Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job every episode to deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines all different worlds. My guest today a fan favorite is Seth Godin find them on Twitter at this is Seth's blog Seth is the author of 19 International bestsellers translated into more than 35 languages. Can't wait until he has this 20th. That'll make that number so much cleaner including tribes Purple Cow linchpin the dip and this
Is marketing he writes daily at Seth's dot blog which is one of the most popular blogs in the world and has been for God decades. I would imagine at this point. He's also the founder of the alt MBA in the akimbo workshops online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people he writes about the post-industrial revolution the ways ideas spread marketing quitting leadership and most of all changing everything his newest book is the practice subtitle shipping creative work. You can find him online at
Seth's dot blog or Seth Godin.com. He's on Twitter, but he's not an active Tweeter. You can find that at this is s blog and on Instagram handled by his team at Seth Godin.
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I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
Seth welcome to the show. Thank you Tim. It's great to talk to
you and I
thought we would start we're all good things start and that is the etymology of the word hack which you introduced me to so, so what is this word hack and what context would you like to provide
so many ways to dig into this? So here's the deal when London was smaller on the outskirts of London was a Borough called Hackney and Hackney.
As a place where they would raise horses, they didn't raise thoroughbreds. They didn't raise extraordinary show horses. They raise just average horses average horses at an average price. And so if you got a hackneyed horse, you probably did it because you were I don't know a hansom cab driver and that's where your nickname came as being a hack in that you didn't have a special horse. You simply had a horse.
There's nothing wrong with raising a hack. There's nothing wrong with buying a hack being a hack is about giving the customer exactly what they want at a decent price. However, it is important to distinguish it from the magic / fraud topic of our art of that thing that lights us up the work that we actually want to do and so my book The Practice is about that.
App between being a hack selling as if you're a hack and the other thing which is the generous Act of doing something magic of leading and it really bothers some people to hear their work described as hack work, but I think there's nothing wrong with it. You should own it because you need to distinguish it from that other work you can
do now you're talking about something that bothers other people. I want to talk for a minute or five.
About things that bother you so one of my favorite aspects of our conversations to give a little Slice of Life for people. I picked up a book because I ronia SLI thought you would recommend it to me. It came up on the podcast somewhere else. I shan't a name it unless you would like to but I picked up this book. I really loved the introduction and the first chapter 2 and I prematurely sent a text to Seth implying that I was impressed with this book. He had recommended and not too far thereafter. We had dinner we sat down and you're like tell me about this.
Because I could not disagree more with everything in these Pages effectively. I'm paraphrasing. So I like how direct you are. You do not mince words when it comes to opinions that that you formed and I would love to know what other commonly used words or phrases bother you whether it's the concepts of the words themselves are how they are wielded right? Because in this case you're taking a word hack and you're going back to the roots in your recontextualizing.
It and showing that it can be a neutral or positive thing. Not just a derisive term. Are there any other terms phrases Concepts that are bandied about that that bother you?
Well, there are a couple that I find really useful to question and one is the way we interchange learning and education and the other one is the way we play with the word quality. So I'm happy to start with either one, but
Already might make an easier place to go. Let's go to Quality. Okay, so quality if you want to be a perfectionist is a great way to hide because you don't want to be an enemy of quality that when someone says well I can't ship this yet because the quality isn't there when someone says why are you racing through that don't you want to put quality into it? Well, we're defenseless in the face of that. And so someone doesn't want to ship their work is going to stand behind perfectionism, but
Perfectionism has nothing to do with perfect and perfect doesn't have a lot to do with quality. So quality has a very specific definition. It comes from Edwards Deming and the rest of the quality movement of the 40s and 50s the people who gave us the Toyota and what it means is meets spec. That's it meets spec. And so if I said what's a better quality car Toyota Corolla or Rolls-Royce the answer is a Toyota because the Toyota meet spec it more.
Library does exactly what it's supposed to do when it's supposed to do it. Then Rolls-Royce does a Rolls-Royce is a different thing. It's luxury. It's ostentatious spending of resources to create something most people can't have and that's a fine thing to if you want it and that kind of quality is also worth chasing if that's what you wanted, but it's easy to show that high fashion Goods, you know luxury purses things that we would say have
Quality don't actually last as long as something from REI. So again back to meeting spec then the third definition of quality. It is the magic of magic. So in the book I talk about the Justin Hamilton and West Side Story. Most people have never seen them on Broadway. Hamilton is famous because something changes in a lot of people in the audience when they see what lin-manuel built on the other hand.
West Side Story cost a fortune the tickets were 400 bucks. The projection screen was the best I'd ever seen and nobody remembers what happened on stage because the quality of magic wasn't there.
What do you mean by magic or how would you describe that magic to someone who isn't present what would is the magic?
So if we go to the colloquial understanding of magic someone who does a coin trick where it disappears from?
On one hand, it's just gone for a moment. We feel real tension and it's Detention of that couldn't happen. And that happened at the same time one know how the trick is done. It's simply a trick the magic evaporates and in the case of great writing great customer service great theater. The first time you experience it the unexpected moment when lights turn on for you I
The call that magic so if you've ever been inside of Richard Serra sculpture Dia Beacon, it's a two million pound piece of Steel. If I showed you a sketch of it, you wouldn't get the joke. If you saw in real life something would change in you if you understood the genre and what came before etcetera. So I believe that now that we've got Ai and robots and offshoring and the rest.
The work that's left for us is the work to create Magic.
How do you think and maybe this is a bad question but lin-manuel Miranda and his team do that in Hamilton more effectively. Is it an unusual combination of elements? Of course it is. I mean in many respects I've seen the show what else is there to that experience or that that piece of art that product in in your mind?
So I was talking to someone the other day about this and they were talking about the fact that they were eager to make some sort of creative magic, but they were just waiting for a really good idea. I said you mean a really good idea like a multimillion-dollar Broadway musical based on an obscure Revolutionary War character with the entire cast played by people who aren't traditionally cast in those roles in a soundtrack sort of based on rap and hip-hop like that kind of really great idea not really great idea, right and
And it doesn't work because when you read the paragraph about it, or even if you read chrno's book, it was obvious that this was a good idea. It's a good idea because it is a series of moments that create tension and then relieve it it is based on a mixing of several genres by someone who really truly understands them. So the things that happen in Hamilton rhyme with the things that came before
If you're a fan of Broadway, you notice things that fit in even though you're surprised that they do if you're a fan of rap or hip-hop you notice things that fit in even though you might be surprised that they do he makes references in every single line to some giant who came before and so that texture grabs people who have cultural awareness and then he takes you every few minutes to a place where you're not sure it's going to work.
And then he relieves the tension and starts the process over again and it's easy to hear this rant and think well that only happens in a good Broadway show but I would argue it happens at a fine restaurant dinner that you're going to remember and it can also happen at a business meeting because we're humans and that's the rollercoaster that informs how we remember the
world. You described just moments ago.
How people can hide behind the word quality or use it as a means of postponing action, right? It's a bit of a unfair trump card that can be used really effectively to not engage right to not take take risk. There's a want to say a corollary of sorts to that that I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind I would like if you could just reiterate for folks we've spoken about it before and that is kind of hiding behind the big hiding behind.
