Transcript of Seth Godin Interview: Diary Of A CEO Podcast

And some of those things cannot be fixed by an individual. We can accept those as situations. You’re not going to change Uber. Uber is going to be the way Uber is going to be. And if you choose to be an Uber driver, the rules of Uber come with it.

But other things are things where we get to make a choice. And I’m not saying — I want to be really clear — I’m not saying anyone deserves an injustice, anyone deserves where they are right now. But given who you are, given where you are, what are the choices you do have? And how do we get out of the knot, the stuckness of wanting 2 things that we can’t have at the same time? Because it’s when we want 2 things at the same time that cannot coexist that we feel stuck. And that feeling of stuckness robs us from the chance to be of use. It robs us from the chance to get to that place that deep down we want to go.

So I use the word purpose. And what I mean by that is not you’re born with a purpose, because I don’t think you were, but you can choose with intent the purpose of whatever you’re going to do tomorrow. That purpose might be, “I need to get paid.” That purpose might be, “I need to get this date.” That purpose might be, “I need to put something on the internet that changes the lives of 1,000 people.”

When you say your purpose out loud — “The purpose of this work is so-and-so” — then I say back to you the very first question, which is the key. Who? Who is this for? Is it for everyone, or is it for 12 people or 1,000 people? What change are you here to make and for who?

And if we can’t figure out who the who is, then we feel like there’s just this amorphous, horrible, heavy blanket on us trapping us. But if you can find the 5 people you can solve a problem for or the 25 people who would miss you, it starts to work.

So let me give you a quick story to help you understand the analogy. You’re a stand-up comic. You’ve been working really hard. And your agent calls, “I got a great gig.” So you go and there’s 100 people there and you bomb. Not one laugh for 10 minutes. And then you leave the stage. Then you find out it’s a tour group from Italy and no one in the room speaks English. So who bombed?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Right?

SETH GODIN: It’s your agent who put you in the wrong room. There was nothing wrong with your jokes. It was a mismatch because the audience didn’t speak English. So you’re allowed to say, “It’s not for you.”

When we show up to try to engage with someone it’s not for, if we read the comments, if we read the reviews and someone gives a great book a 1-star review, all that 1-star review says is, “This book wasn’t for me.” That’s all they needed to write. Nothing else in the review is helpful because someone else thought it was a 5-star book. So the author has learned nothing.

So we pick who it’s for. What is our intent? This person I’m going to help, I’m going to trade with, I’m going to engage, I’m going to sell to or whatever. Who exactly? What do they believe? What do they want? What are they afraid of? If I can solve their problem, they’re going to want to engage and I can be of use. And then I can do it again. And then I can do it again.

Getting Unstuck: The Uber Driver Example

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is this a point about getting unstuck in your current situation? Is it come right back to who you want to serve, their persona, what their needs are, and then focusing on that? Because I’m thinking again about this Uber driver who feels somewhat powerless in their life. They think, “I’ve got to sell my time to make this much money, but I’m not satisfied and I’m not fulfilled.” So how does what you’ve just said sort of dovetail into that person’s life?

SETH GODIN: So people sometimes call me a marketer, and I had the luxury of starting my career right when television was dying. So before that, marketing meant big companies buying ads, interrupting people, hustling them, et cetera. And then it shifted. So I got to define marketing as anything I wanted. And I’ve defined marketing as telling a true story to the right people in a way that helps them get where they want, that they will tell their friends about. If you do those steps, you’re not doing any of the icky part. You’re being of service. And you don’t have to have a budget to do this.

We are all marketing. When you walk in in tatty jeans to a job interview at an investment bank, you’ve just marketed yourself by your clothing. There’s a signal that you chose to send and that they will receive or not receive.

So when we think about the agency, the freedom that each of us have, we have the freedom to decide who we’re going to show up for and what’s the story that’s built in. So back to this Uber driver. If you want to make a living driving a car and meeting interesting people, one thing you could do is give up all of your freedom to Uber and let them find you the passengers. But the other thing you could do is realize that there are 75 people who live in this suburb of your town who need to get somewhere reliably and safely and would be delighted to have you be their driver. And when you hand out the right cards to the right people, making it clear what you do and don’t do, and who you do it for and don’t do it for, getting to 15 regular customers is not out of reach.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As a private chauffeur?

SETH GODIN: Yeah. That path is a better use of his tomorrow than simply being ground out by some social media company or ridesharing service.

The Gordian Knot: A 2,500-Year-Old Lesson

STEVEN BARTLETT: Bringing it back to this rope thing over here, because I really want to just focus in on people who feel stuck right now, the essence of where I’m trying to go to in this conversation is I want to speak to people that currently feel stuck, but they know that they’re capable of more. They know that they could have another life, but they practically don’t understand, I guess, both the psychology, the systems, the mechanisms, and I guess what they can control in order to move from where they are to where they want to be.

There’s a rope here. And it serves as a somewhat interesting analogy for, I guess, being stuck and pulling on the wrong thing.

SETH GODIN: You sound like a magician.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, do you know the analogy? Because I don’t know.

SETH GODIN: Yes, I do. So 2,500 years ago, this guy named Alexander — he didn’t have a last name yet — showed up outside of a small village in Turkey. And there was a legend from King Midas. There was a wagon there and it was tied with a complicated knot. And the legend was whoever could untie this knot would become the ruler of huge parts of Europe.

And Alexander was 21 years old and he did not use a knife. He did not cut anything, but he looked at this knot that was tied to the wagon, and he did one thing that no one before him had ever done. He realized that there was a pole in the center of it that it was tied around, and he removed the pole, and then he could see by looking very carefully how the whole knot was held together, and he could untie it with no trouble whatsoever. And then he became Alexander the Great.

Because the secret, the simple secret was: we are stuck because we can’t see what’s holding us there. If what’s holding us there we cannot change, like gravity is holding us to Earth, gravity’s not a problem. Gravity’s a situation. Going to the moon doesn’t deny gravity. It works with the fact that it exists.

But we are working with problems, but we’re confused because we want 2 things. So can I show you what I mean?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

The “But” Trap: Naming What Holds You Back

SETH GODIN: Okay. So here’s an actual carrot, and here’s actual water. This is not actually a donkey, but let’s pretend this is a donkey. Okay? In Buridan’s philosophy experiment from a couple hundred years ago, the donkey is hungry and thirsty. He has complete freedom. He can move. And he’s halfway between a pile of carrots and a bucket of water. And he’s trapped. Because every time he moves toward the water, he’s moving away from the carrot. Can’t do that because he’s hungry. And every time he moves toward the carrot, he’s moving away from the water. Can’t do that because he’s thirsty. And so in the experiment, because we’re trapped, we end up dying of hunger and thirst.

And all of us do this, and we do it with one simple word, which is but. “I want this, but I also want that.” “I want to have a creative life, but I never want to get rejected.” “I want to run the marathon, but I don’t want to get tired.” And we hide the but. We don’t say the but out loud.

So my favorite story, which I talk about in the book, is Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock was the most famous painter in America in the 1940s, about 80 years ago. He was on the cover of Life magazine. He had 3 years where he could do no wrong. His paintings were snapped up. Everyone saw him as a little bit of a hero. It’s very unusual for an artist to be a hero in their own lifetime.

And his wife, Lee Krasner, later said that he felt like he had done everything he could do with this cycle of art. And what most people in that situation would have done is become a Jackson Pollock cover band, paint more versions of his old paintings, take the money — you won. He wanted to be a brilliant creator. He wanted to be on the frontier. So he stopped painting Jackson Pollock paintings. He went to his studio and came up with a whole new style. Different size canvas, different approach. It didn’t look like Jackson Pollock had done it. And he brought it to this big show and the world yawned. Not one piece sold. And to this day, if you go to a museum, you will probably not see a second cycle Jackson Pollock.

This led him to become even more of a substance abuser, which led to him dying in a tragic car crash that killed somebody else as well. Because Jackson Pollock wanted 2 things. He wanted to live on the frontier and be the creative artist on the cutting edge, but he also wanted to be the celebrity who could sell everything he made and was seen as a genius. He forgot how many years it took the first Jackson Pollock to accomplish that. And because the second Jackson Pollock didn’t hit, the but became really loud in his head.

You can’t have 2 of these things if they are diametrically opposed. We need to find where is the but. “I want this, but I want that.” It’s usually hiding as an and. But once we see it, once we say, “Oh, that is what is keeping me from giving the people I’m trying to serve what they need. That’s why I’m not getting where I need to go.” We can remove the pole, see the entanglements, see what we’re measuring wrong, forgive them, make a new decision, and the problem goes away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you can substitute and, you’re saying, instead of but.

SETH GODIN: The and is the thing that emphasizes it. “I want to be a creative person, and I’m eager to be rejected and not have people get the joke for a while and have to live in the back of my van because that’s what creative people do. That’s part of it. I get that.” “I want to be popular on social media, and that means I can’t be honest and authentic and consistent because I got to keep chasing X, Y, or Z.” And when we look at the people who consistently get big clicks, that’s what they’re doing. They’re not saying, “This is who I am.” They’re going to chase the next thing. If you’re not happy with that, please don’t do it. But the and amplifies the work; but undercuts it.

Balancing Family and Ambition

STEVEN BARTLETT: There are people listening right now that maybe they’ve got 3 kids under the age of 7. I’m thinking about my brother. He’s got 3 kids under the age of 7. And they also want to launch a company. And they might feel that there’s a tension between those 2 things because they, on one hand, want to be the best dad on earth, like my brother wants to be. But at the same time, they really want to launch that AI startup. Now, these 2 things are tugging at each other. What do they do?

SETH GODIN: Well, the first thing they did was really important. They named it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

SETH GODIN: Second thing — can’t do 2 things at the same time, but you can do many things over time. And what that means is he made a commitment to 3 small humans in this moment. He’s going to go to work, but he can’t go to work for 100 hours a week. So he needs to pick a project where the amount of time he has is enough time to do the project really well. He cannot start an OpenAI competitor. It is off the table. That is impossible because the thing he’s committed to cannot coexist with that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s hard to admit.

