I've never said these out loud. So I'm going to try them with you first are the three pillars. But before I share them with you a quote from the great philosopher Dolly Parton and what she said was find out who you are and do it on purpose the do it on purpose is a lot is a significant underpinning of the kind of ideas that you
expose in your work
that here's something you might.
Benefit from if you were trying to do X Y or Z on purpose and I would like to flip Dolly's phrase upside down and I'd like to say do it on purpose and you'll find out who you are asking for a guaranteed before you start isn't helpful instead. We need to look at a concept and idea and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do if we try it on for size, we will figure out if it fits us as opposed to the opposite.
Which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are and then going and finding the things that fit us.
Hello and welcome to the knowledge project. I'm your host Shane Parrish this podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what are the people have already figured out if you're listening to this, you're not currently a supporting number. If you'd like special member only episodes access before anyone else searchable transcripts and other member only.
Content you can join it FS dot blog / podcast check out the show notes this episode for a link today. I'm speaking with Seth Godin Seth is the author of 20 best-selling books which include Purple Cow linchpin the dip and this is marketing. He writes and runs one of the most popular blogs in the world. He's the founder of the alt MBA and the akimbo workshops. His newest book is the practice shipping creative work. This episode is jam-packed with wisdom. We talk about creative work fear.
Her shame trusting yourself what it means to be a professional how to become an observer of reality emotional labor hiding behind Perfection how we learn and so much more you don't want to miss this one. It's time to listen and learn.
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Seth Godin, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long
time. Well, I had to send some Scouts ahead and you've talked to some of my dearest friends. So it was time. It's a
pleasure. There's a quote in your new book The Practice by sculptor Elizabeth King and she put it beautifully when she said process saves us from the poverty of our intentions. What does that mean to you
the poverty of our intentions if you wake up in a bad mood if you hit a speed bump if you get a bit
of negative feedback,
Back from someone who is just a bystander.
It's super easy to spiral out of control and to determine that maybe you should take some time away or that what you're working on isn't really important enough. And in those moments, you are not the best version of yourself, but you're still yourself. If you have a practice you get through them you get through them because you already decided there was going to be a blog post tomorrow and you already
decided that the podcast comes out on a regular basis and you already decided whatever it is make the decision. Once then you have a practice
forever. I like that a lot creative work obviously doesn't come with any guarantees outcomes, but there's a pattern to sort of who succeeds and who doesn't tell me more about that pattern and what it means to
succeed. So what I'm trying to do do in the practice is decode what works and what doesn't because too much of the internet has
Then about chasing down the longest possible list of hacks and coming up with as many aphorism shortcuts or best practices as you can as if having all of them means that you will get to where you're going and I know a lot of creative people some of whom are well-known. Some of them will never be well known and the question is what does it even mean?
To make creative work happen. What does it mean to show up and make change and I looked for patterns so years ago when I wrote linchpin what I said is the only thing that leaders have in common is that they are leaders and the only thing that charismatic people have in common is that people had think they have Charisma but there isn't a given set of checklist items that you have to have to be creative or to be a leader or to have charisma.
Instead we can look for What rhymes and what the patterns are and in the case of a creative. It involves somebody who has made the decision that they want to change things and that is different than adopting. The brainwashed mindset of I will do what I'm told can we
dive a little bit more into the hacks. I mean we see them everywhere where does the the term hacker originate and then maybe dive into why?
So prolific, why are we so drawn to those?
Well by now the word means three or four things. So let's just isolate them because I'm I tend to use it in two different ways. There is the cracking hack of illegally opening somebody systems and messing with them. There is the esteemed hack of figure out how to use code or other forms of technology to solve an intractable problem in an elegant shortcut way, but there's also the
Pack of figure out exactly what the audience wants and giving it to them. That is the original definition of how hack the borough in London called Hackney used to be on the outskirts of London when London was smaller and they raised horses there, but they didn't raise great horses. They didn't raise expensive horses or thoroughbred horses or beautiful horses or trained horses just ordinary cheap horses. And if you were a cab driver, that's the horse for you.
