the best parking spaces, have the most leverage, are able to make a difference, aren't the ones who did everything they were told and simply outlasted everyone else. That was true 50 years ago. That's not what's true now. What's true now is people say, we have no choice but to listen to Heather because she's figured something out that the rest of us haven't figured out yet.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And what we're able to do is become leaders. And the thing is, if you want to be a leader, you have to deal with imposter syndrome. And a lot of people would love a formula to make imposter syndrome go away, that feeling that we don't amount to anything, that we're a fraud, that we're going to get caught. And I'm here to say, the reason we feel like an imposter is that we are one.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
What it means to be a leader is to show up with an answer where there is no playbook. to show up, not to manage, but to say, I think over there is where we want to go. Well, of course you're an imposter because you've never been there. Of course you're an imposter because leading is telling the truth in advance when you have insufficient proof.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And so when you feel that way, it's a symptom that you're onto something. Not that you're right, but that you're starting to model behavior that helps you get to where you need to go.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Right, and the purpose of the pressure is for the strict compliance voice to make the other voice be quiet. That's why we invent the pressure. And we get hooked on the outcome because it gives that voice more leverage. So I can't tell you how many people who have been working on a book Talk to me about how many will it sell and how do I get the right distribution? This is your first book.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
You're not going to sell that many no matter what you do. You're almost certainly not going to make it a bestseller no matter what you do. What would happen if you just wrote a book? What would happen if you just wrote the book you wanted to write without regard for whether or not everyone was going to like it? What if you wrote a book for 10 people?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
What if you picked in your head who those 10 people were and created something that they couldn't forget? Wouldn't that be enough? Start there.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Your family wasn't being evil. Your family thought they were being kind because their controlling voice was trying to protect you. And they were empathizing in the sense that they wouldn't publish something like that because they're afraid. So on your behalf, they were being afraid. And one of the key principles in the book is all criticism is not the same.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And we have to differentiate between the criticism of a troll, the criticism of someone who cares about us but doesn't know better, and the criticism of the actual useful critic who can help us make it better. All of which, again, to remind everyone, there's no guarantee any of this is going to work. But all of it is going to work better than not doing this.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Right. Well, it's super easy to get paralyzed because we've been pushed to believe that we need to appeal to everyone and we need Albert Einstein quality breakthroughs. And the alternative is pick the smallest viable audience. and seek the smallest viable breakthrough. Can you say just one thing that will make a difference to just 10 people? Because that's clearly not fatal. Start there.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
It matters a lot to those 10 people. Start there. And then once you realize it's not fatal, maybe you could do it again. And then maybe you could do it again. If you're a fan of music from the 60s and 70s, it is possible to buy demo CDs that Billy Joel made, that Cosby, Stills, and Nash made, other people. They're all terrible. They're terrible because they don't sound like them.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
They're just getting started. But if they had listened to them when they came out and said, I'm out of tune, my lyrics are a little off, and my blah, blah, blah, we never would have heard of them. Instead, they said, this is only for 10 people to hear. I'll try. And then I'll make it better. And then I'll make it better. And then I'll make it better. Shipping creative work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
That's the only way to make things better is to ship creative work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Well, let's get the words right. Most people in corporate America are managers, not leaders. Managers have authority. Managers get people to do what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. Managers are held to account because they have power and authority. Leadership is optional. It's optional to lead. It's optional to follow. That's what makes it leadership.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
So we need creativity from leaders. And it is possible for a manager to act like a leader. But managers have authority. And once you have authority, you just get to tell people what to do. And that's the way factories work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Most people would rather work for a manager.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Because you know what they're going to do next. You're not going to get surprised by a good manager. Being a good manager is not an evil thing. Being a good manager is essential. If you go to the supermarket and they're completely out of milk, that's a freak out moment. That almost never happens in the United States. How come? Because the people who manage the milk supply chain are not creative.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
They're really good managers. They understand that there's cows all the way over there, and there's people all the way over here, and we're not going to run out of milk. And the same thing is true for the people who manage the airline industry before the pandemic. Planes don't crash. They don't crash because of management, not because of leadership.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
It begins by refusing to look for a guarantee. And this is the biggest challenge that I find people have. This is why the book is called The Practice. Because what it means to have a practice is that you show up tomorrow, even if it didn't work today. Because it probably isn't going to work today.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And I was just reading an article about Sia, who has had more billion viewed YouTube music videos than any other artist. And she said, look, I did the math. And what I saw is that one out of 10 songs Maybe work. So instead of writing one song every three weeks, I write 10, right? That doesn't mean she ships junk. It means she understands that it doesn't come with a promise of acceptance.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