SETH GODIN: But it unlocks the door to what we can do. If he can figure out how to build an entity where he’s not hiding, where he’s actually showing up on the hook, to a group of people and say, “I know more about AI than you, and I’m going to use this tool to do X,” and they pay him for it — now, at the end of a 40-hour week, he appropriately goes and does the work of a dad. That’s a business that’s creating value for people that will make you more profit than OpenAI made last year.

So the point I’m making is media keeps showing up and saying, “What you’re supposed to do is be a Kardashian. What you’re supposed to do is be Sam Altman.” No, that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to make promises and keep them. For the smallest audience, that’s enough. You can’t maximize 2 things that use the same space.

Are Your Goals Truly Your Own?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think it’s possible to know if a motivation or a goal or a dream you have or an ambition you have is real or not? And when I say real, I mean — did I just inherit this from expectations from Instagram or from my family, or because my brother-in-law is rich and I want to compete? Is there a way to know if the goal I say I want is a real one?

SETH GODIN: Yeah, I love this. This is brilliant. This gets back to the idea of purpose. What is the change you seek to make with the next cycle of your effort? Not your purpose on Earth, but the purpose of the work you’re about to do. Are you trying to make Mark Zuckerberg happy? Are you trying to make an anonymous commenter happy? Are you trying to teach a troll a lesson? Because when you say that out loud, you realize that’s a ridiculous purpose. A trap.

If we can be clear — what’s in it for me? If I put this time in, what will I get in return? So my company has 75 people, let’s say. Should I grow to have 250 people? Well, what would be in it for me to be a CEO of 250 people instead of 75 people?

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re going to have a bigger headache. You’re going to have more money, theoretically.

SETH GODIN: Theoretically. But what you’re really going to earn is a different kind of status. You have to decide if that status — boss of more people, that status, what I get to say at the cocktail party, that status of what could happen after that — is worth the price you’re going to pay to do this or not. And so we keep making these choices about what is the purpose of this work.

Resistance: The Force That Keeps Us Stuck

And that leads to the key from Steve Pressfield, which is resistance. And resistance is any feeling we have that keeps us from doing generous, generative, creative work of any kind. So for example, writer’s block is resistance. You’re going out on a date and you change your outfit 6 times — resistance. It shows up in so many of the things we do.

And the systems around us indoctrinate us because they want us to be cogs in the system. They want us to say, “How do I get an A? How do I get permission to do X, Y, or Z? I’m not going to initiate anything.” So it’s easier for your brother to deal with the resistance in his head by saying, “I’m stuck,” than it is for him to say, “I changed the lives of 17 people this weekend.” Whereas if we kept drilling into what’s your purpose, I think he would say, “Yeah, changing the lives of people is more important to me than making Businessweek magazine happy because I built some company.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it useful to try and name the resistance in order to overcome it?

SETH GODIN: You can’t make resistance go away, ever. You can dance with it. You can invite it in for tea. You can name it. You can say, “The reason I’m hesitating to do this is resistance.” You can say, “I don’t feel like it. I got to go do this other thing instead. I don’t want to host a small party.” Resistance.

My friend Lisa moved across the country to be with her partner, all the way to Los Angeles, knew 3 people in the whole city. She says, “I don’t want to live a lonely life in Los Angeles. I’m going to have a potluck dinner every Friday. I’m going to start by inviting the 3 people I know. And every week you can come back if you bring a new person.” 50 weeks later, she has a network of 400 people, all good friends. Anyone could have done that. No one does. Resistance. “What if I invite someone and they say no? What if I invite someone and I don’t like them? What if I invite someone and they don’t like me?” Resistance, resistance, resistance.

Name the baggage, drop the baggage, do it. Once you can name the baggage, you can say, “This is why I am feeling stuck. If I can let go of this other thing, I can move toward the carrot because I can forgive the water.”

Why Some People Handle Resistance Better Than Others

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was sort of running through different people in my head that I know, again, trying to think about the personas of the people listening. And one of the things I realized is that everybody’s starting from a very different place here. Why is that? Why is it that some people are quite good at dealing with resistance? They can invite around strangers, and then other people are living in fear — they almost never take a risk.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. Well, a big part of it is privilege. It’s injustice. It’s living in a culture that never gives you the benefit of the doubt. But even if I look among a group of people who all have the same amount of privilege, there’s still somebody who is at the marketplace helping strangers find where they’re going.

I have a family friend who went to an Ivy League school. He wanted to be an actor. He went to apply to the improv troupe for auditions. They picked 10 people and he came in 11th. He called me up. He was very upset. I said, “Why don’t you start your own improv troupe? You don’t need any equipment. You don’t need a permit. You just need 4 people to do improv with.” And the irony — the reason I remember the story is they couldn’t do it. I mean, isn’t that what improv is? Start your own improv troupe.

So I run an online community called Purple.space. And on Purple, we’ve got thousands of people who are coaching each other. And it’s the opposite of a social network. There’s no scams. There’s no hustle. Nobody sells anything to anybody else. It’s just, “I’ll talk you through my knot, you talk me through yours. Let’s hold each other accountable.”

Well, someone needs to go first. Everyone wants to be invited to an engagement like that, but few people want to start one because you’re afraid of being rejected because it’s one step short of dying. So when we can name this and realize it’s actually not at all related to dying — this isn’t about hustling someone and getting in their face to sell them something. This is about offering to solve their problem as you solve your problem by naming the thing and figuring out where we can be of value.

Overcoming Resistance: The Smallest Possible Step

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that I’ve experienced as a podcaster is a lot of people come up to me in the street and they’ll tell me about the podcast idea that they’ve had for 4 years. And it’s quite a curious thing to observe because it appears on the surface that they are serious, but the very nature that they’ve been mulling it for a couple of years means that there’s probably some kind of resistance there. Correct.

SETH GODIN: Exactly. So for a couple years, my friend Alex DePalma and I ran the Podcasting Fellowship. Thousands of people went through this workshop to start a podcast. And the reason podcasts are such a great example is everyone knows what a podcast is, and the cost of starting a podcast is less than a dollar. So why don’t you have one, right?

Okay, so we start the cycle by asking, “Give me all the reasons you can’t have a podcast.” And one of the ones that comes up is, “Well, I don’t think I could get good guests.” And then we would say, “Okay, who would be the best guest you could ever get?” And amazingly, Michelle Obama’s name comes up. Michelle Obama’s not going to be on your podcast. But who would you need to have on your podcast as the guest before Michelle Obama that would lead her more likely to say yes? And who would be the guest before that and the guest before that? And let’s go all the way back to your next-door neighbor. Can you get your next-door neighbor to be a guest on your podcast? Yes. So go make that podcast and just play it for the 20 people who are in this circle.

And at that point, half the people can’t do it. There’s no technical reason why. It’s just too hard to say to your next-door neighbor, “Can I interview you for 20 minutes and then show it to somebody else?” Because resistance.

And so the hack I give people is start a blog under another name, under an assumed name. No one will know you wrote it. Do it for 100 days in a row. If you do that for 100 days in a row, I’m betting you’re going to want to put your real name on it. But if not, at least you understand there was nothing fatal about posting something in public for 100 days in a row with somebody else’s name on it. So that’s obviously not where the writer’s block is. It’s in resistance.

Two things at once. I want to do this. I want to be recognized, but I don’t want it to fail. I don’t want to be disrespected. I don’t want to lose status. And those 2 things keep us paralyzed, and the system likes it like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What you did there is you took the resistance and you tried to break it down into the smallest possible piece.

SETH GODIN: Correct. Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you took a big piece of resistance, which is, how do I get Michelle Obama on my podcast? You broke it down into, I need to go ask my next-door neighbor to come on my podcast. And then you broke it even smaller to, I’m going to start an anonymous blog.

SETH GODIN: Because when we call our own bluff, it’s very uncomfortable, but it’s better than someone else calling our bluff. And this gets back to my posture of, I can’t solve your problem, but maybe I can give you tools that can help you name your problem so that in a safe place you can talk to somebody about where is the resistance? Why am I in my head about this? What’s the smallest unit of value for the smallest possible audience that I could do that would make a difference for them.

Bob Lefsetz writes the most popular music blog in the world. Everybody in the music industry knows him. I promise you, when he started, he had 5 readers. My blog has a million readers. When I started, I had 5 readers. That’s the way they all start. That’s how your podcast started, 5 listeners.

Embarrassment as the Cost of Entry

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you broke it down there and you turned it into an anonymous blog, I guess what you were also doing is you were breaking down the embarrassment into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of embarrassment. But irrespective, there was still embarrassment. And I heard this phrase, “Embarrassment is the cost of entry.” Would you agree with the general idea that irrespective of what you do, you’re going to have to be embarrassed? You’re going to have to pay that as the fee of entry to almost anything outside of your current context and identity?

SETH GODIN: All right. So let’s talk about lifeguards and imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome was named by 2 social scientists about 70 years ago. Imposter syndrome is that feeling when you’re doing something important or new that you’re a little bit of a fake or a fraud and that someone else ought to be doing this instead of you.

So the story I tell is about being a lifeguard. In Canada, you have to get your bronze medallion to be a lifeguard. And imagine you’re on Canoe Lake on duty. There’s 6 lifeguards on the dock. And a kid starts drowning right in front of you. The first thing that might come to mind is, “I just barely got my bronze medallion, and that guy 2 docks down is a much better swimmer than me. Someone else should save him.” And then you realize, no, no, it’s right in front of you. This is your kid. You jump in the water. Do you apologize for your stroke? Do you say, “I’m really sorry I’m not getting there as fast?” You save the kid. That’s what lifeguards do. The kid is going to thank you and their parents are going to thank you. That’s the work of a lifeguard.

Lifeguards are able to overcome resistance because it’s such a vivid thing. Well, if someone’s going to send an email newsletter to someone who asked for it and that might help them get to where they’re going, where’s the embarrassment exactly?

And shame is this interesting emotion because we must receive it. It’s sent to us all the time, but you have to receive it for it to work. Now, I’m walking on 74th Street, not far from here, past this little pocket playground, and I hear a 4-year-old inside the playground taunting somebody else. And this kid is making fun of this guy, making fun of his clothes, making fun of the fact that he’s bald. And then I realized the kid’s taunting me because he just felt safe and he’s just yelling at bystanders.

The point was it instantly brought me back to 3rd grade. Instantly brought me back to what does it feel like to be bullied? But wait. First of all, you’re on the other side of a fence. I’m never going to see you again. You cannot put any shame on me. It bounces off of me.