That's why London cab drivers are called acts
that's interesting. But we're drawn to that right? It's almost like the illusion of knowledge that if somebody else is giving us the Nugget the gist of something we've lost something in
that right. So the the other definition of hack which is that I found the core nugget that mental understanding of what's behind this it corrupts. What the
Ants of the original word right that the original word means if I'm in the Doobie Brothers and I'm doing my 50th anniversary tour the people without a pandemic who would have come to see them don't actually want the Doobie Brothers to sing new songs. They want the Doobie Brothers to be a cover band of the Doobie Brothers. That's a hack in the sense that anybody who sounded like the old Doobie Brothers would have been a substitute because no one could tell the difference and what I am.
Ewing is you want to be doing work where people can tell the difference because that puts you on the hook.
Do you think we're naturally drawn to
shortcuts? I think that we've been indoctrinated in brainwashed by an industrial system and I wasn't alive before Frederick Taylor but Frederick Taylor definitely change the world it when you bring a stopwatch to a factory suddenly you are taking capitalism in weaponizing it you're saying if I can figure out how to save 30 seconds for every single
A part at the end of a year, we're gonna have a million dollars. So there's a real incentive to turn that screw to get quote more efficient. And I was just reading about Emoji shop in Kyoto Japan. That's a thousand years old and building a business to last a thousand years. You're not gonna be able to do that with shortcuts or hacks. You're going to do it by focusing on something else. And the thing is they bought a rice.
Machine, I don't know 20 years ago, but that was the first major technological Advance date had in a thousand years because the job of the Mochi store is not to be the biggest or most profitable Mochi store. It is to do their work the way they want to do it.
There's something Noble and not right and I think you mentioned a story on a another interview that I was listening to yesterday. We're used to eat at this restaurant and you wanted the Brussels sprouts, but because you're vegetarian you
Ask for no bacon and maybe you can tell the story a little bit better.
Well, there's a little celebrity angle which makes it an even juicier story. So David Chang mo mo Foucault the whole empire That Grew From nothing. We used to go to Momofuku when no one knew about it and it was probably David behind the grill. I'm not sure and the place only seats 50 people we would get there for lunch on Saturday with the family five six weeks in a row. They happily made me the Brussels sprouts with no bacon.
Because after all that saves them the cost of the bacon and saves me having to deal with the fact that I don't eat bacon and the sixth week we went and David said, you know, there's a restaurant about a block from here that really likes vegetarians and we have almost no vegetarian items on our menu and I think it would be better if you went somewhere else for lunch next time and that was the day that Momofuku became Momofuku in the David Chang.
I became David Chang because yeah, there are plenty of people you could cater to but the question is does that help you make the change you seek to
make I want to just explore this a little bit more because if that restaurant wasn't successful the story we would be saying afterwards as well. They didn't adapt that didn't serve their
customers. Yeah. I think that's legit except the word the gets into us into all sorts of trouble because nobody has everyone as their customer.
But it may be the water company, but that's about it that our goal cannot be to be
for everyone that we have to be for someone the smallest viable audience not the
biggest possible audience. And so for people who are you know, taking notes in search of a nugget. That's one that can change how you do your work whether you're a professor at York University or whether you are trying to do a start-up or whether you're in
Investor the whole deal is the internet is not a mass medium. We haven't had a new Mass medium since television. The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible and reaching everyone. There is no home page. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night and what that means is we have the luxury of saying
This is for and who it's not for and the mistake that so many people building something make is they get hung up on the feedback of people who it's not for as opposed to being obsessed with the people who it is for can they live without it? Would they miss it? If it were gone? Let's make that
that's what we should make. That's interesting. I have a friend who's writing a book and I said who's the book for and he said it's for everybody. Why do you think that we default to the this big everybody
concept?