Creating something gigantic or affecting a billion people Etc. Could you speak to that because I think this is this is closely related. And then I have a follow-up
completely related, you know, we live in a crazy moment in time and we're also in political season and part of it is where is the person on a white horse Shining Armor who's going to come fix everything and if we read the traditional Business Media the folks who are lionized are running public companies changing the
Fabric of our culture backing up billions and billions of dollars as if that's the only sort of success that matters and you almost never read a story about a kindergarten teacher like Lenny Levine who changed the lives of 20 kids by showing up day after day. You can't say you can't play and now 20 25 years later after Lenny has passed away. Those kids are passing on that message the other kids, but we don't write articles about that.
And one of the things I've been arguing is that the smallest viable audience is more attainable than ever before it didn't used to be possible as Kevin Kelly would talk about a thousand true fans impossible. But you know, if you run an HVAC small business 200 customers is plenty and you know, I'm super pleased with how my books have done but 99% of the people in America have never read a book. I wrote 90
% plenty fine the smallest Bible audience means you're on the hook because if you are specific about who it's for then that group gets to say you made me a promise. You didn't keep it. Whereas if you say I have this big shiny idea, but this VC won't fund me or this Media Company went right about me or Oprah won't call now. You have a great
excuse. All right, so I'm going to personalize this selfishly because
that is my nature to flashback. Now. I'm going to create a montage of dinners with Seth. This is this is just a portion of our Exchange in the last inner same dinnerware. I miss tributed this book to you as a recommendation where I asked you for advice.
Because I was feeling stuck with writing and you very very observant Lee replied didn't we talk about that eight months ago the last time
we had dinner and I
said, yes indeed. We did it shows you how little progress I've made and whether this is just an opportunity to showcase my insecurities. I don't know but I would love to hear what you think it is that I torture myself with
Thor that tortures me that leads me to ask you these types of repeated questions on different occasions because you are as much as anyone I know you see him right from the outside looking at it. Maybe it's like the calm duck on the surface kicking like hell underwater. I don't know you seem to be a relatively unconflicted person. You're not like biting your nails fretting about doing a or b you seem to pretty calm. They do your thing.
And I wouldn't describe myself that way. So in what you've seen is there. Is there any sort of outside perspective where you're like, I think that these are some of the reasons Tim gets tied up in knots. Is there anything that you have to
okay? Well, first of all if I'm making you miserable dinner, I apologize. It's certainly no no. No, you're not know I love our dinners. So I think that this is just left leg way in the conversation left out. The thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which is
where is your bad writing?
And there's no such thing as writer's block right is black is real but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed. I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing and the way through is to do your bad writing you don't have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing.
And bad writing over time. If you do enough of it can't persist good writing will slip through and I learned this from Isaac Asimov. He and I worked together on a project years ago. He published 400 books back when it was hard to publish book 400 books and he told me that every morning. Sorry. That's the volunteer fire department every morning for six hours. He would sit and type and it didn't matter if it was good or not.
He had to do six hours of typing now. Obviously, he didn't have a typing problem just about anybody can do six hours typing and then at the end of the shift, he would look throughout the bad writing. Whatever was left. What was left in the subconscious understood that if he's going to type. Anyway, you might as well type something good. So he got through the bad rating thing and in your case, you have so much skill and such a benefit of the doubt from people you've
learned it from that. It's really likely that you're saying why do I need to get back into that? There's nothing but downside for me because you know how to make one of the world's best podcast you do it on the regular people really like it when you write a book they roll their eyes are red the whole thing what Donald you're proud of me. What a pain in the neck. It takes a year just do the other thing. And so I totally get that feeling and this is where we lead to the second part about
I'm conflicted and it's it's a small Nike riff, which is that just do it. We're not going to go into the origin of that phrase coming from a mass murderer, but just do it improv.
Is this like a Manson family reference? Very Gilmore. Wow, no idea. Alright, that'll be for people to research
on their own now wait for last thing he said before they killed him.
Wow, just do it. Now. You'll never be able to unsee that image. Sorry just do it implies. What the hell doesn't matter. That's not a good way forward because it pushes you to be a hack who's not responsible for your own work. The alternative is to replace the word just with the word merely merely do the work that the time you are spending narrating yourself doing the work the time you're spending catastrophizing the work.
Is not helping anything and so I was a really insecure flailing failing entrepreneur for at least eight years in a row just consistently failing barely breaking even getting close to bankruptcy on a regular basis and I was willing things to work out and I was spending a lot of time dramatizing all of the perfect problems that I was confronting.
And then I was able to shift to merely doing the work without the narrative and without the drama. And as soon as we can merely do the work, then there's room to see what needs to be seen so I don't believe in the Muse at all. I don't think there's any outside force. I don't think Talent really matters. I think what matters is choosing to find your small as viable audience understand your genre and explore what it means to
Magic in the small so you can do it
again two things. The first is you are a delightful dinner host and I love our dinners so not to cherry pick and make it look like a sort of okay. Here's my dad
back
to make yeah. This is not sort of a collage video collage of like NASCAR accidents that I want to paint as the experience at your house. That's not the case at all. Number two. I would love to ask about
the decision the point at which you decide you have something that you would like to publish or share and that quality cut off or how you think about it because in my head the helpful and self-defeating depending on how you want to look at it perfectionist side of things will for instance. Look at something I wrote in 2010 and say I can't do that anymore. And if I practice I could still practice for weeks and
Something on the blog and it would not be that good. Therefore. I'm not going to publish because I feel like people will be disappointed or I will be letting them down and that the attention they'll spend on it will not derive or return as much value to them. Right? So this that's the voice that is the deliberation that I have in my own head and I do actually have hundreds of drafts like I have shitty stuff, but it's never quite cross the chasm into
Good enough to publish. So I've been stymieing myself in that respect and there is part of me. That's like, you know what the podcast is easier. It's fun. I feel like it's a craft. I'm still improving on why don't I just do that. There is part of me that says that and there's another part that says that's a cop-out. In fact, you know, the writing helps you to learn to think as Kevin Kelly to invoke that name again ready rights to think he doesn't think and then right and that I'm shortchanging myself by using perfectionism as
An out. Yeah, if hearing all of that what what comes to mind for you?
Well, I'll share my personal experience. But first I want to challenge something you stated as fact, which is that the writing isn't good enough to publish says
who says me. Yeah. It's right. That's me,
right. No, it's not that the writing isn't good enough to publish its that when you look at the writing your analysis of where you are in the market.
Place and the promised you'd like to make and keep doesn't match the writing that's in front of you. But I dare say as talented as you are so many things this might not be your best skill knowing when it's ready to
publish.