And when we can get to useful work for a small audience of people, we’re allowed to say to someone who doesn’t get the joke, “Sorry, it’s not for you. I forgive you. I don’t have to accept your shame. I don’t have to accept the embarrassment you want to give me because I’m here for the right reason. And if it’s not for you, we both learned something.”

Mastering Shame in the Age of the Internet

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess because of the internet as well, embarrassment is everywhere and shame is everywhere. You start anything on the internet, there’s going to be some troll that tells you it’s terrible. Even when we started this podcast, still today we get a lot of people telling us it’s f*ing terrible.

But because it’s everywhere, one could almost argue that overcoming it is now a superpower because everybody that does anything is going to encounter it and you know how painful it is to deal with that. And you also know that most people won’t. The skill of mastering overcoming shame or embarrassment or critical feedback or whatever it might be, might be one of the most important skills in the modern world today when there’s so much negative feedback and so much shame or embarrassment or whatever. That’s what I was thinking of when you were saying it. It’s like, how do I get better at dealing with— well, let’s look at it slightly differently because I think that’s a great point.

SETH GODIN: Practical empathy says, “I don’t know what you know. I didn’t have the day you had. I don’t want what you want, and that’s okay.” And I can forgive that, and I don’t have to take it personally. I can simply take it seriously. And those are different things.

Here’s an interesting semi-business example. You’ve been to Shake Shack?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes.

The Shake Shack French Fry Lesson: Who Are You Really Serving?

SETH GODIN: My friend Danny Meyer started Shake Shack. It’s now a multibillion-dollar company. Shake Shack is based on his youth in St. Louis, Missouri. And he grew up with crinkle-cut French fries. Crinkle-cut French fries are the secret to a certain kind of fast food hamburger joint.

And fancy New York restaurant critics, Ed Levine, The New York Times, said, “What are you doing? You’re making this whole big deal out of everything is handmade and fresh. You’re serving frozen crinkle-cut French fries that we can buy in the freezer at the supermarket. You need to make real French fries.”

So Danny, his status is associated with the fanciest restaurants in the United States. And he and his team see this assault they’re getting on being embarrassed about the French fries, which are at the heart of their menu. So they spend millions of dollars over the course of a year researching potatoes, reconfiguring every single restaurant, putting in a different kind of fryer. Making fresh-cut French fries is a really big challenge. Also, fresh-cut French fries are a living thing, and in May, the potatoes are different than they are in November. So sometimes a fresh-cut French fry is the best French fry you ever had, and sometimes it’s limp and not very good.

And they switched to fresh-cut French fries because they wanted the status that came from New York cultural critics saying, “These guys are authentic. They’re the real deal.” And the French fries were no good. And the entire internet blew up and said, “What have you done to Shake Shack?” And the staff hated making them and it was a mess and you got to clean things differently. Nothing good came of this shift except making a couple people in New York City happy because that’s who they decided to listen to.

And one day, Danny looked at this and said, “What is the purpose of the French fries at Shake Shack? Do the French fries at Shake Shack exist to help a non-customer feel good about eating at a Danny Meyer restaurant? Or do the French fries at Shake Shack exist to further the story of what it is to come to Shake Shack?”

And they ripped everything out and they went back to the crinkle-cut fries and the world rejoiced. Profits went up, productivity went up, and they got back to what they were trying to do in the first place by forgiving and ignoring the people who needed to say, “You need fresh-cut French fries,” because that’s what they stood for. But it wasn’t what the business was for.

Knowing Who You’re Serving

STEVEN BARTLETT: This sounds like a business story, but actually, as you were saying it, I realized that it pertains to everybody’s life listening right now because we’re all serving a certain voice.

And then the other thing that came to mind is I’ve just hired someone called Ada Pema, who came from Amazon. She was leading products there, building AI products at AWS. She’s now our CITO, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at Steven.com, my holding company.

And one of the things she told me about Amazon is that they are just unbelievably obsessed with the customer. Every decision they make from a culture perspective is all about the customer. She even told me that Jeff Bezos in his meetings, and still in the Amazon meetings today, they put an extra chair in every meeting that is empty to represent the customer because they want the customer to be in every meeting. And she told me how that anchors all of the decisions they make from a product perspective, right back to the person they’re serving.

I guess it kills the donkey thing you told me, because they’re not having to choose between serving the merchants or the customer. They are serving the customer. Sometimes, she told me, at the merchant’s expense. But you have to be okay with that.

She said to me — and it stayed with me — because now I always think about, who’s the customer? Even when I do this podcast, you hear me talking about personas. I’m talking about Dave the taxi driver and Jenny the mum.

SETH GODIN: Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s who we’re serving here.

The Purpose Behind Every Decision

SETH GODIN: Yeah. And so I just need to put a small paperclip here. In the last 2 years, Amazon has lost their way about who they’re serving. And Amazon made billions and billions of dollars last year selling ads that make Amazon Search worse to people who want to interrupt what you’re looking for to put their thing up on top. That doesn’t serve the customer. That serves a different kind of shareholder.

But yes, the model of what Jeff built there — from the way they hold their meetings, which is absolutely fascinating, to what they chose to do about who it was for and who it wasn’t for — were consistent about saying, this is the problem we are here to solve. This is the purpose of this click. This is the purpose of this page. There’s no doubt about what it’s for.

And so the meeting thing, most people who are listening to this go to meetings. And many people who have white-collar jobs say the meetings are the worst part of their day. What is the meeting for? The typical meeting, if we’re going to be honest, is to make the boss feel like you are listening to them and let the boss take attendance because it could probably be a memo. And if you’re not sending a memo and you’re having a meeting, let’s be clear. Who’s this for? What’s it for? What is the purpose of what we just did here with 8 people just listening the whole time? Well, why didn’t you just send them a video that they could watch at double speed? Meetings are a symptom. They’re a symptom of whether the organization is entangled and stuck with unspoken rules about what we do around here. And we can see them everywhere we look.

Fear, Belonging, and Status

SETH GODIN: When in doubt, there are 3 things that drive people: fear, belonging or affiliation, and status. And we don’t really understand what they mean.

So first, fear. I call it the freedom from fear, which is different. Freedom from fear is, I don’t want to do things that are going to make me feel nervous. I don’t want to do things that I think I’m afraid of. That keeps people from doing a lot of things. That’s resistance.

Affiliation is you don’t wear a tuxedo to a funeral or a clown suit. No one’s going to do that, so you’re not going to do that. Fitting in. Who’s to my left? Who’s to my right? What’s everybody else doing?

And the third one, which is really misunderstood, is status. Status is simple. Who eats lunch first? When we get to the oasis, which animal gets the water first? Status isn’t money, but it could be related to money. Status is just who’s up and who’s down.

These 3 things keep dancing with each other about how people choose what kind of coat. Are they going to buy Patagonia or are they going to buy a cheaper knockoff? One of those things comes with a different kind of affiliation and status than another one. But if we can look for this, we can start to decode that quiet voice that’s been going on in our head.

Name it, right? I want to get this car. Why? Because it’s fast. No, you don’t need to go fast. I want to get this car because that kid at the high school lunch table who said I was never going to amount to something, he could never afford this car. And every time I get in this car, I’m going to be able to tell myself a story that I’m not that kid from the lunch table anymore. That’s why I want to get this car. Okay, now we’re clear about what problem you’re here to solve. Go for it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really?

SETH GODIN: Well, does it help you? Is that what you want to put your resources into? If that helps you, then it solved the problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think it is a worthy goal, a worthy reason?

High School Tracks and Emotional Needs

SETH GODIN: Well, it’s not for me to decide this, that high school leaves all sorts of tracks all over how we look at the world. My high school English teacher wrote in my yearbook, “You are the bane of my existence and you will never amount to anything.” And she was partially in jest, but remembering that as I become a professional writer is fascinating. I dedicated like my 9th book to her, and then I could let it go, right? And she and I had a wonderful lunch a couple years later.

The point is, we can’t deny that these things are in our lives. None of us are living this optimized, fully optimized life. The reason you’re going and taking those nutritional supplements, the reason you’re listening to this thing about some shortcut of bio-whatever, has nothing to do with you doing an actual analysis of all the best ways for you to be healthy. They have to do with feeling agency. They have to do with feeling a certain kind of affiliation with the crowd you’re in. That’s why we have cycles in medicine. It’s not because medicine goes in and out of actual science fashion. It’s because culture changes what we think is beautiful, changes what we think we need to do to get our emotional needs met.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I asked this as well because, yes, you can serve my parents’ expectations because they’re immigrants and they want me to be doctor, lawyer, scientist, whatever. Or I could serve my kids who want me to be a great dad, or I could serve my playground trauma who wants to get the kid back who said I was never going to be anything.

SETH GODIN: Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are any of these voices more worthy than the other? Is there a particular voice we should really orientate ourselves around? And the other thing I’ve really now sort of internalized is I’m going to have to say no to the other voices.

SETH GODIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I can’t try and serve them all or else I’ll be the donkey stuck in the middle of the water and the carrot.

Forgiving the Voices That Hold Us Back

SETH GODIN: I love this. I wish I’d put this in the book. This is exactly correct, that we’re going to have to forgive some of these voices. So there are 3 basic things that get us hung up.

There are time entanglements, which is today is not yesterday and today is not tomorrow. Today is right now. There are social community entanglements. What will this person think of me? What will that person think of me? And then there are the entanglements we have with our vision of ourselves. When I look in the mirror, if this works, what will I think of myself? If this doesn’t work, what will I think of myself?

And all 3 of them get in the way of announcing a purpose and then going to solve that problem. Because we say to ourselves, well, I want to work to help the poor, but I can’t get a job at a really fancy nonprofit. And if I get a job at a less fancy nonprofit, then what will my parents think?

All of that’s going on. We have to acknowledge that. We say, I went to law school for 3 years. I didn’t like it. I practiced law for 5 years. I hated it. Do I want to spend the next 40 years of my life being a lawyer? Because I’ve tried it fully out. We can’t quit because then we would have to explain to our former self, why did they pay this big price to get me this fancy gift and I’m ignoring it. Sunk costs keep us trapped.