All right, so that book is going to fail. I happily put that in writing right this minute. That book is going to fail Harry Potter the most successful book franchise in history. It made the author over a billion dollars. That book is for almost no one write that book is for precocious 12 year olds and people who like to remember what it was like to be a precocious 12 year old. That's not everyone that's a very small group of people and we say it's for everyone because it's
You'll it helps us be an evangelist. It says I am going to be so generous and I'm going to bring something to the world that everyone will benefit from but we are not who we are because of our atoms or molecules our DNA. We're who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves about the pain. We're in the hopes. We have the dreams. We live with pick those be specific about those and then those people
not only will find you but they will tell the
others. Are we hiding when we make something for everybody because that way we can't really fail like if we put something out for a specific audience and it doesn't resonate than the we get this immediate feedback that we missed the
mark. Yeah the way to be on the hook is to say this is only for people who are like this because if those people hate it, then you were wrong. Whereas if you say this is for everyone you're allowed to hide behind while
And hasn't found
it yet. When I come back to the inner stories that we tell ourselves. How do we how do we change that inner voice? How do we listen to and how do we debug
it? Okay, so in listening to your work overtime, I love the whole idea of first principles and mental maps and I think it's very easy in the information tsunami that we live in to feel like our defect is we don't have enough information.
Ation, if I just had more information than whatever I'm working on would go better and so I got to thinking about what are the pillars behind how I'm looking at the world five years ago. I started the altar MBA which is now an independent B Corp and they often be a teaches people to change their mind and it does it in this intensive 30-day online session and it combines a lot of the thinking I put together for the last 20 years in my books.
Here are I'm going to I've never said these out loud. So I'm going to try them with you first are the three pillars. But before I share them with you a quote from the great philosopher Dolly Parton and what she said was find out who you are and do it on purpose and the do it on purpose is a lot is a significant underpinning of the kind of ideas that you exposing your work.
That here's something you might benefit from if you were trying to do X Y or Z on purpose and I would like to flip Dolly's phrase upside down and I'd like to say do it on purpose and you'll find out who you are asking for a guarantee before you start isn't helpful instead. We need to look at a concept and idea and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do if we try it on for size, we will figure out if it fits
Us as opposed to the opposite which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are and then going and finding the things that fit us. So the three pillars the first one is the change you seek to make are you here to make a contribution or are you here to take something are you here to do what you are told or are you here to question and to make things different and answering that question honestly is really difficult because it's all about the story We Tell.
Tell ourselves and so if we can figure out how to tell ourselves a different story then we might be able to make a different level of contribution. So some people wake up in the morning and say how do I double my net worth and some people wake up in the morning and say how do I help the people in Borelli India get through another night without electricity. Those are two totally different kinds of change that you seek to make in the world, but they are both a change right the second pillar which fits into the first one so
I think the first one is too hard to start with is what possibility do you see because we've indoctrinated people from birth to either believe that they are entitled or not to believe that they are special or not to believe they have leverage or not. Do you see possibility in the change we seek to make and the flip side of that which goes with it is learning to see the world as it is and this is why you know the work that my friend Derek severs is done. For example.
It's so important any Duke on decision making learning to see the world as it is because it's so easy to imagine we get to make it the way we want it to be but we don't the world is the way it is and learning to see that reality is critical and it changes our understanding of what is possible because no one has ever done the work you hope to do then you might be deluding yourself. If on the other hand. There's a well-trodden path.
People have gone on that path. Then you might be able to follow it. So if we think about the stock market of which I know nothing lots and lots of people millions of people have read Ben Graham, but almost none of them turned into Warren Buffett. So part of that is discipline part of it is seeing the possibility part of it is deciding what kind of 50 year Journey you want to go on and how you will approach it. But none of it is that you didn't read Ben Graham.