It's simply the practice of doing it. And if it gets accepted, that's nice, but it's not related to the practice.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Of course. I mean, I have a blog that comes out every day. It doesn't come out every day because I've written the perfect blog post. It comes out every day because it's tomorrow, right? And once you know that there's going to be a blog post tomorrow, then your subconscious works really hard to make it better because there's going to be something. You might as well ship something good.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
I've been thinking of you and I'm sorry for all the speed bumps. Thank you so much.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
What I'm about to say is not to diminish any of the trauma and tragedy. It's to say the following. Writer's block disappears as soon as you call it, I don't have any perfect writing. Of course you don't have any perfect writing. Can you show me your bad writing? Can you show me your bad paintings? Can you show me your bad songs? Can you go write 10 bad songs even if you don't feel like it?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Probably you can. Because it turns out writing bad songs or books or drawings... Isn't that hard? But if you start doing bad ones enough, a good one's going to slip through no matter how hard you try to keep it out. So there's no plumber's block. There's no walker's block. There's no talker's block.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
If you are physically lucky enough to be able to walk and talk, you're going to be able to walk and talk tomorrow. You don't get blocked. Well, the same thing is true with creativity. What's actually happening is people... wait to be assured that it is going to be well-received without criticism, that it's going to be a happy process, that it's going to work. No, you don't get any of those.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Reassurance is futile. It's not relevant. The real question is, where's your bad writing? Where's your not very good work? Show me that, and then talk to me about the fact that you're blocked.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Yeah. I mean, if they were honest with every kid who tried out for the basketball team in ninth grade, the honest thing to say is not one of you is going to be a professional basketball player. To a rounding error of one in a million, it's true, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
But they don't do that because we have persuaded people to buy into the cycle of that worked, that's going to work, that's going to work, everything's going to be fine. And the problem is when you get hooked on that cycle, you need it to go back to your work. The alternative is to realize, probably not going to work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And I'm going to do it anyway, because I'm doing it for 10 people, the smallest viable breakthrough. And even if I don't get those 10 people, I get a chance to do it again tomorrow. And that privilege that we have to not work in the iron mills, the privilege we have to just show up and say, here, I made this, should not be wasted while we wait for reassurance.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Well, I didn't for a long time. And it was wrecking me, really wrecking me. And then I was lucky enough to see that I was becoming attached to outcomes. And it undermines not just creativity, but salesmanship, our ability to get on stage and give a speech. So still to this day, if I'm on stage or in a Zoom room giving a talk and it doesn't look like it's working, my throat will tighten up.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
I'll talk faster. I'll work harder at it. None of which have ever worked. And it ends up making my work worse. On the other hand, if I say, you know what? These people are in the wrong room. And I'm only going to get to give this talk to this room one time. So why don't I just relax and give this talk the best way I know how?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Because the outcome is pretty much assured is not going to be what we all hoped for. But I'm here. And if I can relax into that is, that happened, it turns out it comes out better for them too. And That is how you save a gig, not by willing people with the force of your mind to get the joke, to like you, et cetera.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Every single time a stand-up comic, a musician, a leader of any kind tries to do that, reverse engineering it, it all falls apart.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Yeah. No, if you need to make a living, I don't think you should bring your most precious creative work to the table. I think that being a hack is a worthwhile endeavor. to say, I am here to extract from the audience cash in exchange for the value of my creating. They see value, they will pay me for it. I'm not showing up to be authentic. I'm not showing up to be transparent.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
I'm showing up to give them what they came for, and I'll get paid for it. There's nothing wrong with that. Just don't get confused when you're doing that, that you are also this authentic, in quotes, artist, in quotes, who is following their calling, in quotes. Because it's when you get confused that you become a diva and a prima donna.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
That showing up for people who need what you have is really valuable. And it makes our market economy work. But when you're going to push the envelope, you've got to realize that it is entirely possible that in that pushing, you won't have the home run that you're hoping for. Can't have it both ways.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Well, it's my 20th, but before that I was a book packager and I did 120 books. So you can count it any way you want.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
I am more excited about this book than I have been in a bit because it is resonating with people. I didn't write it to resonate with people, but I'm thrilled that it is. Now that the book is written, all of it is about me pleasing the audience, not about changing the book because I can't change the book. The nervous thing is interesting because the nervous thing is a form of fuel.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
What we know is that nobody gets nervous before they call their family down for dinner. But that same person might get nervous if they were on Top Chef or whatever show follows the pandemic, right? What's the difference? The difference is the story we tell ourselves about what's going to happen next. And if you find that that nervousness is useful fuel to get you to pay attention to...