And what we can do is realize that’s a gift from our former self. And like all gifts, you don’t have to accept it. If someone shows up and offers you a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig to take care of, you can say, no thank you. I don’t want to accept your gift. That law degree is a gift, but you don’t have to accept it now. Now that you know what you know, you can make a different decision about the purpose of your work. And if it’s not helping you achieve the purpose of your work, you can forgive it, say thank you very much, and untie the knot.

The Sunk Cost Trap

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think that point around sunk cost is an important one to really double-click on. Because when I learned about the idea of sunk cost, it completely changed me as an investor. It was actually my brother. My brother’s been working in investment banking for 15 years, now works in my company. And he explained to me one day early in my career, he goes, “Steven,” — it was a stock I had. I was an investor in a particular stock and the stock was doing terribly. The company was doing terribly, but I didn’t want to sell it because I’d invested at a higher price.

SETH GODIN: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then he sent me The Psychology of Money book and a few other papers and said, “This is what sunk cost bias is, and it’ll ruin your life if you don’t realize what it is.”

SETH GODIN: Yeah. And it’s in everything we do. So there’s the new parking apps that let you find a parking garage near where you’re going and pay in advance. So when I come into the city, sometimes I’ll do this. So I’ve got a $35 ticket to go park at this lot starting in 5 minutes. I’m driving in and I pass a free space on the street. Should I take it?

So the advantage of the free space, of course, is you can leave when you want to leave and you don’t have to engage and it saves you 5 or 10 minutes. But if I take the free space, I’m wasting the money I just paid for that parking garage. And it still goes off in my head. Then, well, yeah, obviously you take the free space because the money you paid is already gone. That ticket is a gift from your former self. Knowing what you know now, would you take this job? Knowing what you know now, would you take this parking space? And if the answer is yes, then you can forgive what got you here because serving the old you — the old you’s gone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Damn, I was thinking about relationships as well.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. Now, if you’re the kind of person that leaves a relationship every 3 weeks because you’re ignoring sunk costs, then you’re never going to have a relationship. Repeating the process has costs to you because it develops these patterns. That’s not the kind of sunk costs I’m talking about.

But yes, when you meet somebody who has decided to end a relationship, the healthy thing for them to do is to say, that relationship was then. I made all the right decisions based on who I was then, based on who they were then, but we are not those people anymore. So based on who we are now, do we want to recommit to this? Will it pay off in the future? And if the answer is no, it will not pay off in the future, you’ve already answered the question.

The Trap of Loss Aversion and the Power of Picking Yourself

STEVEN BARTLETT: It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman’s work on loss aversion. And I think this is an important thing to explain because when you realize what’s actually going on in your head and why people don’t like to lose things, you can spot it when it’s happening to you.

I read this study that showed if you lose £10 in the street, falls out my pocket, if I then find £10, it doesn’t make up for the £10 I just lost. I’d have to find £20 to feel the pleasure sufficient to the pain that I experienced from losing the £10. Humans don’t like to lose things.

And when I remember searching, what’s the evolutionary reason for this? And it came to say that once upon a time in our evolutionary past, again, this is a hypothesis, when we had a meal in front of us, going in pursuit of another meal that would risk the one we currently have was a terrible decision to make. So actually, we’re designed to be sufficiently satisfied with what we have versus the pursuit of surplus. So we want to protect what we currently have. That was a survival advantage.

SETH GODIN: No, absolutely. And we don’t have to look in evolution. We look at wild animals today. Wild animals are wild. They hate change. Change never helped a species move forward because it represents a threat. And what we built as humans is a culture where change is happening faster and faster and faster. By the time we’re done with this conversation, some AI company will have launched a new frontier model.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Boom.

SETH GODIN: And we can look at this and say, where can I go hide? How can I get back to being a wild animal that’s in this one place where nothing changes? Or we can decide to get back to the purpose of what are we trying to do right now, ignore the stuff that’s not relevant to it, seek out the stuff that helps us make the change we seek to make, and get back to work. So we need to decide where we’re going to put our attention, because our attention is something we can never get back.

Picking Yourself: The End of Gatekeepers

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talked as well about systems, the systems we’re held in place with. One of the things that I’ve seen in your work is this idea of picking yourself, because I guess we’re wired to believe that there are still gatekeepers, but those gatekeepers have increasingly vanished. I mean, the fact that I can start this podcast and people listen, I think, is evidence of the fact that you no longer need gatekeepers.

Do you know a funny story that I’ve never told? I went for an interview with LBC, which is a UK radio station, before I took this podcast seriously. I went there, I did my 2-hour audition, sat there in the chair, people pretended to phone in, it was just staff at LBC. And I left, I was quite nervous, et cetera. I thought I did a good job, but I was a little bit nervous, unsure about what they might say. And I never heard back. They never gave me feedback. They never told me if I was good or if I was bad.

So I started this podcast on YouTube in my kitchen because I never heard back from LBC. And it just goes to show, actually, you don’t need a massive company to give you permission to start a platform. You can just do things in this modern world. And this kind of dovetails into your idea of picking yourself.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. So let’s talk about systems first, and then we’ll come back to picking yourself.

People get a little glassy-eyed when you talk about systems. So let me try to make it really simple. For example, when you get in a car here, you drive on the right side of the road. When you get back to the UK, you drive on the left side of the road. Why? Because it’s way more efficient to drive on the same side of the road as everybody else. We have a system that says, if you’re going to drive in the United States, drive on the right side of the road.

Systems start to get a little bit more complicated. The college industrial complex is a system that starts in first grade that includes things like the SATs and the stickers and the football teams and the dorms, and it’s a 400-year-old system that we got into because it works. It works for most people most of the time. It’s an easy way to look at a resume, see one word, and decide if you want to interview somebody or not.

So the system that people my age grew up in is you would do as well as you could in high school and a college would pick you. And then you do as well as you could in college and then a company would pick you. And you do as well as you could at the company and then they would pick you and you get a promotion. And then you would die. And so we indoctrinated billions of people around the world, please wait to get picked. Here are all the rules. And if you follow all the rules, you might get picked. Turns out it was rigged. Some people got picked unfairly, but that’s what we got brainwashed. And we still teach our kids this.

And then all of a sudden, starting in the ’90s, we said, here’s a microphone, here’s a video camera, here’s a typewriter. Pick yourself. And now it’s extended to, here’s an AI. You can start a company by tomorrow. You could build a complicated website by Friday. Wait, I’m waiting for someone to tell me I should go do that. No one’s going to call. It’s $20 a month. You can probably get it for free at your library. What are you going to do?

And when we put ourselves on the hook, it’s super scary because does that mean I’m responsible for every kid on Canoe Lake who needs a lifeguard and I’m responsible for every kid who might suffer from river blindness, and I’m responsible for this. So it’s easier to say, I’m responsible for nobody. I’m a victim. But we have the chance to say, I pick myself to solve this problem. I’m on the hook to help these people. I’m going to use whatever tools I can to pick myself to make a thing better. Turns out that’s generative. If you get a little good at it, lots of people will ask you to do it again. When you give away credit, and take responsibility, lots of people will ask you to do it again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sometimes we tell ourselves that we’re waiting to be picked because it’s a nice excuse for resistance. We live in a permission-seeking state because it’s a good shield to avoid this thing you were talking about, which is the freedom from fear. Yeah.

SETH GODIN: I mean, the entire New York City book publishing industry is based on the author gets to say, well, they picked me to write the book. And then I got to go promote the book because I promised I would promote the book. The book isn’t there because I wanted the book to be there. They asked me to write this book.

And as soon as you can publish your own book, as soon as you can start your own YouTube channel, you don’t get to say, “Great news, YouTube called. They want me to start putting things on YouTube.” And that’s why the number of people you would think would go ahead and use this tool isn’t as big as it could be because, again, it’s one thing to ask a teenager to be on TikTok. They’re just entertaining themselves. They don’t see themselves as a TikToker. To see yourself as somebody — I picked myself. I am saying this and I’m responsible. That’s hard. No one taught us to do that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s kind of like the LBC thing. I was waiting for LBC to pick me.

SETH GODIN: I think once this podcast comes out, they’re going to call you and you’ve got a big decision to make because it’s steady, Steven. They’ll give you like health insurance, the whole thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I still love LBC, by the way. I still watch LBC. But I’m probably too busy now to do LBC.

How Do You Know If You’re Delusional?

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the sort of adjacent points here is, how do I know if I’m delusional? I always think this because a lot of the advice we give people around getting going and starting and pursuing the thing they want to pursue doesn’t necessarily always come with the nuance that actually, I can’t actually be an NBA player.

SETH GODIN: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But how do I know? Because all the advice is just go for it, pick yourself, et cetera. But—

SETH GODIN: Yeah. That’s not my advice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I might not have the talent.

SETH GODIN: I’m so glad you brought this up. That’s not my advice. You probably are delusional if you’re picking something that’s super fun, that involves skipping lots of intermediate steps, and it ends with a happy ending where you’re famous. The chances of winning that lottery are very, very low.

So people come to me and say, “I got this great book. Will you help me get a career as a novelist?” And the answer is super easy. Take your novel. It was really hard for you to write. I get that. Make it into a nicely formatted PDF. Costs you nothing. Email it to 20 people. If they send it to other people and it spreads, someone’s going to call you and hire you to write your next novel. If it doesn’t spread, write a better novel. But don’t start running around saying, “I’m a novelist and I deserve to get picked and have a big advance.”

The heartbreak of someone who is delusional is they insist that the world owes them because they worked so hard on X, Y, or Z, or that they have found some secret transcript that if anyone else understood it, everyone would realize. Well, if people don’t understand it, that’s on you. So we can get past the delusion by going for the smallest viable audience. What’s the smallest group of people that if I made a difference for them, it would be enough?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s interesting is I imagine if you said that to some people, they would really not like the answer.

SETH GODIN: People hate it when I say this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

SETH GODIN: Because it’s so comfortable to be stuck in that knot. “I’m a genius and I’m really hardworking, but no one in the world understands me.” So now my butt isn’t the problem because I don’t have to worry about any of the things that come with the responsibility of it being in front of the wrong people or whatever. It’s so much easier to say, “if only,” and, “I need to be home for this,” or, “this thing happened to me, therefore I’m stuck.”