And because all of the people did right and then the third pillar is and this is the one that is the most interesting to me lately how much emotional labor are you able and willing to expend to accomplish the thing you set out to do when I think about learning versus education, which I can talk about for hours education is compliant education is compulsory education is coercion learning is serious.
Incompetence on our way to getting better. And so the flip the pairing the tandem of emotional laborers. Do you care enough to learn something? So there are all these things in my life. I don't care enough to learn that I could go get a book from the library or I could go listen to 20 podcast so I can go practice something and I would get better at it and I haven't done it and I'm 60 years old and the honest answer is not because I'm talented or not talented. It says I don't care enough to expend the energy of what it would take.
To get good at that so you asked me a simple question. I gave you a half-hour answer but there you go back to you.
You give me a beautiful answer every three follow-ups to that that are sort of like different rabbit holes here. The first is how do we learn?
The only way to learn is by doing things?
That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make a vegetarian Maki roll, but you will not learn how
to do it until you
do it and the reading the listening is important preparation. But learning is the act of failing on our way to Mastery and that is part of my beef with organized education. So that organize education has precious little learning in it and you mentioned
in your book that when you got your MBA there was an open book test and I thought that was a typo because when I got my MBA there wasn't One open book test every test was closed book and what I thought about it, I realized that the only course is I learned anything in in college and business school where the ones that were essentially open book because what it means to have an open book educational interaction is that you have to do the work you have to actually learn something because it
Not about did you memorize things for 10 minutes and then write them down? It's did you actually do the thing and now you know how
I think so much about what organized education is also doing is preventing failure. It's going out of its way to not build those muscles and in children for
sure and you know, I like to talk about the act and Academy which is now there's more than a hundred of them. It's basically a one-room schoolhouse. Typically, there are 50 kids.
Kids and two adults in the whole building and one of them is the custodian and one of the rules that act in is you're not allowed to ask an adult a question.
And so we've got kids between 5 and 17 years of age teaching each other learning from each other. They get a report card every week that goes home to their parents. It says what they built on what they created and who they helped and the process just keeps repeating and you got to believe that the end of 12 Years of that you are probably more optimistic more resilient more generous and better qualified to make a contribution and someone who got A's and was on the
Pep Squad,
how do we learn to become an observer of
reality? This one is so important particularly in are siloed world that it is really dangerous to deny science and accurate reporting of the world around us because it permits us to live in our own reality which is fun for a while, but then you try to do something and you
discover that.
The laws of
thermodynamics are actually correct and you discover that viruses don't care that you tried really hard for five days. And now you deserve a break that's not how epidemiology works and you could learn how epidemiology works by actually exposing yourself to the data and the experiences around it. So when I read any Dukes first book and she tells the story about
Jim Carroll in the Super Bowl it blew my mind because For the First Time, I really understood what it meant to make a decision or when I teach people about sunk costs. It's really fascinating to watch some people get it because they'd never properly understood what song costs were and how they were holding them back. These fundamental principles are at the core of so much of what you've been sharing and so I don't have to persuade people who are
Ending to this that there is a shared reality we live in but pursuing it by testing it by exposing ourselves to why is this true? Not just did it get past a peer-reviewed journal if we understand it and it holds up to examination then we've learned to see it as it really is.
There's a little wrinkled or Nuance to that that I would say that I see occasionally, which is we understand
how the world works, but we
think it should work.
Work differently.
Yeah, and you know if you listen to David Deutsch who I don't you think you've interviewed him have you
know, I would if he's listening I'd love to have him on the show.
What a character and I I listen to a stuff on audiobook because I would just slow down so much if I had to turn the pages but everything he says makes absolutely no sense and yet it's coherent and so multiplying multiple Universe quantum mechanics times.
How can someone not you know donate to a charity? How can someone eat this unhealthy food? I mean all around us. There are people who make choices that we would not make who do things that we would not do it's not quantum mechanics. What it is is everyone tells themselves a different story. They don't believe what we believe they don't know what we know. They don't want what we want and if we don't have the empathy to say that's okay, then we have no hope of ever serving or work.