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Activate your adrenaline, et cetera, et cetera. I say, go for it. If it's not useful fuel, we got to figure out how to tell ourselves a different story so that we get the fuel we want. So I used to get nervous before I pressed publish on my blog. And there were two reasons for that. One, as soon as I pressed it, it went live. And two, if you hit reply, it went to my inbox.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
So I knew that every single time I pressed publish, I was going to get between three and 10 angry emails from people who either didn't understand what I wrote or just wanted to clear something up. And so I was conditioning myself to dread, to be nervous about blogging. So the two changes I made were now I queue the blog post up. So it goes live at 4.15 in the morning while I'm asleep.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And two, the emails don't come to me. They go to an auto reply that say, I didn't read your email and I don't read them. And all of a sudden, all of a sudden blogging doesn't make me nervous anymore. And I didn't need the fuel of being nervous to blog. And I blog better because I'm being generous, not nervous.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Right. So what you're really asking for is reassurance, right? But you're really asking for- It goes back to reassurance again. If I do this and it works, I get the credit. And if it doesn't work, I get to blame you because you told me everything was going to be okay, right? That's not a fair deal. And what I'm saying is just because you're a creator doesn't mean you get to be selfish.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Just because you're a creator doesn't mean you get to be right. What it means is you get to be generous, right? So the question is, are you doing this with someone who is enrolled in your journey, going where they said they wanted to go in a generous way?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And that's why walking up to someone in the bus station and insulting them, not helpful, even if you're an insult comic, even if you're the next Don Rickles, even if you're practicing, not allowed because they're in the bus station. They're not in a comedy club and you're not doing it for them. You're doing it for you. And that distinction is key.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
So we all have permission to make things better for people around us who are on the same journey we're on. You don't need a new permission to do that. If you do something and it doesn't make things better, you need to apologize, learn from it, and do a new thing.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
But you don't get to insist that people do it your way just because you invented it, because the outcome doesn't come as part of the deal.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Right. Well, you use that word self-aware again. Aware of which self, right? The self that wants you to be in the straight lines, invisible, safe, is really, really good at coming up with stories to trick us. The other self, the self that's cowering but wants to come out, the flower, the genius inside of us, doesn't use words very well.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And so in the debate between the one who's good at words and the one that's not, the one who's good at words almost always wins. it's the one that can rationalize you eating a pint of ice cream before you go on a blind date, right? Because it's just trying to get the other part of your brain to be quiet.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And it knows that if you put enough fat and sugar in your system, it'll go into a coma at least for a little while. And so it comes up with this whole articulated thing. Well, I didn't eat breakfast, so I can eat this and it's vegan and it'll be fine. Wow, look at all those words we're good at using. And What I'm getting at is we can fuel that.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
We can feed that voice by arguing with it, by debating with it, by bringing up facts. Or we can say, oh, yeah, keep talking. Go ahead. I'm just not listening. Keep going on and on and on and on about outcomes. I'm not listening because outcomes aren't why I did this. I did this to be generous and you're not good at generous and you don't know how to talk like this about generous.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
So you just keep coming up with reasons why we're going to fail and why we don't have permission and why we need reassurance. Keep going. I'm not going to argue with you. I'm just going to make my work. I have a practice and I do my work regularly. I'm not waiting for the muse. I'm not waiting for a genie. I'm just going to do the work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
If we look at before the pandemic, how people went to the gym, the biggest month of the year for the gym is January. Lots of people joined. Most people quit in February. And by March, the people who are left are going to stick around for a while. Not because it's easier to go to the gym. but because it's normal to go to the gym because you start to identify as the person who goes to the gym.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
The same thing is true with the practice. When you say to somebody, I am a writer, that's different than saying I wrote something. How do you get to the point where you say I am a writer? The answer is you just keep writing things. If you keep writing things, sooner or later, you are a writer. So our mutual friend Brian is a magician. He doesn't do magic tricks. He's a magician.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
What's the difference? Because he shows up and he does it even when he doesn't feel like it. He practices his one-handed cuts even when he doesn't feel like it. He's a professional. He has a practice. That's the difference between him and someone who does magic tricks.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Right, because identity is a scary thing. Seeing ourselves in the mirror is a scary thing. Mirrors are a fairly recent invention and they freaked people out for a long time. And just look at how much we spend on dog food and hair products, right? Both of them are forms of mirrors. How will people think of me if they feed my dog cheap dog food? And what will people think of me if my hair is a mess?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And these are all about hiding that other voice and not coming out with what we are capable of doing. And so what I keep coming back to is there is a practice. If we acknowledge that there is a practice and that it is imperfect and that it doesn't bring us results, it is simply a practice and that we can simply do it. That is the best way to ship creative work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