Yeah true. And it may make sense in this world where it is ever easier to hire somebody to do the thing. They are good at to say to this person. Here's 5,000 words aimed at
Kind of reader tell me where I'm got light and tell me where I should take stuff out because the way you get my friend went to business school Evan climb Mount Everest back when that was a very big deal and I had never seen him. There was no YouTube or anything and I was quizzing him. What's that? Like, well, he said that the first weeks are just spent walking up this Trail. That's not that hard a trail to walk up with tea houses along the way and
stuff like that. It's only toward the end. Once you've committed to climbing Mount Everest at Mount Everest actually gets really hard to climb and it's a fortunate coincidence for the climbers that it happens in that order because you're sunk costs have increased so much by the time it gets serious that you're too embarrassed to turn to your peers and say I can't put in the work and so what you're doing before you get to the hard part is you're
In a reason to stop and you said something was really poignant, which is you look at stuff you wrote in 2010. And you say I can't do that anymore. Well, two things happen to me first 20 years ago. I wrote a book called permission marketing it became a New York Times bestseller, and I said I'm done. What could I do first time out of the gate because I've been a book package before was my first quote real book. How can I beat that? So I stopped I just stopped and I sat in the dark for a year.
I just didn't do much of anything because I said I can't hit lightning like that again and thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. He sent me he was unknown he sent me this new book called The Tipping Point and he asked me to write a blurb for it and I read it in one night and realized that without knowing it. I had been writing a book about how ideas spread and in the next 12 days I wrote.
225 page book and I sent it to Malcolm and I said look if you want me to not publish this because it seems like you unlock the key and I don't want to take away anything from the Tipping Point. I will stop and just throw it out, but I needed to get this out of my system and he was such a mensch he gave me his Blessing and wrote the foreword and I realized in that moment. I couldn't write permission marketing again that day was gone, but I could write this book and someone would benefit.
It from it and then 10 years later the same 2010 you're saying I wrote a book called linchpin and I will never be able to write a book that good again. I'll never write a book that goes that deep close to my bones that makes me feel the way that book made me feel and after that book came out. I felt the same way again, which is well, I if this is the journey I found the end of the journey.
And I realized six nine months later that that was selfish and that leads to the other key thing. I want to talk about which is generosity. Its generosity doesn't mean free people pay for our surgeon who's going to save their life generosity means that you're spending emotional energy emotional labor to help somebody else. And as soon as I could shift it around in my head to say there's somebody over there who could use a hand
and then it wasn't about me anymore and I wasn't parading anything and it got way easier to merely do the work without commentary because there's somebody over there. I'm doing it for Here We Go.
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You have a great quote in the introduction of the new book from sculptor Elizabeth King, and I'd love to hear you explain this or give examples of how it can apply or might apply the quote from Elizabeth King is process saves us from the poverty of our intentions. What does that mean?
There would be no book if it weren't for that quote from Elizabeth King. I don't know how it ended up on my desk. It came from somebody else who took credit for the quote and
They're tracking it down because it's so resonated with me and after talking to him. He acknowledged. Well, someone else really said it first and I found this woman and if you close your eyes and visualize the sculptor, you might be visualizing her and if you think about how she lives her life and the number of hours, she puts into each piece of work. It's extraordinary and they made a documentary of some of her work which you can see on Amazon. I had never heard of her, but now she's my friend and
I've just learned so much from that one sentence what she is saying is this
Tomorrow morning when you wake up. You probably won't feel like engaging in the practice. And if you do you probably won't feel that way the next day that what we do is once decide we decide that we're a runner and runners go running every day. We decide where a blogger and bloggers blog every day and that decision lightens the cognitive load so much because there's no
Oh time, no reason to negotiate with ourselves because we already had the meeting we already decided now. The question is not should we go or not? The question is should we go left or right but we're going
are there other macro decisions like that in your life that you could give as examples of saving yourself from the poverty of intentions or from The Whimsy of how you feel on different mornings.
Well, so then the other one which is
As big as that one is I think authenticity is a crock and I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much the problem with authenticity is it selfish authenticity enables us to say whatever we want and if people don't like it. Well, I was just being authentic it is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency. And I don't think anybody we serve wants that I think what they want is consistency. I think they want us to make a
a promise and keep it and the reason it's called work not my hobby is because I made a promise and so I decided to really long time ago that I was going to be consistent and it didn't matter if in a moment I felt like yelling at a customer service person or going up on stage when I'm supposed to be adding energy and just taking energy instead and what I learned from that is
The way we act determines how we feel way more often in the way. We feel determines how we act
I've heard you why say I've heard you I guess because I know your voice so I hear your voice when I read you that do what you love is for amateurs love what you do is the mantra for professionals and I found this interesting on multiple levels because amateur the sort of Latin root.
It relates to love. So if do what you love is for amateurs that I love what you do is for professionals we can dig into the Civil layers of that but I'll add one more thing which is three words attitudes or skills. And these these these might go together nicely like a BLT of Concepts. Could you expand on any of those?
Okay, so let's talk about skills. You've come up first with wrestling and then with other skill.
Activities that you excelled at by putting an enormous amount of effort and practice and grit but plenty of other people did too and you somehow outperform them and you've done that beyond the Physical Realm you've done it in culture and in writing as well I would argue that's because in addition to the obvious easy to measure hard skills of how many words per minute. Can you type and how many pounds do you bench press?
There are soft skills and they involve curiosity they involve experimentation and 30 other things. These are all skills in the sense that we can learn them. We can learn to be more honest. We can learn to be more diligent we can learn to be more persistent and that's great because if you can learn them then you're not stuck where you are. You can become who you want to be. And so if we start by acknowledging that our attitudes our skills.
And the skills are learnable. Suddenly Talent recedes far into the rearview mirror and we are going to be rewarded not simply because we can beat someone on a test. But because our whole posture is based on the possibility of better and the possibility of if your goal is to win to win. That's the second piece that goes right next to the other skills and people Overlook it because
Our industrial system doesn't really reward us for measuring that
stuff. How do you take something that is considered an attitude and convert it into a skill. In other words. It seems like you would have to take say honesty and I'm not sure if Ben Franklin did this a particularly well necessarily but as one of the virtues convert it into some type of habit or action that you practice on a regular basis. Is that the right way to think about this and if so how might you approach?
Taking something that is widely considered an attitude or a talent and translate it into a skill.
So let's pick being a good listener and being charismatic. I can prove it most people if they didn't think about it a lot would say that those things are talents those things come naturally to some people. They're not skills. They're sort of hardwired attitudes that fair.
I think so. Hmm.
But we know what makes someone be seen as a good listener and what makes someone be seen as charismatic and you can do those things and at the beginning just like falling asleep, you will be faking it, but then just like falling asleep, you will be doing it and in the case of being a good listener, it might sound stilted at first to ask follow-up questions. It might sound unnatural at first, too.
Leave a beat when you ordinarily would jump in. I like most people don't think of me as a good listener because I jump in and other people who I know don't they leave that extra beat? Well, that's a skill and you know, whether it's Dale Carnegie or anyone who's followed in his footsteps, you can learn those things. And at first you seem as awkward as someone who just learned how to ride a bike and then you don't
Got it. So it should also say that just to reinforce what you're saying it becoming a better listener and that extra beat training yourself to utilize that extra beat is absolutely a practice. I remember Cal fuss men who wrote for Esquire for ages and ages and ages and they interviewed everybody Muhammad Ali I think corporate Chef you name it and his expression is let the silence do the work.