We’re safe at some level in that frustration. And so what I’m trying to do with The Knot is help people understand. This is possible, but it is not easy. This is possible, but it will not give you the thing you are dreaming of. It will merely find a path to get to where it is possible to go. That’s a grown-up thing to have to commit to.

Traction, Gifts, and the Podcast Lottery

STEVEN BARTLETT: If someone’s not happy with the advice you just gave, I think it also illuminates that maybe their motives are wrong. It reminded me of when I started this podcast and I had these 2 friends, Oliver and Ash, come to me and say, “That was good. When’s the next one?” And I always say, if they hadn’t have said that to me, it probably wouldn’t have continued because I was busy with other things.

But those 2 people who I trusted and would tell me when something is terrible, and often do, saying that to me, it gave me so much energy and motivation. And I kept publishing in part for them because I knew Oliver had this 3.5-hour commute to work every day from Sheffield. And I loved the process. I was getting this feedback from this particular person that carried on going.

But a lot of the time, I think a lot of people would bounce off this advice of just send it to 20 people because they’re actually attached to the podium. And what you’re saying is, no, focus on the journey. But they want in their head somewhere, actually, no, f* the journey, Seth. I want to be famous and I want the million pounds. And that’s not what you’re offering them, but actually you are.

SETH GODIN: Well, someone’s going to win the lottery, Steven, and it’s probably not going to be you. And so in your case, we’re talking because you won the podcast lottery. There are 100 podcasts as good as this one out of a million. That’s pretty amazing, but there’s still 100 of them. So you show up to buy lottery tickets in a way that lets you buy more lottery tickets. You show up to add value for people so you can keep going. And then when there’s a lottery, you got a shot.

But along the way, the journey says, I have a chance to say, “Here, I made this.” “I made this” means it’s for you. It is a gift I’m giving you. If you don’t accept the gift, I can’t blame you. I just have to make a better gift. But if people start accepting your gifts, you have traction.

And Steve Blank talks about customer traction. As an investor, you know this. Customer traction is the single best indicator of whether a startup is going to succeed, more than any other metric. How many customers would miss you if you shut down tomorrow? And for a pizza place, 100 is enough.

Creating Tension and Moving Forward

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. They say that a lot in product development. They say, just make a thing for one person you know and make it for one person you know that really, really, really loves it. And it will turn out that there’ll be lots of people like that person you know.

SETH GODIN: Enough people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Enough people.

SETH GODIN: Maybe it’s not lots, but it’ll be enough. And so this cycle we’re talking about, isn’t self-focused. It’s empathic. You have to let the audience into your thinking or else you’re thinking about what’s in this for me and me alone. And that’s narcissistic. And that is where you see all the internet hustle going on. All the people who are trying to pressure folks into sending them $5 or multi-level marketing, all that stuff. That isn’t what’s possible. And it’s not what we should be spending our time on.

But when we can be of service for the right people, we have a chance to make things better. But I need to put a big aside here, which is where resistance kicks back in. The only way to launch something new is to create tension, not to relieve it, but to create tension, generous tension, the tension of you might be left behind. You won’t be in on the first cycle of it. I have this thing that’s going to help you and you don’t know what it is yet. That’s offered generously is the only way people create forward motion.

So Taylor Swift is having a concert, 15,000 people can fit in the arena. She just created tension for 40,000 people because they’re saying to their moms and dads, I got to go get tickets before everybody else. If she’s not willing to create the tension, she can’t go on tour. So yes, it’s awkward to create tension. It’s awkward to say, I’m doing this event. I hope there’s room for you, but it’s the only way we can cause other people to decide to move forward.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was stress testing that Taylor Swift analogy, and the way that I stress tested it was, well, what if Taylor did a gig and there was unlimited seats? People would still go, I guess, because the tension is that she’s so good, I might miss the experience. As you said, there’s FOMO itself is the tension.

SETH GODIN: There’s unlimited seats, but there’s not unlimited nights. It’s just tonight.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Okay.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. And that’s why live events create a different sort of tension. This video’s on the internet. You haven’t seen, I haven’t seen. And we’re not stressed about that because they’ll be there tomorrow. But the live event starts to change how we’re going to engage with it among that community.

Getting Unstuck: The Practice of Throwing

STEVEN BARTLETT: What else is sort of adjacent to this idea of getting unstuck? Because that’s really what we’re circling here. It’s like the things that keep you stuck and how to take sort of actionable steps outside of being stuck. Is there anything else we need to close off on here?

SETH GODIN: So you saw some of my juggling balls there. Juggling is fascinating because when you see someone on the street, if you’re a good person, if you see someone on the street juggling, you’re not rooting for them to drop a ball, right? That we want the juggler to be able to juggle. So when people say, I’m going to learn how to juggle, what happens is they throw one ball and they can catch it. They throw the other ball. But within 2 or 3 throws, one of the balls goes over here. So they lunge to catch it because juggling is about catching. So they lunge to catch it, but now they’re out of position and the next one’s going to hit the ground. And then people give up. People give up because they think juggling is about catching. It’s not. It’s about throwing. If you get good at throwing, the catches take care of themselves.

So the way I teach juggling is with one. Throw it, catch it. Throw it, catch it till you’re really bored. Then 2 balls. Throw, throw, catch, catch. This is not hard. But if you do throw, throw, catch, catch for 20 minutes, every ball is landing exactly where it’s supposed to. And now juggling is easy.

But what we are hooked on— and listen to any self-improvement podcast, it’s all about the catching, right? Does this help me lose weight? Does this help me find friends? Does this help me build my business? Those are all catches. Where’s the throwing? How are we going to get good at throwing? How are we going to get good at realizing even if no one reads this next short story, I’m going to get good at putting words on the page?

STEVEN BARTLETT: The process.

SETH GODIN: The process. The practice. If we can develop a practice, we’re no longer attached to the outcome because the outcome’s out of our control. The practice is under our control. Get good at throwing. Get good at seeing where problems lie, seeing where audiences are, seeing where you can be generous. When you get good at seeing those things, the catches take care of themselves.

The Power of Listening as a Competitive Advantage

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is not a narrative that people will love because we all want to get good at catching. Yeah. It weirdly, this is very, very adjacent and almost unlinked, but it’s somewhat linked. I sat here with Julian Treasure. He did 2 TED Talks, one about speaking, right? 40 million views. One about listening, 2 million views. And I thought it’s almost kind of similar to like the catching and the throwing.

And actually, when I sit here with spies, and I’ve interviewed some of the world’s leading spies, and I say, how is it that you’re able to get people to do whatever you want, that have just met you in foreign lands and hand over their secrets? They say, listening. It’s all about the listening. I go in the taxi and I listen to them for 8 weeks as they offload because no one listens. And it kind of got me thinking about this is like, no one focuses on the throwing. And actually that becomes the great competitive advantage.

SETH GODIN: Right, exactly. Yeah, the practice. I love the idea of world-famous spies because you would think that that’s sort of an oxymoron. I would imagine the world’s greatest spies, we have no idea who they are.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, they go on podcasts now, so they are like— But part of it links to one of the books you wrote, which is called The Dip. We’re talking about delusion here and how to know if you’re delusional or if you’re just going through the dip. So I’ve got some images here, but—

SETH GODIN: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does someone listening know if they should give up on something or if it’s just the inevitable rough patch that you go through when you start and you’re bad?

The Dip: When to Quit and When to Push Through

SETH GODIN: Okay. So The Dip describes something in the world that no one had talked about in the book before, which is the power of quitting. What is the dip? The dip is the hard part in between starting and getting good at it. The dip is organic chemistry on your way to being a doctor. And you got to get through it to get to the other side. The dip is the gym in March. If you want 6-pack abs, you can’t quit the gym in February, which you joined during the holidays. You’re going to have to get through the hard part. And so most of what we do that creates value has a dip in it.

And my argument is you should, A, see the dip before you start. You should say, if I’m going to drive this car across the Gobi Desert, I can’t whine when I can’t find a gas station. There are no gas stations in the Gobi Desert. There’s a dip to get across the desert. Pack what you need to get through the dip or don’t start.

And number 2, when the dip shows up, say thank you because it means you hit the hard part. It means this is the beginning of getting to the other side. Don’t complain about organic chemistry. You knew organic chemistry was coming. Organic chemistry is part of the process of becoming a doctor. As my friend Gabe says, it’s not an obstacle in the way, it’s something along the way. And it’s a signpost that you’re on the way.

So your question then is, should we quit? Has anyone ever made it through this dip before? If this is a dip like organic chemistry where every single doctor in the world has made it through, now you know. You know this is coming and you know if you make it through, you’re going to get to the other side.

On the other hand, no one that I know of has ever smoked their way through emphysema. That when emphysema shows up, it’s not a dip and continuing to smoke is not going to make you better. It’s what made you worse. It’s a cul-de-sac. It’s a trap.

And so what we look for when we’re talking to people about this journey, this delusion, problem we’re trying to solve is, what does it usually cost to get through a dip like this one? Do I have the resources to get through it or am I just throwing good time and good money after bad? But if you’ve got a business that’s losing money and losing money and losing money and losing money and there’s no evidence that putting more money into your thing is going to get you to the other side, that’s a cul-de-sac. Forgive yourself, the old self who started the wrong business. Thank you. Thank you for having the right insight, but it wasn’t correct for this world today. I forgive you. I’m going to go quit and do something else.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Keyword there you said is evidence.

SETH GODIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the evidence could be, as you say, small.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. So if we think about the business, if you had a retail shop or a restaurant, the ones that succeed, 95% of their profit goes to the landlord. And the ones that fail, 102% of their profit goes to the landlord. That’s the only difference between failing and not failing in one of those businesses. The landlord’s job is to take as much as they can of your profit, but not too much that you go out of business.

So someone’s got a 4-year lease. They’re 2 years into it. They’re not making rent. They’re losing money every single day. And they have a sunk cost, which is I got to pay for the next 2 years of this storefront whether or not I’m in here. But you can quit because you can forgive that 2 years you have to pay. You decided that 2 years ago. That’s not a new thing. That’s an old thing.

Are you really going to spend the next 2 years of your life punishing yourself because you made a decision a few years ago and signed a bad lease and built the wrong business on the wrong street in a system that doesn’t support you? Why? You can’t get those 2 years back. But we can take a deep breath and say, yeah, I’m going to leave this place empty and go build something really useful over here, and I’ll come out way ahead compared to defending that old decision.