That's right. Forgiveness is a key part of this. Also is defining what a great day is, right? If you go to the studio and make nothing of value, but you went to the studio and you did the practice, that might be just as great a day as the next day when you win a Pulitzer Prize. Because you wouldn't have done the Pulitzer Prize winning work if you hadn't done the work the day before.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Right. But the answer is not to forgive ourselves by watching Netflix, not to forgive ourselves by doom scrolling, not to forgive ourselves by getting caught in the media maelstrom. That's not a form of forgiveness. That's a form of hiding.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Exactly correct. And so one of the riffs in the book, I tell the story of a lifeguard. And if you're a lifeguard at 18 years old, there's no chance you're the best lifeguard in the world. None. But if someone is drowning six feet in front of you, You're the one who's going to save them. If you want to apologize for the kid for not being the best lifeguard in the world, feel free.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
But the kid's still alive because you're a lifeguard and you showed up and saved them. And there are people who need our creative work. Maybe it's not life or death, but they still need our smallest viable breakthrough. They still need our insight. They still need our creative work. You're probably not the most qualified person on earth to do it. So what? You're here. You're on duty.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
You're on the deck. There's someone drowning. Now what are you going to do? And that ability that we have in this privileged world we live in to connect to a billion people on earth, to find a way to make the culture better, I think it becomes an obligation.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Well, we run the marketing seminar, which is probably the most effective and biggest of its kind. And it's a hundred days of people wrestling with questions like that. We have to begin by acknowledging that your work's probably not that good and that maybe you're going to need to make it better. And number two is there's a difference between hustling and telling a true story.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Hustling people is unattractive. Nobody wants to be hustled. No one wakes up in the morning saying, I wish someone would hustle me today. If you need to hustle people, To get work, you need to find a new line of work because that's no way to live. The alternative is to tell a true story to the people who need to hear it.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And if you tell the right story to the right person on the right day and it's true, they're going to beg you to buy from you, not the other way around. That's how you know you've found the right smallest viable audience. It's how you know you're actually doing something of value and of service.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And if there's a two-foot snowstorm and your neighbor is 80 years old and you say, can I shovel your walk for $20? The neighbor doesn't say, oh, they're hustling me. The neighbor is really grateful. Because it was worth $100 to have their walk shoveled and they trust you. And that combination of trust and competence means you weren't hustling anybody.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
You were giving a gift because you did $100 worth of shoveling for 20 bucks. In order to do that, it's not about persuading yourself it's okay to hustle people. It's about being really smart about what you make and who you make it for and refusing to do work for anybody else. Because as soon as you take anything, then your model becomes you can pick anyone and I'm anyone.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And that's not a good motto.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Yeah, because better clients are the secret to all of this. Bad clients want cheap work that's deniable, cheap work that's a commodity, cheap work that's fast, cheap work that's good enough. And you can find bad clients really easily. Just go to Fiverr and be a dollar cheaper than anybody else, right? Yeah. If you want good clients, good clients want you to do better work.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Good clients push you to challenge the status quo. Good clients pay on time. Good clients aren't focused on how cheap it is. They're focused on how good it is. You're not going to persuade your bad clients to become good clients. They're not. There are lots of things that I buy, like rechargeable batteries for a phone. I'm a bad client. I want the cheapest one that works.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
I don't care that you made it out of sheepskin, right? I want a commodity. So you got to do the work that attracts good clients and you got to fire your bad clients so you have time to do the work that attracts good clients.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
And once the clients know that you're willing to fire bad clients, some of them will stop behaving so badly.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
But it puts us on the hook. And that's the third story in the book. Do you want to be on the hook? Most people in an industrial setting do not want to be on the hook because it's when you're on the hook that you get in trouble. But if you want to commit to the practice, it means please put me on the hook. I am promising you this. Let me build this for you. That's scary, right?
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Frank Lloyd Wright was on the hook. Frank Lloyd Wright didn't say, tell me what kind of house you want and I'll draw it. He said, this is the house I made. Do you want to buy it? Those are two totally different ways to be an architect.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
You can read some excerpts and stuff at seth.blog slash thepractice. And if you want to see our workshops, they're at akimbo.com. Mostly, I wrote the book for people to share it with other people, to start circles of support, to create community, a conspiracy of the practice. Because it's when we support each other in this work that we're able to do even better.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
So whether or not you buy my book doesn't matter. Whether you commit to the practice, that's my mission.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Thank you, Heather. Be well and hugs to everyone in your family.