And you can remember that and then apply it it is a learnable practice of all skill. Are there any particular or any other skills that you think are important for say entrepreneurs or creatives that have a disproportionate Roi if a listener can train themselves to view them and approach them as
skills. I think the combination of patience and impatience.
Most of the struggling entrepreneurs I've seen are impatient when it comes to things that look like an external hustle. They're emailing People Too Many Times. They're looking for a shortcut. They've got an elevator pitch. They've got the fancy business card. They're pushing and pushing externally. That's the wrong place to be impatient. But when it comes to confronting the thing they're afraid of they can just make a really wide berth around it instead of figuring out how to be honest looking in the mirror.
So, you know this isn't that good I should just do something else the same thing is true with someone like Elizabeth king or a stand-up comic or Richard Serra if we look yesterday. I was listening to one of the earliest demos of Joni Mitchell and I don't think there's anybody who wants to argue that Joni Mitchell has a hack nor anybody who wants to argue that she didn't have a huge contribution to music but her cover of the House of the Rising Sun.
It wasn't just that I wasn't familiar with her version of it. It just wasn't any good and fortunately she was patient with herself. She didn't say. Oh, I'm bad at this and then go work at a 7-Eleven. And so where we need patience is in confronting the things we're going to get better at anding strapping in for a useful journey and where we need impatience is with our fear and with our selfishness.
With
but whirring, what's your perspective on whirring?
So I had a riff a while ago. It was one of my most popular blog posts and I'm hesitant to dive too deep because I'm not a medical professional and there are people who are challenged by organic and and Trauma related illnesses, but for leaving that group aside anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. At least it is for me me me.
That after it's over. We don't call it anxiety anymore. We're in grief or were rebuilding but when it might go wrong.
Whirring anxiety is what we feel when we're imagining it did and that's not helping anything. And so the question is how do we focus that part of our attention on something generous instead because anxiety and worry is almost never in service of someone else. It's in service of our need for the status quo and reassurance and I think it reassurance is futile because you never have enough of it.
Can you say
About that, please. So it feels it is futile
because we can never have enough of it.
Right? So it feels great to get reassurance. I wish that you know, the phone would ring and it's the head of the Pulitzer committee saying that they read this thing I wrote and it's fantastic. I would be high as a kite for at least a day and a half and then
You'd need it again because what it did for you was make you feel for a moment like bad outcomes weren't going to happen until you got new evidence that they might and then you're back to anxiety and worrying again. So people get hooked on reassurance might end up building an intimacy with the person who's reassuring them all the time, but it is not helping them do better work nor is it making them happier the alternative is to say
This might not work this thing. I did this thing. I cared about might not work odds are we won't but I have a portfolio and then I'll make the next thing because we don't live on the Savannah. This is not a matter of life or death. Most of the time it is instead a matter of ego and self esteem and it's not fatal. And so all of the worrying is worse than the rejection when it finally comes so better I think to me early.
Do the work be generous with the work and improve our skills so we can do it again and that gets back to Elizabeth
Kings quote.
Ura
fantastic presenter public speaker teacher, of course these things tie together. Although not all good public presenters are good teachers, but you are excellent at all those things and I remember advice I was given which I don't follow as as well as many which is presentations fail more often from too much information rather than too little I think this is true books also and part of the reason why as one instance the 4-Hour Chef was such a credibly challenging and also,
Fusing book ultimately something very proud of but it tried to do more than any three books should try to do and it ended up being very problematic for that reason not from the writing perspective not So Much from the reader perspective in any case, how do you think about constraints and can you give any examples of constraints historical constraints that you like in your life or applied to other creatives entrepreneurs anything?
Okay, so it's a two part question. The first part is about pedagogy and the thinking about how people learn and I think one reason that a lot of people are bad at teaching is because they don't think about pedagogy all they know is they know something and if they could just recite all the things they know someone else will know it too and that's not how learning works so that the challenge that we have.
Is not seeking information density and tufty I think made a mistake with this with his graphs that trying to cram as much information in a square inch as we can about Napoleon's whatever whatever. Yes someone who's into that who's willing to dissect it will find a Marvel of information inside. I look at a book like the 4-Hour chef and it's stunning the
hope of what you did the depth of what you did but it has a tufte density problem in that very dense right in that you were counting on somebody to go deep into it get inside your head and learn what you learn but that's not how the typical person we seek to serve learns something that we learn things by becoming momentarily incompetent. We used to feel like we were control that we understood things and then all of a sudden a new
Rises that counters what we know and in that moment, we're feeling incompetent and that's when most people quit but then we get through it. And now we know something more than we used to know and now we're on to the next thing and pacing that process is tricky. So, you know, if you're sitting listening to a high-level conversation between two extraordinary systems Engineers their back and forth and really fast because they've got Full Throttle between them.
But most of the time you don't get that privilege and so the challenge is not to dumb it down but to figure out what are the youthful chunks of tension that you can create where someone can feel the tension get through the tension absorb it and then be ready for another bit and media challenges us because every once in a while something breaks through that super dense and like I wish I could write something that dense.
One book that was that dense survival is not enough. It sold 14,000 copies. It's hard to get to where people will sit with you for that long. So I'm ranting here but you asked about
boundaries. I appreciate the other pedagogies is that discussion is endlessly fascinating to me the density question of sort of too much not enough to little and then the Goldilocks for the person.
Or Avatar, you're trying to serve right that is is something that we could talk about for a very long time. I'd also ask and I think this applies in some respects, right if you're trying to learn a skill. I think it's also very helpful to apply some constraints at least to Define what you're trying to learn with very tight constraints. So constraints are boundaries. I think there is a fetishizing of freedom in a very
Unhelpful actually kind of debilitating lead nebulous way among many entrepreneurs among some creatives who view ultimate Freedom infinite choice. I could do anything at anytime as the ideal. I think the although I suspect very few people have experienced what that level of paradox of choice actually inflicts on the human mind.
But could you could you speak to however, you want constraints boundaries and how you are other people have applied them actually and hold that just as a bookmark, you've talked about creating tension a few different times in your work or in your presentations in anything that you do. Could you give an example of how you create or have created tension and then had that release of tension since you've mentioned that a few different times, I'd love to
You're a real world example, then we can Zig back to constraints and boundaries.
Oh, well, let's start with a trivial example ready?
I'm ready knock knock.
Who's there exactly? So
there we didn't agree in advance to have a back-and-forth that would lead to a stupid joke. But as soon as you say who's there, a tiny sliver of tension is created which is why is he doing this? And what's going to make it worth it, right or calling a book Purple Cow instead of how to grow your business by becoming remarkable.
Because Purple Cow creates tension. Why is this in the business section? What does this have to do with anything? It's a mystery and then the mystery is resolved that tension is in all form of teaching and culture. If there is no tension just like if you want to shoot a rubber band across the room, you have to stretch it backwards first. And so what I try to do when I'm building a workshop or something like the old NBA is to say
How few minutes can I speak to lay the groundwork enough that tension will be created so that people will resolve their own tension by learning what it is. I need them to learn.