Being with
them want to come back to some coughs. What are those?
Okay. So the first lesson of almost any business schools ignores some costs and then people who are smart say, what are those a sunk cost is a gift from your former self. Maybe it's a law degree. Maybe it's tickets to the movies. Maybe it's the deposit on a vacation that you had long planned. Maybe it's the
All connection you have to a certain kind of thing happening in your future like a big wedding. It was hard for you to learn that dream and it was hard for you to get that degree. And now here we are. It's a gift from your former self in the question is do you have to accept that gift? So the story I tell is they were doing some construction work across the street from my house and the guy put in a new flight of
stone steps and I waited till he was done and then I went over and I said you did nice work. He said thanks a lot. And I said, I don't know if anyone mentioned to you, but you have these signs that say Quality Masonry with your phone number on them and we live in a fairly literate town and I was just letting you know, you spelled the word masonry wrong and he was like, yeah, I know it cost me a lot of business, but I already paid 450 of these signs.
And that's a sunk cost because if he had found 50 signs Lying by the side of the road with his name spelled wrong. He wouldn't have picked them up because he would realize these signs aren't going to help they're not worth having for free and these signs are free because the old him paid for them. He didn't pay for them and every time he's using them it hurts and I have a pair of shoes at home that don't fit me anymore, and I should throw them out, but I don't because I
Member what it took to get them when I was younger and I can't throw them out but I should because I didn't pay for them my former self pay for them. And if you're walking around with shoes that don't fit you should probably get a new pair of shoes.
Do you think that applies to relationships as well?
It does but it's largely misunderstood with relationships in the sense that a new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting, but it will not be
A new relationship for a long and then you're still stuck with an old relationship. And the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is and if the answer is yes, then yes sunk cost completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs
are there other ways that we don't think of sunk costs that are non
intuitive. Well are
ability to rationalize sunk costs is really spectacular. And one of the things that we do is we increase with dramatized how expensive it will be to tell other people that we are ignoring sunk cost. It will break my parents heart if I tell them that after 10 years, I hate being a lawyer because they paid for me to go to law school. And so therefore I'm going to be unhappy for 10 more years because I don't
My parents to be unhappy for an hour right that we really liked being hooked on the effort and the feeling it took to get our neurons aligned around who we thought we were the story We Tell ourselves and that is probably why sunk costs are so challenging. So what I encourage people to do this is a hack in the good sense is established.
- new sunk cost for yourself to keep you going. This is part of the practice. So I've written 7,500 blog posts in a row haven't missed one. It's really emotionally expensive for me now to miss a blog post. My blog is a sunk cost in the sense that if it stops giving me dry for the Long Haul I should stop writing it. It doesn't matter how hard it was to build the streak going forward. It's a gift from my former self.
But I can tell you on a Thursday if I just don't have anything to write that sunk cost is enough to get me over the hump.
All right, we're coming out of this Rabbit Hole slowly here. How do you make decisions?
Well, how do I make decisions that I talked about in public because I'm proud of how I make decisions or how do I make decisions most of
the time in reality? How do you make decisions? How do you make important decisions
what I found when I was 12, is that my mild.
Survey EDD was either a curse or an asset and it certainly got me in trouble at school and it certainly made my life a lot more interesting because I'm easily swayed by novelty and bright shiny objects and opportunity and possibility. But what I also discovered shortly thereafter is that I could develop the willpower to walk.
Wolof certain areas of choice so that I wouldn't end up chasing those sorts of novelty. I just decided and so I don't look back. So I haven't had meat since 1981 or 1979 or so. I just decided I'm done not going to do that and I have no yearnings Cravings whatsoever. I'm just done and by Walling off areas of what
Do and don't do and how I do it. I've narrowed the frame of the decisions that I need to consider and then within that frame I try to use this this this math of how do I build resilience into the process? How do I see the dip that lies ahead with any given path? Because if I'm not willing to commit to something it's probably not.