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Seth Godin on The Practice: How to Inspire, Embrace, & Share Your True Voice
Writer's block disappears as soon as you call it, I don't have any perfect writing. Of course you don't have any perfect writing. Can you show me your bad writing? Can you show me your bad paintings? Can you show me your bad songs? Can you go write 10 bad songs even if you don't feel like it? Probably you can because it turns out writing bad songs or books or drawings isn't that hard.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
I have had more failures and lost more money doing this than most people, and I wouldn't trade it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Well, the first thing I would say is that group is probably not a group you are a part of. That one of the challenges of do what you know is the things you know tend to be popular consumer things, and those things are crowded. What you want to start with is people who have a problem, who know they have a problem, and who have money to solve that problem.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Sure. It's great to be here. I would say that YoYo Dine was my seventh company, not my first company. And One of the challenges that we have when we seek to lead and to show up is this sensation that we have to get it all right and have the big launch and everything's got to be smooth sailing after that. But that's almost never what actually happens.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So in my case, when I started the book packaging company, editors' only job is to acquire books. So it's not like I was hassling them. They were doing their job. They have a problem. They need a book tomorrow. They have money to spend to get one. Here I am. This is not true anymore. There aren't as many editors. They don't have as much money.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And there are more people pitching them than ever before. So that problem is solved. But it wasn't solved when I started. On the other hand, if you can find this group of people, you can try it out by having lunch with them, by being in the world that they are in. Before you open a bakery, work in a bakery.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
and figure out what happens when a customer walks into the store and how do they behave and what do they ask for and what are they looking at? Because that's really practical empathy. Not saying, I dreamed of everything you want and now I'm going to make sure that you like what I did. No. Look to see what people like. Look to see where they have a problem. Where are they waiting in line?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
What are they dreaming of, talking about? They're happy to tell you. And you can then say, well, the way they're trying to solve it might not be the best way. If I can solve their dreams in a different way, I can do that in my own unique way. And that's what Richard Saul Worman did when he started TED. And Chris Anderson multiplied it by a thousand.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And it also works in the nonprofit space to be able to say, I see the kind of donor that is looking for an effective way to make a donation. I see the kind of person that needs help. I can connect those people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Well, I think the words here matter. I think I leaped pretty much once, which is deciding that I'm at my best when I don't have a boss. And I don't reinvent myself very often at all. Instead, what we get is the chance to show up for different people doing the kind of craft that we are proud to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And outsiders could see that as a reinvention, but it's really stressful to completely reinvent how we see ourselves creating value. So I've had employees. I don't like having employees. So I tend to revert back to being a freelancer. I've worked in lots of different fields, but they all tend to involve media and and fairly low expenditures on behalf of people who have enough money to spend.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So I'm not alternating between running a payroll caching service and a restaurant because that would be reinvention. We only need to leap once, and then we need to iterate and iterate and iterate. And the iteration comes down to, well, who needs to hear from me? So Billy Joel played a certain kind of piano, but then he had enough resources to make classical music records.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
What usually happens is first we look in the mirror and see somebody who wants to build something. And that thing we build might be solo. That thing we build might be freelance and it might be entrepreneurial, something bigger than ourselves. So, you know, I think I started my first business in 74. I built businesses that sold ice cream sandwiches and posters.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And when he made classical music, he discovered that people in the classical music world didn't want to buy the story he wanted to tell. So he went back to doing something else. The cost of finding out is pretty low if you approach it with generosity, if you don't go all in, if you go in enough. And that is the secret to this longevity, which is to be able to say, how can I be of service?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Who can I be of service to? What do they need? And how can I bring assets to those people that they'll be glad I did?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Well, you know, it would have been very hard to build your company if you'd called it the iteration academy. So I totally understand that there's a desire to leap. But if you think about people who had 40-year careers, a lot of them start in the stock room. They start as the receptionist. They start as the messenger.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And maybe 40 years later, they're the senior vice president of international operations. So they've iterated too. The only difference is they got to keep the same parking space at work for a very long time. And what I believe is happening now is we need to shake off the indoctrination of people You need a particular boss who's going to give you tasks and switch it to you are your boss.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And if your boss isn't doing a good job, you need to make your boss do a better job. Because most of us have a lousy boss who wakes us up in the middle of the night telling us we're not doing a good job, who isn't kind to us, who gives us bad assignments, who has to stick with lousy clients. Get a better boss and that boss will help you build the portfolio you're talking about.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Well, if the world were fair, people would get fairly for the effort and risk they take. People wouldn't be judged by their appearance or their background. And we'd have this generative, resilient economy. None of those things are true.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So given that none of those things are true, what will help you be seen, treated with the dignity and respect you deserve, and earn the freedom that you're looking for? So this is back to the ideas in this strategy. The first one is, what do you own? What are the assets in your reputation, in your productivity, in your machinery, in your network that are worth paying for?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Because someone's not going to pay you because you want them to, they're going to pay you because they want to. So we get to build these assets. And if you are the most successful patent lawyer in the United States, you can charge $6,000 an hour. And it's not because you worked hard to do it. It's because someone who needs the best patent lawyer in the United States is happy to pay $6,000 for it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