And what the mistake we often make if you know a lot and are trying to teach someone who doesn't know a lot is we tell them too many things and we relieve the tension we steal the Revelation don't steal the Revelation open the door and let them find the revelation.
Could you describe an example from all NBA? I mean, the first thing that came to mind for me is you're describing this in terms of not stealing. The Revelation is actually the Harvard case study method that's that a place like our business school. They do this other places like Stanford Business School where you have effectively these two part modules part one presents a real world historical case study of a problem or opportunity or situation that a business
or more accurately leaders within a business or facing and then Cliffhanger and the class then at that point has to determine the proper course of action what they think should be done or not done and then you have the Revelation in part to where they talk about what was actually done and how it turned out so that jump to mind is an example of that but I would imagine that is not the format you're using within something like the alt and be a so, how do you not steal the revelation?
Create tensions that people will plow ahead with developing a skill or learning something.
It's such a cool idea to bring up the Harvard case study the
There is a reveal sometimes in a Harvard case but it is not the Revelation and that's why it works that if you knew the reveal the class wouldn't go better the Revelation in a Harvard case is when a student comes up with a an approach that they wouldn't have had if they hadn't heard the conversation and that probably isn't what the company did.
Because it's that furrowing around in a safe space that lets you experience years and years and years of strategic business thinking in one year because you know, so like one of the most famous cases there was a guest chain called Atlantic Richfield Arco and it was pages and pages of spreadsheets about their credit cards and because in the gas business when gas was Thirty cents a gallon credit cards were bit.
Big chunk of what they did and what it forced students to do who had never thought about any of these issues was dig in deep on where does the money flow? What's the difference between what you charge someone and what you make what is it like to be the low cost provider etcetera? Well the reveal is that Arco just canceled all their credit cards and they became the first chain that was just casually in the 70s and 80s, but it didn't matter that. That's what they did What mattered was?
Is 30 or 60 people together were digging into this situation. And so I didn't have any of that in mind when I built the altar MBA and just in the side, so we're up to 5,000 grads, but I shouldn't say we anymore because it's now a b Corp and it's run by Maria and Alex. So I've turned the reins over to them. I'm still involved in the akimbo the B Corp, but I
I need to give them full credit for the institution that they were building. Mmm. What I said was without the 18 pages of Harvard case study. What's a nugget here? So a nugget is something like let's talk about a decision and tell everyone else in your cohort a decision you made and how you used
Decision thinking to make it and then defend your decision for the five other people you're with and they will do the same with you and most of us have never actually had an emotion free conversation about a decision that we've made because usually we make them either after it didn't work out or we forget right but in this case having to work your way through it, they will I decided this instead of that and I did this instead of that suddenly without me.
Telling you without anybody telling you you realize there's actually a calculus 2 making almost any decision and you glossed over the parts that you are afraid of and now you can see them differently.
And when you add to that the Persistence of the cohort what you end up with is this increase in safety and enrollment which are the two core elements of learning that it will enable you to deal with ever more attention which leads to more incompetence which leads to the
revelation.
Well so many so many different directions we could go from there. We're coming back to constraints so we could talk about Susan Rothenberg painted horses. We could talk about Ken Burns we could talk about. Mr. Rogers. If you look at many of these iconic whether it be television shows movies creative teachers who you have described in your books and else where they are.
Other examples of the power of positive constraints and I would just love to hear you tell a story or two that really stand out for you. Whether it's other people or the constraints that have been incredibly impactful for you personally
constraints used to frustrate me so much and now they are the core of my useful working life. I'll start with this when I was going up. I broke my arm.
My arm and I broke my nose playing hockey and I was terrible at it. But I knew what was going on on the ice, but I was terrible at it. The thing is if you've ever tried to play hockey on a ring that has no boards. It's just a giant Lake two totally different game. The boards are the point without the board's there is no hockey. And for me, I've set up constraints All Around Me constraints about how I choose which projects constraints about what I eat constraints about
A project can entail and what it can't entail constraints about how many people work with me constraints about which media I'm going to be in which one's I'm not going to be in and they're all arbitrary that there isn't a law of nature that says don't be on Tick Tock don't be on Twitter, but it's okay to have a daily blog. I don't know where those rules came from. I just made up rules because having constraints lets me get to the edge. It lets me get to the boards.
It's without breaking my nose that knowing. So in the case of the alt NBA I built it in a two-week period of time in the desert in Utah and I made like seven constraints because I could have built it in a hundred different directions, but I made constraints about what the dropout rate would be what the tools we would use would be what tools we wouldn't use what it would cost all of those things went in before. I started brainstorming anything because I know that the cost
I've going back and starting over is Tiny. Whereas the cost of making up the constraint after you have what you think of as a great idea are enormous when
people start a business or I should say rather that was about to become an illustration of what you probably don't want to do when someone comes to you and says, I am thinking of starting a business.
How would you Usher them through the process of deciding on constraints before they embarked on creating some darling that they're not willing to kill or exactly yes get tied up in knots.
So the core questions that we begin with our what resources are you willing to put into this either resources, you're willing to expend emotional labor and risked get or resources you already have they could be resources of time and risk tolerance.
Money right number two is who do you want your customers to be because if you hate your customers, you're going to hit your business and number three is what do you want to get out of this? Are you looking for something that makes every day better or you looking to gruel your way through something so that X number of months or years from now, you win a prize notice that you don't get to reverse the answers to these from what you started with as your germ of an idea.
Idea that these are not about your idea at all and you can always tell when an entrepreneur is trying to back pedal as fast as they can to say. Well the idea really want to do is so-and-so. So therefore these are my answers I've done that and every time I've done that I have been disappointed if we can look at it with that agnostic point of view. Now, we've created a puzzle and puzzles always have constraints in boundaries and we say, all right given that this is the puzzle.
No, you cannot come up with a carbon sequestration technology that will spread around the world and help you dominate a new industry when you're only willing to mortgage your house. No, that's it's can't be done. So you found a null set of place where your goals and your constraints conflict. So instead let's take a deep breath and figure out what you really are hoping to do every day. And what success will look like.
When you're done and one specific example that I think your listeners will really resonate with is Freelancers. If you're really a freelancer, you have no employees. You only sell your X number of hours a week. That's all you get. But if at the same time you want to make ten million dollars a year, you're going to be unhappy because you can't really be a sole practitioner in freelancer who's making ten million dollars a year so which is it and let's get really clear about why you're doing
Who it's for and what's it for?
What do you do with someone who has started a business or a creative Endeavor or there are freelancer who? Oh now they have X number of employees and the the original plot is kind of escaped if that makes any sense or priorities and they now want to
Take the car into the shop and apply some constraints. Is there a particular approach you might recommend to those people who have they're already out of the garage. They've been driving around there like okay, there's a problem. This needs to be fixed. The answer could be of course just
Retiring that's that's one option. But are there other ways that you encourage people to explore?
Right constraints if they already are in motion with something.