Worth starting doing it because again the novelty will be satisfied but then I might be stuck without the objective that I sought to serve. I will tell you that certain things that are designed to be really difficult but somewhat trivial decisions, like what kind of car to buy they can really mess me up for weeks at a time because there's no dominant choice, but when it comes to something like should I have a podcast the way that I did that math was I care?
The form of media I always come up with my media boundaries before I come up with the media content and I learned that when I was booked packager meaning I don't say I have a good idea. I'm going to make a book. I say what are the constraints of books? How do I explore that? And then how do I find an idea that fits into that container? So with podcasts I did want to really long time ago. It was the number one business podcast for years and years, but it was
completely out of date. And so the question was should I make a new podcast? So I explored the format in my head because that was novelty that was fun. The commitment didn't exist because I didn't have to say yes to anybody and once I solved the problem in a way that made me happy there was no point in making the podcast because I'd already gotten all the satisfaction. I was going to get out of solving the problem and then I got a call from somebody who said we will pay you to make a podcast and in that moment I wasn't
Taking intentional action. I was reacting to something it was incoming that was sloppy, but it's okay because I was busy doing other things in this wasn't my intention in the moment, but I looked at the options which is why you've solved this problem and so you could say no and then you get nothing or this person will make a contribution to the things that you care about and you'll get a laboratory to explore new ways.
As to do this and so I said, yes, and now I'm on the eighth season the question. Is there a dip or is this simply part of my practice and I've come to the conclusion there probably isn't a dip in the sense that this podcast is going to get to become as popular as yours, and that's fine because that's not why I built it. But as long as chopping this wood and carrying this water satisfies me I'll keep doing it and the day it doesn't it will become a sunk cost and I will walk away.
It sounds like when your Walling off certain areas of your life that you're forcing yourself to focus through either environmental constraints or mental constraints. How did you go about deciding which areas to put barriers on it doesn't
matter.
That's the key.
But it doesn't matter that. I just have not going to watch television and with all the time. I saved not watching television. I got all these other benefits but I could have just as easily said I'm not going to do this with my time so I can watch television. It doesn't matter. It's just limiting the incoming limiting the distractions forces me to be on the hook because I can't go home at the end of the day or can't go to bed at night and say well that day.
Went fine because if I don't do the things that I'm left with I do nothing and it's that doing nothing becomes a fuel for someone who needs novelty that doing nothing deprives me of the fuel that I need to feel alive. And so I don't do nothing
like that want to come back to the emotional Labour to which is do you think that that's our willingness to
Except
a certain degree of pain or effort that's associated with the goals. We want to accomplish. Is that really just asking us like how bad do we want
it? Okay, so let's how about labor labor? First Karl Marx labor labor, most of the people listening to this not only don't we do it. We don't even live next to somebody who does it right the person who worked in the mine the person who worked in a dark Factory in Manchester surrounded by
Candles for light who was grinding their way through work that was painful tiring and ultimately unhealthy. That's what labor used to be digging ditches being, you know outdoors in the heat having someone tell us how to expand our energy emotional labor Arrow hochschild named it 1963 emotional labor is showing up when we don't feel like it emotional labor is smiling when we're grimacing.
NG emotional labor is being kind to a customer who's not being kind to us. If it's your hobby and you can do it when you want to do it. There is no labor whatsoever. Right hobbies are great hobbies help make us more human. But if we're going to get paid at some point, we're doing some form of Labor what I argue in some of my writing is if you're going to run a marathon you're going to get tired and you shouldn't hire a coach to teach you how to run a marathon without getting tired.