When I was in college, Steve Dennis and I co-founded one of the largest student-run businesses in the world. Each one of them had value being created for people and none of them was a household name. And in 86, I started a book packaging company, got rejected 800 times in a row after selling my first book.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So then the second part is find customers who have a problem they want to solve and money to solve it. And this seems trivially obvious, right? But people miss this all the time, right? So if you want to make money selling bean to bar chocolate, don't sell it to seven-year-olds. Because seven-year-olds just don't have a lot of disposable income. And they also have lousy taste.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So they just want to buy something that's big and sweet. They don't want to buy the thing you made. On the other hand, people spend $100, $200 for a bottle of wine. Not everybody, not somebody who's drunk on the corner, but some people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So if you want to make money selling wine, probably you should find those people and sell them wine because it costs just as much to make a $200 bottle of wine as a $10 bottle of wine. If you're not going to make those choices at the beginning, you're probably going to be frustrated at the end, complaining that people are treating you like a cog. Here's what I would say to those people.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
How come you didn't hire a $10,000 wedding photographer for your wedding and instead just gave everyone an Instamatic or told them to use their phones, right? There are photographers who worked really hard, but you didn't hire one because when you're the customer, you're saying, well, it wasn't worth the money. Well, the same thing is going to be true on the other side.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
The most important expression I can share is famous to the family. That if you and I are going to play 20 questions back and forth, you're going to think of Abraham Lincoln or Ben Franklin or Marie Curie. The rules are you got to pick famous people. And if you can be a famous person who's respected, you're never going to have trouble making a living.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
But the number of famous people is really small. I am not a famous person and I'm glad of it. What you can be is famous to the family. And famous to the family means that if I'm with my real life family and we mentioned Ziggy Spock, we all know who he is. He's famous to us. You have no idea who Ziggy is, but we do. So the family needs to be the people you are hoping to be your customers.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Because when they think about who to hire or work with or to feel good about, that's you. So before Michael Ovitz tried to be a famous, famous person, Michael Ovitz was famous in Hollywood and just in Hollywood. So an actor or a director who heard that Michael Ovitz was on the phone would take the call, famous to the family. And what social media has done is confused us a lot.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Because we figure if we're obnoxious on some social media platform and people pay attention to us, that's a good thing. No, it's not. Because you're trying to be a celebrity and you're not going to succeed. And you've burned the trust that you were looking to gain with the people you need to be with. So in the case of my blog, I haven't tried to grow my blog traffic in 10 years.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And it was a slog of inventing things that people didn't want to buy or inventing things that they bought them, but it was tricky. And what I saw was a company called Prodigy coming along. And Prodigy and then AOL and CompuServe were the thing before the internet. And I'm a game designer from way back, and I designed a game that we ran on Prodigy, and it was extremely successful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And it goes down every year because Google doesn't like blogs anymore. And that's okay. Fine. Because I'm not trying to talk to strangers. trying to narrate for the people who already give me the benefit of the doubt. So what it means to earn this brand, as you're talking about it, is do people think that when you make a promise, you're going to keep it?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And if the answer is yes, then you have a brand.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
These are really tricky words. So let's be clear. Control implies you're controlling somebody else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
All you can do is do what you're going to do the way you do it. Which clients are you going to take? Which words are you going to use? What are you going to be associated with? When you show up, what do we expect from you? And this thing is not authentic. It's consistent. It's not what do you feel like? It's what did you already agree to be like?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
I don't think it's true anymore, but years ago, if you went to a McDonald's and ordered a milkshake and a Big Mac and ate half the Big Mac and drank half the milkshake and then put the Big Mac in the milkshake and brought it to the front counter and said, I need a refund, there's a Big Mac in my milkshake, they would give you your money back. And the reason is,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
It wasn't worth it to them to train 17-year-olds to discern between someone who was being a clown and someone who had an actual problem. It was simpler to just say, we're not going to be authentic here. We're just going to be consistent. If someone asks for their money back, give them their money back. Done.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Because the few times that we would have kicked someone out for a bad reason wouldn't have been worth it. So what we have to do is announce to ourselves, who are we willing to consistently be like even when we don't feel like it?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So there's strategy everywhere we look. And my friend Sean Eskenozy started the second bean-to-bar chocolate company in the United States. Bean-to-bar means you take a cacao pod, which is about the size of a, I don't know, big softball, and you do stuff to it and you make it into a chocolate bar. It tastes completely different than a Hershey bar and also has important socioeconomic implications.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