So you've touched on one of the most important elements of human nature, which is our inability to ignore sunk costs sunk costs are the the unspoken Minefield of mistake in which we rationalize why we have to justify the thing. We already have we invent new meanings for the word momentum. Well beyond Isaac Newton and we imagine
That we have to stick with what we did so much of the time learning to ignore sunk costs is the single most useful thing. I can point out to people. However, there are times when you actually do have momentum when you have trust when you have assets when you have a chance to go forward and in the book, I tell the story of REM and REM was a successful College radio band that was gigging hundreds of times a year, but they were not the REM of today. They weren't this famous legendary.
Very band and they made two decisions. They invented two constraints before they made a new album and the constraints were we're going to stop touring for four months and you'd be amazed at how few bands add that constraint. If you saw the Go-Go's documentary The Go-Go's would have definitely had a half a dozen more hit albums. If they had just stopped touring for three months when they were all burning out and then the second thing they did was they switch instruments.
That the guitarist which the mandolin and the bass player switch to the guitar, and they said you have to play a different instrument on this album.
Those two decisions ended up creating one of the best selling albums of the decade because they got all the benefits of their momentum in their trust for each other in the trust with the fans. But those fresh eyes in those new boundaries enabled them to explore new edges and it's at the edges where the tension lies and so they weren't playing covers of their old selves. They were something new.
So I want to talk about the practice and there's there's a
Here's a little nugget in the elements of the practice this list of elements contained in the many chapters and bits of wisdom and tactical advice that you have in this book one is seek Joy.
How does one do that?
Well, it gets back to enjoying what you do more than doing what you enjoy and so the question is, you know, if Marshall sahlins who just wrote a book with David graeber who recently passed away, but Marshall sahlins wrote a breakthrough book in the 60s called Stone Age economics and it is about what it was like to be a caveman.
And it turns out the cavemen who in my view were wearing like these horrible Flintstones, like clothes and barely surviving only worked three hours a day.
and they spent the rest of their time being present and alive and with their family and all the things that people say they want to do more of
and what's fascinating to me about that is lots of the people that you and I know who go to work and just dig it out day after day don't do it because they need more money. They are seeking some sort of status some sort of emotional engagement some sort of energy, but they forget along the way because they signed up for this other game that there is the game one can play of wow that
Bailey was cool. What I just made that fills me with joy. I just did something generous. I just connected with someone at an elemental level that they're too busy playing somebody else's game to play that game.
I've read in many books that some version of we're all playing games and step step one is to know which game we're playing and maybe step two is to deliberately choose the game. We're playing as opposed to something. We absorbed or inherited.
Or had imposed on us by by others or by upbringing you have zigged quite a lot when others have zagged. How do you think about the game or games that you play because these are just like hockey right there certain constraints that certain objectives certain values that are given points positively or negatively. How have you chosen the games? You have chosen and how has that changed?
Retirement know that's like 15 questions in one but I know you can handle it.
It's a great question and there are a few people I would answered for but I'm delighted to answer for you. It's great question. The first rule is you don't break your nose. We are in front of that is the first rule and what I mean by that is I have been surrounded since I started one of the first internet companies, which was 1990-91 before the World Wide Web. I have been surrounded by people.
Who have been playing a game with very few elements of score keeping the generally revolve around wealth and they will come up with all sorts of reasons why their Silicon Valley doohickey is going to change the world for the better, but it's not really true and they will make decisions and compromises about who they hire and how they spend their day because that game is culturally sanctioned. It is a game that's
Truly deniable in the Milton Friedman sense and you know, you're getting what technology wants you're getting with the market once turn the ratchet and it has been thrilling every few years to be around that Rush of growth but early on with yoyodyne. I saw what it would mean to take it to the next level and when I got to 70 employees.
I said I can't these people should not be counting on me and I can't play the way I like to play on behalf of 70 other people and so I had to stop and then a few years later. I did it again with squidoo which was before Pinterest and all the rest. And so what I've learned is that veering away from the next two zeros of upside is really expensive and the single best way for me to live too.
If I want to live and so I didn't like the sequel to permission marketing and I didn't start MailChimp and I didn't you know, there's all these things I could have done if I was a business Builder, but I'm not a business Builder the game I'm playing is have I earned enough trust to do another generous project that I'm proud of and if so do I get to do it again?
What other elements of the life you wanted to live provided for you? The Tipping of the scales? Like you said, I mean giving up those additional two zeros of upside has a cost. I mean there is sort of an incremental return on dollar right at some point like a marginal use of each dollar but there's a sacrifice being made what how would you describe the life you want to live that was on the other side of door number two?
So you mean the one I picked this opposed to when I walked away from that's right. I was so fortunate to have two amazing parents and we lived in Buffalo New York. Not a big town and there were always people parading in our house one night at one Thanksgiving 18 Russian refuse Nick's showed up for their first Thanksgiving all smoking like chimneys right that the way
It felt to see them be part of the community of their choice and to Simply commit to the work they were doing so my mom worked as a volunteer at the Museum and then got a job there and pioneered the Museum Store and she just stuck with it and stuck with it and stuck with it without a lot of drama. But in terms of it was sustaining and she could point to work that she did.
Others didn't think we're going to make a difference that really did and that was my role model and I was aware really early on that that was sort of unique that I was really lucky to have that privilege and that head start but I have been aware that it would be really easy to blow. It would be really easy to say I need a seventh house or eight houses opposed to just one and so one of the constraints was
There's enough and knowing that there's enough opens the door to merely do the work. Whereas if you need to get attached to the outcome because you need more now. You're not doing the work anymore. Now, you're just simply trading for the outcome.
What's what's so bad about trading for the outcome. Is it because and I'm playing a bit of Devil's Advocate here, but is it that you ultimately cannot determine the outcome because so much is outside of your control. Is that what makes that
Appealing. Is it just that day-to-day your kind of trading misery now for some low probability ill-defined happiness in the future. That is probably not going to come true. What are the main risks of kind of betting on outcome because that is what a lot of people do right? I mean, I'm yeah, I'm in Austin, but it's it's right now as opposed to Silicon Valley, but the outcome driven.
Decision making is the default. I would say yeah, and the sort of individualized American culture at least what are the the main risks that you see that that I that I have mentioned couple
ways to look at this you're exactly right that the current Western mindset is tell me if it's going to work and then I'll do it and pardon part of this comes from school, which is you know, you're in school if someone says will this be on the test?
The phrase will this be on the test means I am willing to momentarily memorize this if you are willing to trade me for an A, and if not, I'll zone out because I got plenty of other things to do. I'll be back when you're ready to trade.
But then let's go one more step. There's a hackneyed except there's that word. There's a hackneyed expression, which is what would you do if you knew you could not fail and I find that completely unhelpful because it's basically a genie question yard. I want invisibility and I want control over this and I know you're never gonna get this. Here's my question. What would you do if you knew you would fail what would be worth doing even though it's not going to work?
And if you've got things on that list that you haven't been doing.