And if you're going to do this work of emotional labor, you're going to become afraid you're going to get fatigued. You're going to feel like giving up. You can't make that go away. That's part of what it means to do emotional labor. The question is what emotional labor do you want to sign up for? And when do you want to do it and what you get in return and there are definitely people who are so privileged. They don't have a requirement to do labor emotional or otherwise
Eyes and I don't think those people are very happy because part of what makes us modern humans is we are on and we are off and when we're on we're doing some sort of Labor. Do you
think that the part of that is our need to contribute to something larger than ourselves now,
that's a really good question because that's what I grew up with. I had amazing parents. I wanted to birthday Lottery. A lot of people didn't have that luxury that privilege and yet many of those
People have grown up to make a contribution, but were also surrounded by people many of whom are in the media who make no contribution at all who are just taking all the time. And sometimes we will ionize those people and sometimes we call those people Heroes. If ours. I don't think that that makes sense. I think the Forbes 400 is actually a toxic pox on our culture because that's no way to measure someone's contribution, but apparently
Why some people in many pockets of our world believe that their role is not to be a contribution but to get rewarded for
exerting their power. How do you think about
success? Well, I try to keep track of would they miss you? If you were gone would they miss you? If you didn't show up have you done something for which there are few happy substitutes and have you done it in a way that leaves things better?
That you
found them. And so that's the compass. I'm trying to use each day. I don't you know plenty of data shows that after seventy thousand US Dollars happiness does not increase for people and you know, there are billionaires who had a really bad day yesterday because something changed in there the numbers on their screen and that seems like a really bad reason to have a bad day
when I come back to something you said about sort of winning the birth Lottery here the ovarian lottery I think is buffer.
And calls it and how how that puts us sort of.
On a trajectory that we didn't control right we get a push into the world based on this and then other people get a push that may be more or less than we are with the different trajectory and yet at some point we take control of our trajectory become an adult and we're responsible, you know, ignoring luck were responsible for our outcomes. So you can you can outperform your initial trajectory or you can underperform and I'm curious as to how you see
things that we control that would help us out perform versus things that we would spiral us downward or change our trajectory into negative.
That's a really elegant way to talk about it. I'm not sure I completely agree because the imagery of Hollywood movies in free fall and people pushing off with puffs of air and stuff. I think it diminishes two things friction and luck how
Times does someone have to get lucky as an adult for the outside world to say that person is succeeding. And are you in a position to maximize your luck or are you in a position where you need to get lucky again tomorrow and the choices that we need to make in that regard are available to us, but are often invisible, you know, so when I think about how deeply we've been
indoctrinated on matters of cast and how the benefit of the doubt goes to people like you and me and the benefit of the doubt is not given to somebody who maybe doesn't look like us or speak with the same accent as we do or have the same kind of parenting that we did that the benefit of the doubt is profound and putting yourself in a position to leverage, you know, so when I think about I started one of the first internet companies and when I started it
Everyone said I was delusional in fact in a best-selling book. I was the used the word delusional to talk about me. The thing that I thought was going to work didn't work and we were resilient enough to shift gears and then I met Jerry Kelowna and Fred Wilson and I was their first investment as it team and that was a really lucky thing, but then Super unlucky things happened.
In very quick succession and we almost got wiped out and so when I think about all of the left's in the rights and all of those choices, some of them were mine and many of them weren't and I didn't know 150th of what I know now, but I'm not sure if I did know the things I know now that the outcome would have been any better. So I'm I think luck is way more important than most people give it credit for
I think it's important to we do have some control over the things that we control but you mentioned friction. Can you explore that a little
bit Yeah, so that, you know, we the convenience obsessed internet and the tech behind it have made it so certain things have so much less friction than they used to. I mean I'm talking about trivial things like how long it takes to reach somebody with a message because back at Spinnaker when I worked there in the early 80s
There were 30 40 FedEx envelopes waiting every day just to leave the building to more difficult bits of friction. Like how do we end up finding the resources to get the next piece of the puzzle in place? You know the Shelf space still matters your product might be great. But how do you get it on the shelves of Walmart or how do you get on the shelves of Google because
If you're not on the shelves of Walmart, you're not in the shells of Google you might be invisible and it's friction that kept you there not some sort of Merit contest in that in order for something to go forward. Something else is going to have to move out of your way. A lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is friction reducing activities, but these friction reducing activities create their own sort of friction because maybe you don't know read and maybe you don't get introduced in that.