“Never Quit” — Is That Really Good Advice?

STEVEN BARTLETT: But hang on a minute, Seth. When I went to the gym this morning, there was quotes written on the wall, and the quotes are like this one here. Can you read that out for me?

SETH GODIN: “If you quit once, it becomes a habit. Never quit.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a Michael Jordan quote.

The Right Kind of Quitting

SETH GODIN: Michael Jordan. Yes. I’m never going to have an argument with Michael Jordan, but he’s wrong. And it’s very clear that he’s wrong. He doesn’t play professional baseball anymore. He doesn’t play professional golf, nor does he play professional basketball anymore. Because humans age and he did a thing, but then he stopped doing the thing because it wasn’t productive anymore.

When we think about our fuel, he used, as an athlete, a couple things to fuel him. One thing he had was grievance. And if you listen to his Hall of Fame speech, it’s just a long list of chips he’s had on his shoulder for his whole career. That’s fuel based on who he was and how he grew up. That’s how he gets on the court. And the second one was never quit.

So if those 2 pieces of fuel help you become the greatest basketball player of your generation, I’m not going to argue with you. If that’s getting you where you need to go, it’s up to you. But for most people, it’s resistance and a trap. It’s shame. It’s getting stuck in a knot. It’s all of the buts, right? “I want to be a successful business person, but I can’t admit I was wrong.” I’ve shut down more businesses than most people who are listening to this. I’ve failed more times than most people who are listening to this. If I was still running the light bulb fundraising company I started in 1987, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s funny because there’s this weird paradox that’s so obvious to all of us, but still people believe this idea of never quitting. And the paradox that I’m pointing at is the minute someone starts something, a new company, a new job, a new relationship, we celebrate. But we also intuitively know that in order to start something like a new job or a new relationship, you have to do something before that, which is quit the other thing. Never quit, but we celebrate starting. Theoretically, then, we should celebrate the quitting just as much as we celebrate the starting because they are fundamentally interlinked.

SETH GODIN: Correct. But only quitting the right stuff. You don’t want to celebrate someone who quits the marathon at mile 25 because what they failed to do in their training was become the kind of runner that sees that the people who finish the marathon figure out where to put the tired. But that’s not the same as working for an abusive boss because your boss is never going to stop being abusive. And so you can say, “This can’t get better. And every day I come here and subject myself to this trauma is costing me. It’s reinforcing a system I don’t believe in, and I can get tomorrow back again.”

A Framework for Knowing When to Quit

STEVEN BARTLETT: What you’ve described there sounds a lot like something I wrote about in my last book, which was just a quitting framework for this exact situation people find themselves in. Because I know what people are saying that are listening. They’re all saying, “How do I know when to quit something?” So I made this framework, which I’ll throw up on the screen. And actually, the example I use is a marathon. This is the framework. You can see it for yourself. And I’ll just sort of give you the voiceover.

But if you look down the left side, I’m referring to a marathon there. And what I’m saying is when something is hard, that is not reason enough to quit. Like a marathon at mile 23, when you’re raising money for a charity that means a lot to you. When you should quit is when something — if you go down the right-hand side — is when something sucks, like you’ve said about the toxic boss, and critically, the effort it would take to change it is not worth the thing on the other side.

SETH GODIN: Exactly right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because that’s what people will say. They’ll say, “How do I know when to quit something? How do I know when to quit the job or to—”

SETH GODIN: Right. And you can question your judgment because if you have a history of quitting because in the short run it was tough, as opposed to looking at whether it was worth it, you can find a coach or peers who can challenge you on that.

So I was one of the leading makers of DVDs for book publishing companies back in the brief moment when they were doing this. I’d worked with Fisher-Price and we made a DVD for parents and stuff. And then this day shows up and it becomes very clear that book publishers aren’t going to do more of this. Because the internet’s here. They’re going to do less of this. So every day I would be defending what I had built as a DVD producer was completely wasted. So forgive yourself. I didn’t change the world. Somebody else changed the world, but it’s not going to get better. This is a cul-de-sac. It’s a dead end. Thanks for doing this. Let’s start something else.

Sunk Costs and the Courage to Change

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because there’s a lot of people right now that are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, that are in jobs that have not made them fulfilled for a decade. But they’re 20 years in, they’ve climbed the ladder, they’re director. They’re CEO.

SETH GODIN: Right. So they have sunk costs because they’ve earned the spot, but they also have a whole bunch of entanglements. “I want to have a job that fulfills me, but I also like this car and this house. I want to have a job that fulfills me, but I also like my neighbors thinking I’m this stable, respectable person. I want to have a job that fulfills me, but I have all this other stuff I have to pay for.”

All right. But if we look at those buts, we realize you just made the choice to stay in this job. So you don’t have to fret about it anymore. You’ve accepted that you made that choice. The alternative is move to a 2-bedroom flat, eat rice and beans, take a deep breath, reset all these things. And now you can get a different job that’s going to pay you half as much, because you gave up the buts. “A job that fulfills me will give me a better relationship with my family, will give me hope for the future, will give me a chance to make X, Y, or Z happen in the world.” That’s hard because you can’t have the buts. You got to let them go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In that scenario, okay, I have the car, I have the business card, which is impressive to people. I get invited to nice things, but I’m miserable. So what do I do? I’ve got a community I’ve built around this identity that is on this business card, but I’m miserable, Seth.

SETH GODIN: Right. So the magic of this process is if you announce through this that it’s a situation, that all these other things are so important to me that I cannot change my job, suddenly your job gets a lot better because you’re not bridling against it. You chose it.

And so if you talk to people, I gave a couple talks for people who are in the funeral industry, undertakers. Most of us would not sign up for that job as high school students at the career fair, right? But the people who stick with it, they’re not sitting there saying, “This is horrible. I hate being around dead people.” They’re saying, “All the stuff that I get in my life, this is part of it. It comes with it.” Just like getting tired in the marathon comes with it. “If I want to have this life where it’s stable, where I don’t have to move around, where I’m a member of the community, where the cash flow is assured, and I get to be an undertaker within that structure, how do I be the best undertaker I could possibly be?” As opposed to wishing that I would get a call from Michael Jordan who wants me to run his financial empire or something, because it’s not going to happen.

The Power of Feeling in Control

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re taking back control from the situation. You’re shifting from victimhood to control.

SETH GODIN: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s this remarkable couple of stats that I read about this idea of feeling like you have control and how it changes your outcomes in your life. The first stat is people who believe they’re in control of their life and have control over their happiness rate their overall life satisfaction at an average of 7.4 out of 10, compared to those that don’t feel like they have control over their situation, who rate their life satisfaction at 5.6.

SETH GODIN: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: People who report low overall happiness are 5 times more likely to feel like their own personal situation is entirely outside of their control. And this one was a landmark study they did in care homes. In a famous 1976 study, elderly residents given plant care and small daily choices that they could make were 50% less likely to die over an 18-month period compared to residents whose care was fully handled for them.

SETH GODIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Crazy. The power of feeling like you have control in your life.

SETH GODIN: Right. And also, I don’t know the stats, but when they give people in hospice control over their painkillers, as opposed to them having to wait for someone to give them a painkiller, they don’t necessarily take more painkillers. It was knowing they can do it.

Same thing back to the meetings thing. If you have a job where you’re going to meetings all day where you just have to sit like this, you’ve lost control over your day. And I’m not here to say there’s no cost to switching. There’s huge cost to switching. That’s why you chose not to switch until now. But let’s name it.

Let’s say gravity is fascinating because it’s here. But if I was on a planet that didn’t have gravity or had low gravity, I would miss this gravity because I’ve built my whole life around gravity being this consistent thing. “I get to live on a planet with gravity. I get to be the kind of organism that’s going to die before he’s 100.” If you look at the world that way, that that’s inevitable and I get to inhabit each day the best I can, you’re going to have a different life than if you’re spending all your time trying to figure out how to live forever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’d never heard that painkiller study before, but as you were speaking, I just pulled it up and it says it’s one of the most famous real-world demonstrations of how the perception of control alters your physical and psychological experience. When hospital patients are given a button to self-administer pain medication, 2 incredible things happen. Number one is they consume equal or less painkillers. Number 2, they report lower pain levels and higher satisfaction.

The physical pain itself doesn’t magically change, but the stress of helplessness amplifies pain. The stress of helplessness. It goes right back to what we’re saying about the knot in your new book, which is a lot of us are living with the stress of helplessness, but sometimes, not always, but sometimes that helplessness is in part a story?

SETH GODIN: I would say it’s always a story because we can look at someone who is in human bondage, we can look at someone who’s been through trauma, and we are projecting what we would feel in that situation. There are all these unfair situations around there, but then the question is, what is our narrative? What is our narrative of how are we living this day? What do we actually have control over? And what situations are we choosing to stick with?

Because most of us have the freedom to shift, right? And so it’s a story we tell ourselves that might not change the outside world in the short run. But what it does is it gives us this feeling of agency, which then gives us a sense of responsibility, which then amplifies into choice. And my whole career is about how can I help people do better?

Do What You Love, or Love What You Do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I wanted to throw another quote at you here. This one is about meaningful work. So if you could read that as well.

SETH GODIN: From Warren Buffett: “In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard that a million times. Do what you love.

SETH GODIN: Yeah, it’s backwards. Sorry, Warren. The people who are the most successful love what they do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the difference?

SETH GODIN: Well, doing what you love means there’s an amusement park out there that has all the treats I love and all the best prizes. Of course I love it. The other is a choice. I chose to do this work because I love it.

There was a guy who worked at the Dean & DeLuca Cafe in Midtown, and he was developmentally challenged, and he was probably 50 years old. He was the mayor of this Dean & DeLuca. He was the guy who cleared the tables and kept the thing straight. He loved this job. You and I would’ve lasted 15 minutes in this job. He loved this job because he decided to love this job.

The Reverend King had a great quote about street sweepers. And he said, “If you have to be a street sweeper, at least choose to be the best street sweeper in that situation under these conditions that it’s possible to be.” And the reason is not because you want to help the street sweeping company, it’s because your day’s going to go better if you do that.