Ironically, those are the things that are most likely to work because other people aren't doing them either and this idea of attachment. I mean, you know chung-yong trungpa rinpoche said the bad news is we are falling falling falling the good news is there's nothing to hold onto and as soon as we explore there's nothing to hold onto then we can get back to the work Elizabeth Kings practice that prevents us from
I'm wondering about what prize were going to get this is just the work then you can merely do it. Most people who enter the Boston Marathon know they're not going to win but they enter anyway, and that's the way I think life is probably more alike than I will only enter the marathon if I'm going to win
it.
The practice is your
What book which number
by the way? I counted maybe 2020 why
write this book?
So as you and I both know writing a book is a ridiculous Venture. It takes a really long time. And then when you're done with it almost nobody says fantastic the way they do say if you made a new record because when you make a record below listen to it, but you make a
Look, they asked for a prize because they finished reading it. And so I only write a book when I have no choice and what makes me have no choice. Well what I learned a really long time ago is once I start working my way through a set of ideas I owe those ideas something and they owe I owe them a package and a way for them to come to people and venue that I hope will help.
Help and the thing about a book that isn't true for all other forms of electric media that electronic media that are easy to share is when you hand someone a book the whole package is right there and when you book group goes through a book you get to do it together. And so yeah, I made a workshop about what's in this book and I could have written 20 blog posts instead of writing a book, but I wanted to signal to myself and to other people that this one was book worthy and probably for
That's five books. I felt like maybe I don't know when the next books coming after it. And this one's one of those which is if this has to be my last book, I'm proud to make this one my last
book what should people hope to get from this book. What is the promise or premise of the practice? Well, the
subtitle is ship creative work and either you do that for a living or you don't if you don't do that for a living good luck to you because you're a cog in a system that wants to replace you on the other hand if your
Up creative work ship means it doesn't ship. It doesn't count work means you do it even when you don't feel like it and creative is where the joy is because creative is no one's ever done it this way before and here I made this and all I know for me anyway is those moments there bathed in Golden Light for me when I feel like like I just got a shipment in 10 minutes before we started talking of the Dozen collectors.
Packages that I designed and printed to go with this for 400 people and I'm just holding them in my hands and it was only three months ago, but I don't remember making them. I just remember the way it felt to make them and I want other people to feel that feeling while they're serving the people around them.
This is going to seem like a complete left turn, but I'm going to okay try to I'm going to try to make it more of a mogul course that makes some sense how
Would you suggest people learn to juggle?
So I have taught more people to juggle the most. I'm not a great juggler, but we're not talking about figuratively. I'm talking about actually juggling. So let's talk this through because I think it's a useful lesson. If you have ever seen a juggler on television or on video or in person what you notice is that they don't drop the ball not dropping the ball is perhaps the driving force of what makes someone a juggler.
And if you are enjoying the show you are willing and wishing the balls not to drop so if someone says you want to learn how to juggle you might say. Yes, and this is what always happens when I teach people to juggle. They grabbed three balls and say no no, don't get they grab three balls and they throw the first one this is easy. They told the second one and then they go to catch it because they know catching is the key to juggling and by the time they get to the second ball they have to Lunge for it.
And once you lunge for the second ball, you're out of position for the third one and then you're done. It's all in the ground and you give up on juggling because if juggling is about catching your terrible at it, what's the alternative? Well the way I've taught people how to juggle simple. I give them one ball and we spend between 20 minutes and 30 minutes throwing the ball and letting it hit the ground no catchy then we add the second ball throw throw drop drop. No catchy throw.
Oh throw drop drop. If you do that for 40 minutes total, you're going to be really good at throwing and if you get really good at throwing the catching takes care of itself. And this is the part about divorce from the outcome because all we care about if we want to learn to juggle is to learn to throw and the metaphor I cannot Escape which is getting better at throwing is what we have to do to build resilience.
And it's what we have to do to live in a world that's changing ever faster because if we try to anchor on outcomes and control results, we're in the catching business and then we're really in bad
trouble. So to continue with this the throwing instead of catching right this inversion of importance that then allows someone to actually learn the skill. They set out to learn but doing it in a very counterintuitive way the first thing I'll say
Say is that this reminds me a lot of how I learned to swim in my 30s. I couldn't swim until I got here it is and it was Terry Laughlin of total immersion swimming. May he rest in peace passed away a few years ago who indirectly I suppose through his writing. I learned I learned to swim through a book, which is just astonishing when you think about it because he took out the base assumptions or he corrected the basic assumptions of swimming namely I
Thought I need to swim on top of the water and I need to kick which is in fact how a lot of swimming is taught and he said, nope, you're not going to do that and you're not even going to focus on kicking like we are not going to do anything that will make you tired. In fact, if you are tired when you are learning how to swim you're doing it incorrectly. We're just gonna have you kick off the side of the shallow end of a pool and practice getting into a fuselage position and the sequence.
Even though in retrospect it makes perfect sense was so different from any other attempt. Yep. It is that that I had made through books videos instruction coaching. You name it. It just worked and it blew my mind and now I swim I mean I'm swimming here with me today to go swimming for relaxation which that and never thought in a million years would be the
case. I'm warmer and I really yes your question yet could have to interject here. I never knew this about you. I swim his method every single day. Okay.
I knew how to swim but the year I was at Stanford to had a master's class at the Stanford pool and I couldn't resist I went and this guy comes out to teach it. He's the consultant to the US Olympic Swim Team and he's assisted by the coach of the Stanford swim team. His name's Bill Boomer Bill had a very significant pot belly and one arm.
And I'm like this guy is going to teach us how to swim and the beauty of it was it's all about the process and not about the outcome because you don't get good at the outcome for a long time and the second part when we were talking about incompetence before but you didn't mention is learning to swim. Terry's way involves drowning for at least an hour and a half and that's why most people don't get to the other
side just to be clear.
It is an uncomfortable practice by Design there is if done correctly no risk. There's a physical risk involved. If you're doing it with supervision and he will do also things like remove breathing right in the sense that you are not swimming and learning how to breathe at the same time. It's just too much right that's like giving it being given a unicycle and seven balls to juggle. It's like that's just not going to work for the vast majority of folks. And so he says, alright great. Well, let's take the
breathing out of it that that failure point will be removed. Let's take out the breathing. We're just going to focus on hydrodynamics and teaching you that naturally because of the density of your body. You're going to be 70-plus percent under water when you swim.. You're not a hydrofoil and you gave then what I think is in some respects a comparable example of a logical but counterintuitive progression with the learning to throw instead.
Etch. Yep, if someone were to ask you.
How would you teach someone to be creative and I'm asking that in a deliberately may be problematic way, but what would your answer be if they were like great I get the swimming example, I get the juggling example. I want to be more creative. What's the equivalent for becoming more creative? What would you say
it's exactly the same and I've done it many many times. Here you go. If you want to learn how to juggle you have to drop an enormous number of balls if you want to learn how to swim you have to sort of drown.
And if you want to learn to be creative, you have to show me an enormous number of bad ideas pick the smallest region domain any segment. You want start listing your bad ideas. Keep listing your bad ideas. Let's prove that your bad ideas are not fatal. That's part one part two domain knowledge and genre. It is true that every once in a while an outsider shows up with something.