The people who grow chocolate around the world are some of the poorest people there are. A lot of child labor is involved. It's a terrible situation. Sean visits Tanzania, Ecuador, the Philippines every year. He pays his farmers five times the going wage and on and on and on.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So I was going to start a chocolate company years ago, and I would probably market it better than Sean markets his with his daughter, Lauren, but I wouldn't be a better person than Sean. So I was going to be stealing business from this guy who strategically is building something important. So I decided to invest a lot of my time to build an art project
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
The thing that I discovered, though, is that building software in the 80s or 90s, the 90s by then, was very expensive and difficult to do over and over again. And nobody knew who was going to win, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, whatever. But what they all had in common was email. And so we invented email marketing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
working with them, they made the chocolate, to make a collectible chocolate bar with a trading card inside and all sorts of cool writing on it that started to help explain to people what I even meant by strategy. But now I've got this piece of swag. And what I've found is many people would rather have a chocolate bar than a book. Because I've tested. I said, you want a chocolate bar or a book?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And almost everyone says, I'll take the chocolate bar. So the chocolate bar is a way for me to engage with people. And maybe as they're sitting there eating this special thing and reading this wrapper, they're like, oh, I'd like the book too, please. And I've started a conversation. And books exist, not so that we can chop down trees, but so we can have conversations.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So I'm actually in the business of making conversations happen, not in the business of selling books. And the chocolate bar was a great way to do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So Alana, I have had more failures and lost more money doing this than most people. And I wouldn't trade any of it. I don't want someone to say, oh no, you should stop doing that and start a web company instead. I have a lot of regrets about particularly the mistakes of omission, the things I didn't do, the people I could have found and seen and helped. But all of it adds up to where we are now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So the only thing I would say to myself at 20 or to the people who are listening to this is, it's going to be okay. And we can define okay as whatever happens. Whatever happens is exactly what happened. So now what are you going to do about it?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Thank you for the ruckus you make.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Thank you, Alana.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
I started my first business in 74, sold ice cream sandwiches and posters. I started a book packaging company, got rejected 800 times. It was a slog of inventing things that people didn't want to buy. The key learning from the 800 rejections is... I totally understand that there's a desire to leap.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And Yo-Yo Dine, which I ran out of my pocket from the book business, incrementally built up by finding clients who wanted to pay us for the next project and the next project until eventually... The web showed up and I thought the web made absolutely no sense. I thought the worldwide web was a scam and it wasn't going to work. That cost me, I don't know, $50 billion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
But eventually we grew to be the largest email marketer in the world. And then I sold the company to Yahoo in 1998.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
They usually stop at 20.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
In my book, This is Strategy, I talk about the key questions we need to ask ourselves. And they are, who's it for? What's it for? What is the change we're here to make? And if you're hassling people to change their mind, to like what you do, you're never going to get to where you want to go. And so the key learning from the 800 rejections is they weren't all the same.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
The rejections at the beginning were, you're a stranger around here. You don't know how we do things. That was it. We're not even going to look at the rest of it because you're not speaking the right language. And over time, over the months that followed, the rejections got more insightful. They were no longer was someone saying, who the hell are you?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
They were saying, oh, I see what you were doing here, but we need something more like that. And so I had to develop the empathy to sell book publishers what they wanted, not what I wanted. Once we got over the hump, we ended up doing 120 books, a book a month for 10 years. And we were a trusted partner. Who changed? We changed. The editors didn't change. The editors were the same.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
But we changed because we now had their voice in our heads. And so if you're busy hassling and hustling people and you keep getting no's and they're always no, then the world is telling you something. It's telling you you're being selfish. But if you are engaging with people and getting better at solving their problem and they're encouraging you,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
then those rejections aren't no, they're no for now. They are, let me tell you where I'm hoping to go, will you come with me letters? And those are the things we're looking for.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
If you're seeking to make something, you're trying to make a change happen. Because before your project got here, it wasn't here. And you want your project to succeed, which means you're going to have an impact on the world. A change is going to happen. Change is always going to be opposed by systems. Systems like things the way they are. That's why they are systems. That's why they stick around.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So we need to see systems. We need to realize that all the moves we make and that the system makes in return look a lot like a game. And if something doesn't work, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you made the wrong move. And empathy we just talked about. And the fourth one is time, which is that forest out the window where you're sitting right now didn't used to be a forest.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
But if you are picking a path that is crowded, that is easy to get on, and only has one or a few winners, you have made a bad strategic decision.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
It used to be a little tiny sapling next to another sapling and it grew over time. And so try to imagine if you had to write yourself a five years ago, a letter, and that letter was to thank the you of five years ago for something hard that you did that we're grateful for today, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