Perfectionism, Authenticity, and the Promise of Consistency

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking he also meant potentially, although I guess he didn’t clarify, but the way that I perceived it was that if I become the best street sweeper, not to say that’s not an important job, it increases my possibility of becoming something else as well, of being promoted, being, dare I say, picked to be something else, or to start my own street sweeping business, or to, I’m going to build a great relationship with my customers who might be—

SETH GODIN: Yeah. And I think they rhyme and dance with each other. They don’t contradict each other. And so all of us have had a job where we thought it was a good job and someone doing the same job down the aisle hated it, or vice versa. So clearly it’s not the job. It’s where did we come from? What are we afraid of? What do we believe? Where are we going? That creates the story that opens the door for possibility.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I guess some of these other quotes link to it then. I mean, they kind of all say the same thing, but let’s do this one. This is a famous Mark Twain quote that probably everybody’s heard.

SETH GODIN: If you get a chance, talk to your favorite AI about Mark Twain quotes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re mostly fake.

SETH GODIN: It’s a great conversation. “The 2 most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard that a lot as well.

SETH GODIN: And my small shift is not the day you find out why, it’s the day you decide why. Because this isn’t something you’re born with. This is something you choose. And if you make the decision, like my friend Jacqueline, to say, there are 400 million people on this earth who are making $3 or $4 a day. I’m going to devote a generation of my life to helping them. You can go do that.

And most people don’t have the head start. Most people aren’t starting at mile 20 of the marathon. Some people are starting behind others, but we still get to decide based on who we are, what we know, what we’ve got access to, which problems are we going to solve and who’s going to benefit from us solving those problems.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That is what I think Twain was trying. And my last one, this one from a very famous guy whose device I’m using right now.

SETH GODIN: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Bingo. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who is that?

SETH GODIN: That’s Steve Jobs. And I think the keep looking part might mean look inside. Don’t look over there. Why is it that you don’t love what you do right now? Let’s unknot that first. Is it because you’re being disrespected? Is it because the external narrative of what’s happening is undermining who you hope to be? If we can get clear about that, finding the next thing gets way easier. You’re not giving in to this lottery of hoping you get picked by the next right boss. You can go hire a boss. And when you hire the right boss, your job is transformed.

Perfectionism as a Trap

STEVEN BARTLETT: At the heart of a lot of this is this word perfectionism. That’s a big knot. When I was thinking about the young lady that came up to me in the Apple Store the other day and told me that she’s been thinking about her podcast for 2 years and she’s been working on it for 2 years, but it’s never been published yet. What I heard there is perfectionism, maybe as a form of procrastination.

SETH GODIN: Perfectionism is a trap every time. Perfectionism has nothing to do with quality. So the word quality has a very specific meaning. It doesn’t mean luxury. It means meets spec. So the quality of a 1998 Toyota Celica was higher than the quality of a Rolls-Royce in 1998 because the pieces fit together better. They met spec. It wasn’t all over the place. If you’re not happy with the quality, make the spec better.

But perfectionism says perfect feels like an honorable thing to pursue, but perfect is unachievable. So if I announce I’m a perfectionist, I’m hiding. Because what I’ve just announced is I’m never going to need to ship this because it’s never going to be perfect.

Authenticity vs. Consistency

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the other words that I think does tie people in knots as well is this word authenticity. Because authenticity is a terrifying concept when you really think about it. What do you think of this idea?

SETH GODIN: Crap, and authenticity is for amateurs. Your friends need you to be authentic. Your family wants you to be authentic. Nobody else. Professionals are not authentic. Professionals are consistent. Professionals make a promise and they keep it.

So if you’re having knee surgery, you don’t want the doctor to authentically be in a bad mood and screw up. You want them to be the best version of themselves, even if they don’t feel like it. And Keanu Reeves — he’s not authentically Neo. He’s an actor. He’s pretending to be Neo. If he was playing Keanu Reeves in the movie, it wouldn’t be any good.

On social media, if you’re going to show up and show up and show up, unless you’re a diva, then we’re watching you self-destruct. That’s what we’re paying for. Like Amy Winehouse or something. Everybody else, we want them to be consistent. And consistent means you made a choice about the promise you’re going to make, and you keep the promise over and over again.

So when I’m writing my blog, I am playing the role of Seth Godin the blogger. It is not authentically how I felt in that moment. It’s my best version of what I think Seth Godin the blogger would say today. And we’ve spent time together. I like you a lot, but I don’t know you. And that’s for your friends and your partners.

So authenticity as a buzzword is a version of resistance. It’s one more way to hide. We say, oh, I was just being authentic. No, you were just being a jerk, and that’s why I rejected you because you chose to be a jerk, not because you were authentic. We say, I can’t write the next novel because it wouldn’t authentically be who I am. Well, yeah, but the people you’re writing the novel for don’t know you. They just want to read the next Perry Mason level. Write that or else get out of this circle we’re in, because that’s what they came for.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In some way, these 2 things are somewhat interlinked. I was thinking, as a podcaster, I know that I’m going to have to do — if I want to accomplish my goals and continue to have this life, I’m going to have to do thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of episodes. And one of the ways that I’m going to be able to do that is by being as authentic as I possibly can, because I find it to be very exhausting to be inauthentic in that way.

One very practical way that I mean that is when I look at my guest booking request list that my team sends me, I go down there and I look at all the people. I go, oh my God, okay, so that person’s got 100 million followers and they’re a super famous person. I’ve never watched their movies. I have no idea who they are because I don’t really watch many movies. But I guess I could be authentic and pretend to care about that thing. But then this principle comes into my mind, which is, well, then I wouldn’t be able to do this for a long time. I wouldn’t be able to be consistent if I didn’t make those, dare I say, authentic decisions. For me to sit here and try and be someone else in those hours and hours and hours times by 10,000 episodes, I wouldn’t be able to be consistent.

SETH GODIN: Thank you for calling this out. What you just said doesn’t contradict what I said. It’s really important we highlight this. You should not sign up for something where you cannot happily be consistent. And so let’s think about a teacher. The teacher knows everything they’re teaching. The students know nothing they’re teaching. So the empathic solution is not to authentically talk about whatever’s interesting to you. It’s to create the conditions for you to teach people so that they can start to get closer to where you are.

That’s a commitment, not an authenticity thing. It’s what kind of taste am I going to bring so I can consistently make a promise and keep it? That needs to rhyme with what you would do if it was your hobby, but it shouldn’t be your hobby. When you turn your hobby into a business, you ruin both of them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do I conclude then that it’s this sort of dance between me and my authentic self and the thing that I can do to be consistent at this goal? Is it a dance?

SETH GODIN: It’s a dance because people who are happy find consistency that rhymes with their overall authentic self. And their overall authentic self, it turns out, changes over time based on the promises they made. So if you hang out with people on Wall Street, even if they weren’t loud and short-cycle kinds of people when they got the job, they authentically became like that because that’s who they were surrounded by, affiliation, status. We change. We’re not who we were. And so we get to pick this arc.

It cost me a lot coming out of business school to be an underemployed entrepreneur in the creative business, not joining Apple or Activision or something like that. So for years, I was behind on the status ladder of my peers. That’s an investment on the long arc of authentically becoming the kind of person I wanted to be all day. But I said to myself, if I have to make a promise to an engineering company that I’m going to be Dilbert all day, every day, I’m going to die a little bit inside until it’s over. And I don’t want to do that.

AI: The Biggest Change Since Electricity

STEVEN BARTLETT: All industries are changing. AI, what are your thoughts on this crazy new technology that has come down from Mars?

SETH GODIN: So my background here is when I was at Stanford in 1983, I took a PhD course with Doug Lenat, who was one of the fathers of AI. I worked with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke in my first real job. So I’d been a science fiction person thinking about AI my whole life. And so when it finally showed up, I was like, yes, it’s finally here. And I’d been writing about it for a while. I did some AI-related products.

Here’s my 2 big ideas. Number one, this is the biggest change in our world since electricity. And number 2, either you work for AI or AI works for you.

And what do I mean by those 2 things? There were companies and workers in 1890 who said, eh, I’ll wait for electricity to go away. I’m just going to keep being a blacksmith or whatever it is. That did not work out very well. This is like that, but much, much faster.

And then the AI thing is, if you work for an AI, it’s not going to treat you very well. It’s not going to be secure, and it’s not going to make you happy because bosses are going to keep pushing the AI to do all the good parts and you to be a gig worker for all the parts that the AI can’t do yet. But if you can say, I use AI to connect humans, I use AI to build a network of people, we don’t know how to replace networks of people, and AI is never going to be able to replace networks of people. If you are trusted and connecting and leading using whatever AI tools you want, you’re never going to have trouble making a living.

And so that’s what you say, okay, if I have these tools, how do I use them not to be a junior, smaller version of OpenAI, but use them the same way that the movie theater used electricity, right? That the electric company brought electricity to lots of businesses, but it took a movie theater to figure out how to get you to pay $5 to see the movie.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You used the word people and humans within that answer, and it made me sort of think that actually maybe the great opportunity in a world of artificial intelligence is not to try and be the world’s best accountant, because maybe the intelligence is going to be great at that, but all the human stuff.

SETH GODIN: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: All the human and the people stuff.

SETH GODIN: Yes, exactly right. Good taste, understanding who trusts you and why. There are very few jobs where if I can write down what you do all day, I can’t find an AI to do it faster and cheaper than you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting.

SETH GODIN: So you want a job where I can’t write down what you do all day, and then you’ll be fine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What the quiet quit is.

AI, Human Connection, and the Value of Meaningful Work

SETH GODIN: Well, if you think about what does a bookkeeper do, I can write down all the rules of bookkeeping and hire a different bookkeeper tomorrow, and my business isn’t going to— That’s something AI is going to get really good at really fast because once we can write down rules, AI knows how to follow them.

On the other hand, somebody— the way you were talking about your good taste about who the next guest should be— you can’t write down the algorithm for how to do that. Your awareness of the world you’re in, the fact that you have read so many books, met so many people, talked to so many listeners. I can’t write all that down with instructions to get Claude to do that for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking about my fiancée, actually. She runs a business called Bali Breathwork. And what she does is she takes women away on these retreats for 7 days. And I see the sort of feedback and the testimonials and the videos that these women send, and they love it. I always say to her, don’t worry about AI.