That nobody on the inside ever thought of but that's not usually what happens. What usually happens is someone who has good taste decides to be willing to be creative and good taste means, you know what your audience wants 10 minutes before they do that's all you can't have good taste unless you have domain knowledge and understanding genre. So if you combine those two things shipping on the regular and
Taste you can be creative when you say genre.
What do you mean because this is a if someone is accused of and I use that word deliberately being a genre writer or a genre this genre that it can be used in a derisive way. Sure oops. What do you mean by genre? And how would you prefer people to understand
genre? So generic and genre are not being used by me in the same way genre means what am I?
Affecting when I encounter your work. So Earl Stanley Gardner wrote mystery novels and they fit neatly into the genre of mystery novels. We knew which section of the bookstore to put them in but they were nothing like Agatha Christie novels and Earl Stanley Gardner's sold a quarter of a billion books by writing his own distinct idiosyncratic peculiar particular books that clearly were in a
Chandra. Can I just for a second? I apologize you were talking about how
the people United States haven't read your books. I am constantly both amazed and not surprised at all that you just mentioned someone who sold a quarter billion books and I've no idea who this person is
May. I have a few
bars. Yeah,
Donna Donna Donna. No. Yeah amazing and he wrote he had a secretary who is a little like Della Street Della.
I don't know what her name was the secretary had a yellow legal pad Earl dictated the books while she followed him around didn't edit a Word every two weeks yet a new one.
Wow, it's got yeah. Well, it's like James the the other James Patterson
machine. Yeah or James Bond it goes with the word James barely but the thing about genre is we don't know what to do with a creative idea. That doesn't rhyme with anything else, right? So is
Google a creative Innovation after the world had seen Yahoo. Well, of course it is because Marissa and the rest said let's not have a hundred eighty Three Links on the home page. Let's have to the search results themselves weren't that different for years, but the leap was you know, what a search engine is this is just like that search engine except it's different. But if they hadn't seen Yahoo, and Alta Vista, they never could have built Google and we wouldn't have known what to do with it if we hadn't seen a search engine.
And so what genre says is there's a box and I can't think outside the box because it's dark but on the edges of the box, I have leverage you got to know what the box is before you can make a thing that is going to be seen as creative.
If we look at the contents of the practice, there's a lot. There's a lot here 230. It's
turning Chevy chapters and the books less than 230 pages long.
Yes, right. So 230 chapters, and I'm looking at
a partial list and I wonder which of these you hope people will pay particular attention to because they are mother qualities of a sense and what I mean by that is I can't recall the attribution so I won't try to make it up on the spot but I've heard in different forms courage is the mother virtue of all virtues because at the
Taking point at the testing Point without courage. None of those virtues can be enacted something along
those lines. I like that. Yeah, are there
any particular chapters or qualities principles that you really hope people will pay particular attention to that if not act as prerequisites in some fashion help the others.
So one of the reasons that this needs to be a book or a workshop that lasts a hundred and fifty days is weird.
So complicated everyone's come up with their own combination of what's holding them back and the way to unlock it. I wish there was a hierarchy in a taxonomy that said this is how we get all the way up to the top. I don't feel like it's Maslow V in that way. I feel like we each find our own sinecure our own way to hide out from the thing.
It is keeping us from the creativity that we want to deliver and it starts to eat us up inside and that the deeper we've built it the harder it is for us to have an outsider help us. The list of excuses we have is infinite and so I don't know if I could point to this one which unlocks all of them. I guess the juggling one has a big piece of it, which is throwing not catching and I think the generosity
One which is I'm not throwing for myself. I am throwing for other people when I add those two up. What I end up with is this creativity is a generous act get out of your own way. Don't ask for a guarantee. Simply merely ship the work without drama and without dialogue
which is the opposite it would seem please correct me if I'm wrong of a word you just used that. I did not know the definition to because I therefore have to
Look it up sinecure. MSI any see you re now in a position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit from the Latin sinecure era Cuda without care. So rather than do that you're effectively it would seem like going to the opposite end of the spectrum is that fair to say although status or financial benefits that come along with it, but it is a very different combination of things.
Is that you are suggesting
so let's go back to Joni Mitchell because something happened to Joni Mitchell after I don't know which album number and it was that she was Unstoppable that her albums were on every radio station and we're in every college dorm room and Joni was in danger of becoming a hack because the audience knew exactly what they wanted from a Joni Mitchell record and exactly what they wanted from a Joni Mitchell.
Kurt and Joni Mitchell looked at that and she said I'm whatever 30 years old. I could do this quite profitably for the next 40 years. It's a sinecure that she will be beloved and she will never fail because writing another Joni Mitchell song was pretty easy for her. And so she made a record called Don Juan's Reckless daughter and then she made a couple other ones after that that seemed intentionally designed to alienate her audience.
But they weren't they were intentionally designed to alienate the old Joni Mitchell's audience so that she could find her smallest viable audience and make the music she wanted to for them because her goal wasn't to sell more records. Her goal was to explore that golden place of wow. This might not work. But if she kept making the things that would work she would ruin her life and I just
I listened to that record. God must be a boogeyman with Jaco Pastorius on the fretless bass and there's still songs in there. I don't get yet. But I'm so proud of her to have said enough I have enough now. How do I make better? Hmm,
what would you do even if you knew you would fill I love that. I love that recasting of the question that I've always enjoyed, but for any number of reasons
Very often not come up with great answers to what would you do? If you knew you could not fail the even if you knew you would fail in a sense. I mean, it's of course, there's some caveats to the question in a sense. But if you answer this or pursue the answers explore the answers to that question. You also end up doing things for which you will have a it will be natural is about to say unnatural but uncommon
endurance or attachment which will then increase the likelihood that over time you will have some version of success when you know, it seems that way to me at least and if you don't then you've chosen in such a way that at least the path along the way has some has some nice scenery. So you're just not, you know horse and Times Square with blinders on going around in circles. Well said Seth you're always so fun.
To chat with enjoy our conversations immensely if taken a bunch of notes for myself people can find you at Seth's dot blog. You can find you on Twitter Instagram at this assess blog on Twitter Instagram at Seth Godin. I'll link to everything including the new book The Practice subtitle shipping creative work in the show notes at Tim dot blog forward slash podcast. Is there anything else you would like to say any recommendations requests?
Comments complaints anything that you would like to put in front of the
listeners before we wrap up I would because you gave me the last word which is it's easy to forget how hard you Tim have worked at leading Illuminating and pushing yourself to become different better versions and you show up on the regular and share it and I for one am grateful you do.
Thank you very much.
Seth I really appreciate you saying that needed that today that's a longer story. But I really I really appreciate you saying that and hope to see you again soon. But in the meantime, thank you for taking the time today to share your life your learnings and the importance of the practice. I really appreciate it. Thanks. We'll see you here and to everybody else until next time. Thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim.
Again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one. This is five. Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email for me every Friday and that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet. Friday's a very short email where I share the coolest things I found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that have discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up.
In the other world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that check it out. Just go to four hour workweek.com. That's 4-Hour workweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email. You will get the very next one and if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.
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