I'm really glad you decided to speak up to your parents and not go to dental school because five years later, my life is better. I'm glad we didn't have to go to dental school. That's a thank you note. All right. Well, The you of five years from now is going to send the you of today a thank you note as well. What are they going to say?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
What are you going to plant today that they're going to be glad five years from now that you put the effort into planting?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Change isn't important if you're happy with the way things are. That if the snow at the top of the mountain where you teach cross-country skiing is exactly perfect for the right number of days a year, don't change it. That's fine. You should dance with that. That's fantastic.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
But if you want to create value, if you want to make a profit, if you want to make a difference, you have to make change happen. And the thing about change, as we said, systems fight it and it always creates tension. The tension of this might not work. The tension of I'm not sure. The tension of this is new. The tension is who are you to do this?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And so what it means to make change is to willingly inflict tension on the system to help make it better.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
If you talk to professional poker players, they will explain to you that going all in is mostly for amateurs. That professional poker players win over time. They don't win all in. And the thing about passion, like authenticity, is for amateurs. In the sense that your friends are owed your authentic passion itself. But if you're a professional... You make a promise and you keep it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
The first one is...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And you don't keep it today, you keep it every day going forward. So you need to be able to operate doing work you are proud of, but you cannot possibly be on the hook to be passionate every single day. That's not something that's going to happen. So instead, what we seek is an arc we can be proud of that we will be passionate about now and then, but mostly we can be professional about.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
That we can say, this is going to be open from nine o'clock to five o'clock, whether I feel like it or not. I'm going to do heart surgery on you at three in the afternoon. The best it can be done, even if I just had a fight with my brother-in-law. That you're not looking for the red hot fire of somebody who's doing their hobby.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
We're looking for the reliable, branded promise of showing up the way you said you would.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Okay, so let's just talk through the dip. Now, far more than when I wrote it, there's a huge premium to go to the entity that wins, right? that if you type in best pizza in Cleveland, you're not gonna go to the fourth best pizza on Yelp, you're gonna go to the best pizza on Yelp. The idea that you can do very well coming in seventh place keeps fading away.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So what does it mean to be the best in the world? the best in the world at whatever world you define, for whatever customer you define, right? That if there are three gyms within driving distance of my house, the best in the world just means you're the best of those three gyms. Fine. What would it mean to be the best at that?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
And it turns out that if we're trying to make change happen, to get from here to best, there's a dip. And the dip is the hard part. The dip is the part where all your competitors are going to quit because it's too hard. The dip is the thing that feels overwhelming, unreasonable to get through. And when the dip shows up, most people quit. That's why it's called the dip.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
You should not be surprised if there is a dip because if it's worth doing, there's a dip. What you should do is when it shows up, welcome it and say, this is what I planned for. I planned for this extremely difficult slog because that's what's going to create value when I get to the other side. And if we see a platform like TikTok where anyone can be on it, because there's no dip really,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
There's this huge long tail and no one is particularly happy unless they win the lottery. What you'd prefer is to find something that's actually difficult so that when you get to the other side, you're glad you did. But as you pointed out, sometimes there isn't a dip. Sometimes it's just a dead end. You cannot smoke enough cigarettes to get through lung cancer. It's a dead end.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
There's no dip there. And lots of us have signed up for projects or entrepreneurial things or freelance careers that are dead ends, that we're pedaling faster and faster and faster and faster, but it is impossible to pedal our way out of it. And so you need to be smart about whether you're in a dip or a cul-de-sac, a dead end.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Well, if you are picking a path that is crowded, that is easy to get on, and only has one or a few winners, you have made a bad strategic decision. You have picked a shiny path, but not a good one. So there's this whole concept in our culture of a certain kind of Instagram influencer with their hat and their hair and their van, and they're promoting this skin cream or that skin cream.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
You know who I'm talking about. That is not a good project. That's a lottery. Someone's going to be a Kardashian, but it's not going to be you. Don't do that. What you can do instead is find an audience and a spot that isn't noisy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
So for example, a year and a half ago, when AI started showing up in conversation, there actually wasn't a newsletter that came out every few days that described in detail what was going on in AI. So there were all these people crowded wanting to have an argument about this or an argument about this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
But when Dan started Every, this newsletter, he only had 10 subscribers the first day and then 100 subscribers. And now it's a profitable, powerful narrator for this space that is almost impossible to defeat because he went in when there wasn't anybody. If we choose to connect people...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
or people and ideas that need and want to be connected that are currently disconnected, we can create lots of value. So no, you're probably not going to get 20 million followers on Instagram, but you know what you might be able to do? you might be able to organize the 20 patent lawyers in Cincinnati. Because if you are the organizer of the 20 patent lawyers in Cincinnati, you'll do fine.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Seth Godin: Turning 800 Rejections into a Roadmap for Success
Because they need to be organized. They need to be connected. They're disconnected now and they have money to spend to stay connected. So the hard work of strategy is to see where there is an actual problem and not just try to find a job without a boss, but to actually create value.