SETH GODIN: Most of what they got out of it is each other. And when we let the computer networks take over, it keeps pushing us away from each other. It pretends we’re connecting on social media, but people are more lonely than ever before. But when we figure out how to connect human to human, we create value.

And ultimately, if you want to make a living, you’re going to have to create value. And the bosses that are right now cost reducing as fast as they can have no imagination. They’re saying, oh, this is cheap, super offshore labor. It’s called a computer. I can get rid of 400 customer service reps. They’re racing to the bottom.

Some people are racing to the top. How can I make this more human? How can I make it so that now that I’ve augmented doctors with these AI tools, they’re going to spend more time per patient, not less time per patient? Because we know that patients that have doctors who spend more time with them are more satisfied. So that’s a business advantage because now someone can either stay home, talk to Dr. Google, and figure out what’s wrong with them and never go to the doctor, or they can go to a doctor that’s worth paying for because that doctor has an AI working for them.

The Knot: Purpose, Agency, and Dame Whina Cooper

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s very true. Is there anything else in The Knot that we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about? Obviously, I want everyone to go and buy the book. I love what you did on here. I think this is probably worth just spending a second on. But do you know when you see an idea and you just wish it was yours? This is one such example.

SETH GODIN: Yeah, that’s the names of all the people who pre-ordered the book from my site. And then I used a gray tone. So if you look at it from a distance just right, it says the word purpose, as in what is the project you’re trying to do.

Let me close with the story of Dame Whina Cooper, because a lot of times we talk about the personal thing, what should this Uber driver do? But then there are other times we talk about systemic injustice. Are we all victims?

Dame Cooper was an indigenous person growing up in New Zealand, and New Zealand was the last major country to be colonized by the United— And so huge amounts of Native lands were taken and the Indigenous people were disenfranchised in a lot of ways. It’s really tragic when you think about it.

And Dame Cooper, at the age of 78 or so, decided that she would use her status and affiliation within the tribe she was part of to capture the attention of the entire nation. And try to put Indigenous peoples’ rights on the agenda. So you look at this and say, here’s this woman. She’s not famous. She doesn’t have a lot of money. She’s almost 80 years old. What could she possibly do?

This is a problem or it’s a situation. If it’s a situation, what are we going to do? Just live with it? But if it’s a problem, let’s figure out where are the pieces to make progress happen.

She organizes 50 people. Most of us could organize 50 people. And they start marching to the capital. And they do the work to spread the news in advance. And day after day after day for more than a month, this group of people is walking to the capital. She’s on the front page of every newspaper in New Zealand by halfway through. Now there’s 100 people, 200 people, 2,000 people. By the time they get to the capital, there are 4,000 people patiently marching side by side.

And they presented their demands, requirements, suggestions to the parliament. And too late, not enough, but in a very big way, it shifted the culture of the entire country, changed the laws about how land was allocated, and made a really fundamental difference.

She didn’t do that by herself, but she understood she had enough agency to connect the others, to create a culture, to show up and show up and show up with a practice. So if one 80-year-old woman can change an entire country, what can we do? We can’t drive to London or Washington, DC and change everything. But what we can do is find the others, come up with a story we can tell ourselves and the others, and establish a new normal. The only way the world has ever changed is when a few people come together, build a culture, and repeat it over and over and over again.

Creating Urgency: The Power of Regret

STEVEN BARTLETT: For some reason, when you talked about that, and it was a very motivating thing to hear, the subject of death came into my mind because, again, I’ve dropped into the world of the listener right now. And I guess I ask myself, how do you create that tension to do it today and not tomorrow? Because there’s never going to be a perfect time. Tomorrow’s going to be imperfect. Next week’s going to be imperfect. So when faced with lots of imperfect options, how do you create enough tension to get whoever’s listening right now to go do it?

SETH GODIN: When the person you’re dreaming of becoming meets the person you become, how’s that meeting going to go? How do you become the person your future self thanks you for? Because most of us have regret. I wish I had done something when I was 20 or 30 or 40. Well, that regret’s a powerful fuel.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said this to me before we started recording about regret. And you said that it’s actually not about what you want to accomplish. I think you said it’s actually about some of the things that you wish you had done.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. So when I think about my mistakes— and I’ve had so many mistakes— the mistakes I regret the most are the things I didn’t do, not the things I tried that failed. The person I didn’t help, the lesson I didn’t teach, the door I didn’t open. Because it’s easy to ignore those things and just move on, but that’s our power, our leverage, our agency, is to be able to say, there’s a thing I could do. There’s someone on that street corner who needs—

How do we build a thing that our future self will thank us for doing today? And so I spent 2 years organizing the Carbon Almanac with 1,900 co-authors, full-time volunteer work for me. And the 1,900 of us got something out of seeing each other, working with each other, realizing we could do something about our understanding of our climate problem. And then it became a bestseller in 5 or 6 countries and opened the door for many of the people who participated in it to have more leverage and to do the next thing.

But when I think about that day when I said, well, I could post something about this and see who shows up, it would have been super easy to say, nah, let’s just go see what’s on Star Trek today. But the habit, the practice of saying, okay, this is the next thing, that begins this generative positive cycle and it’s contagious. And that’s the magic of this sort of virus. If the generative contagious idea of who can I open a door for spreads, then you’re probably going to end up living in a world that’s more like the world you want to live in.

Why Seth Godin Keeps Going

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why do you continue to do things? Because you’ve written more books here than I could bloody carry. I mean, I was saying to you when you arrived that when I started my career as a marketeer, which is that website that failed, turned into a marketing business essentially. And then everybody gives you this book when you get into marketing, which is your book, This Is Marketing, and they use your ideas all the time. I mean, one could say, Seth, you’ve done enough. Maybe now is a good time to just enjoy it, they might say. Why’d you keep going?

SETH GODIN: When I invented email marketing all those years ago, I needed to do it to make a living, to eat. And it was thrilling to watch an industry grow up out of that. But after that, writing books is a lousy way to make a living, but it’s a pretty good way to make a difference.

And I said, don’t turn your hobby into a business because you’ll wound both of them. But it’s interesting to think about turning your business into a hobby, into the thing you love to do. And if someone said, I can’t share ideas anymore, I’m not exactly sure how I would spend my day.

For me, when I hear from somebody who says, “I learned something from someone who learned it from someone who learned it from someone who learned it from you,” that’s thrilling. The only thing I’m trying to do is turn on some lights for people, offer them some dignity, and create the next cycle. And if you sign up for that, I’m not sure how you can stop.

Closing Words for Those Stuck in a Knot

STEVEN BARTLETT: Now, maybe, just maybe, listen, I’m not that superstitious, but maybe there’s a couple of people that found this conversation and they got to this point in the conversation for some kind of reason. And I imagine it’s because they are in— they have their own knot somewhere. So just to close off for those people who currently are in a bit of a knot, it could be a job, a relationship, a situationship, whatever it might be. What is your sort of closing remarks to those people that are a bit stuck and that are on that precipice of maybe taking a leap, a step forward, but they’re tied up a little bit like these knots are?

SETH GODIN: You’re not alone. We all are. Every single one of us, especially— We’re all stuck with something. And you can forgive that and then say, okay, who can I contribute to today? Who can I offer help to and maybe ask for help? And it doesn’t mean that where you are is fair. And it doesn’t mean that what you’re feeling isn’t real. It is real. The only question is, what will we do next?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve really sort of taken to heart this idea as well that we talked about earlier of just being really clear on which voice you’re serving. Because everyone’s life is a noisy place increasingly. We’re so connected in a digital sense. We’re so connected to other people’s lives. And even if someone isn’t directly shouting at us and telling us what to go be and who to become, their life is. Seeing them in Hawaii on a beach having a margarita is shouting at me, telling me that my life sucks and that I should change it and that I should be more like them.

And in such a noisy world, I think maybe some of the most critical advice you’ve left me with is this central idea of getting clear on which voice in my life I’m going to listen to. Because we fail, we end up in a knot when we try and serve them all.

SETH GODIN: People are really lucky to have this show. The way you show up, you’ve been narrating this kind of journey for years now, and you probably don’t hear it often enough, but it’s important. And thank you for doing it.

The Last Question: Would You Live Forever?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, well, that’s an unbelievable compliment coming from one of my sort of personal icons. So I appreciate that a lot. The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved comes out in September. If it’s September, it’s out now. If it’s not, you can preorder it. There’ll be a link below. But I think, again, in the context of the world, I think unfortunately we might find ourselves in even more knots. So this is a wonderful thing, I think, to buy for somebody in your life that might be in a little bit of a knot themselves, but also to buy for yourself if you find yourself in one.

Seth, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you, if you were given the opportunity to live forever, would you take it?

SETH GODIN: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That was quick.

SETH GODIN: I think walking through the world as the only immortal person would be heartbreaking and enervating and wear you out much faster than you think. If everyone was immortal, I think we would play by different rules as a— and that would be fascinating, but that wasn’t the question. I think if you read enough science fiction, you realize that selective immortality is a real curse.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

SETH GODIN: Because everyone around you is dying and you’re not. Every single day, everyone’s dying just a little bit more. And we define our humanity by our connections. And we’re all on this journey together, and all of a sudden you opted out of the journey. You’re the only person on the boat. It’s not going where the boat’s going. And in the short run, it would be nice that my shoulders didn’t hurt and that my voice was fixed and things like that, but that would get old really fast.

The Value of Shared Life Stages

STEVEN BARTLETT: That point of connection is so interesting because it immediately made me think about my friendship circle. I’ve got these 5 best friends I’ve had for the last 15 years, and we’re all progressing through the life stages together. Like, they’ve all started having kids now, and then I’m trying to have a kid at the moment. And so we’re like talking about that together, and we’re connecting about that together. And actually my nightmare would be to be the only one that wasn’t in that life phase right now. I feel disconnected.

SETH GODIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Gosh. And if I lived forever, I’ve never wanted to live forever. I think people need to think about the trade-offs of everything in their life, but particularly this idea of longevity.

SETH GODIN: Embracing this moment, you lose that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I highly recommend just before we do wrap up, people go read your blog as well. I’m going to link that below.

SETH GODIN: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Seth, we’re done.

SETH GODIN: What a treat.

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