Setting where things would have been easier. I mean I just completely irrelevant story. It was 1997 and they were launching ZDNet which was softbank's TV network about technology and my office was outside of New York City and I get this call. Mr. Saint would really like it. If you would come to the launch party for ZDNet and I'm like, well, he's an investor in the people who are investors in me. I'd be
Happy to help. They said great. It's tomorrow at 4 o'clock and figuring. Well, I could get away from the office for an hour and they said in San Francisco and I had to go and it was nothing but friction, right? It's all around us, but it's easy to imagine that it's not
for somebody like yourself who so accomplished that you've got 19 books.
Now the new ones the 20th best seller, but I used to be a book packager. There were a hundred and twenty of those people don't talk about.
How do you you get all these inbound requests? How do you decide what to
Do what not to do.
I don't get particularly hung up. I know that's one of my disciplines. It's one of my boundaries is that I think people appreciate a thoughtful quick generous no more than no response and more than a yes. You don't follow up on your work is your work and defending it is critical because otherwise you are going to do nothing but be
The a cost-free Unpretty or ties contribution to other peoples work that will never amount to what it needs to be because your your work will not be appropriately allocated. And so, you know a long time ago. Tom Peters changed my life by blurbing one of my book so I try to do that, but I can't do it for every book because I read every word and I write my own stuff. So more and more several times a day. I write back saying I did.
But you wrote. I'm really sorry. I can't no I won't be able to do this. Good luck not having cognitive load associated with that is critical because otherwise there would be no more work for me.
I like that because so often we just do this non response or the other sort of other things in that script that you have because it's really hard for us to learn how to say no like how do we say no with Grace and appreciation for the other person but also put up that boundary in a way that doesn't affect.
Fact that relationship and I think that we struggle with that so often we just I won't reply to this email,
right? So again, I take the I won't reply off the table except for the now dramatically increasing number of semi personalized spam that's coming from virtual assistant Farms that is going to be the end of email forever but leaving that part aside why is the person asking you so for example, I give
Peaches for a living it's one of the only things I charge for and if it's a non-profit in New York City. I never charge them. But everybody else I charge them because it's not fair to some people to charge them and not others. I need to be able to honestly say to somebody it is how much it costs. So someone will send me a note and they'll say I'm doing this thing for these 20 entrepreneurs. There's no budget. Will you come speak to us for 20 minutes? What I'll write back is well, here's four videos of Me on YouTube.
I have found its way more effective for your group to have everyone watch the videos before the meeting and then have a discussion with each other about what I said way more effective 99 times out of a hundred that never happens because they weren't actually asking me to come say something to them that they couldn't get somewhere else. What they were actually doing is saying I will gain status in the eyes of my peers.
There's if I can persuade you to give us a very expensive speech for free and I heard that and I saw that and I will back basically say yes, but you will gain more status with your peers if you can persuade them to exert emotional labor to actually learn something. So I'm not doing it to tweak people. I'm doing it for the one out of a hundred who we're doing what they said. They were doing which is trying to help people. I think that that distinction is important because just because I'm easy to find and
because I'm sort of known doesn't mean that I have an obligation to make you happy right this minute
talk to me about some of the lessons you've learned about giving good talks versus bad
talks. We're going to talk first about a post covid pre covid world where we're live in person. I've seen 10,000 talks live in person because I've given a thousand of them and almost all of them are terrible and they're terrible for a couple of reasons.
First of all, the person giving the talk is afraid and secondly the person giving the talk is mistaken about what the talk is for.
If you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation if your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that Insight then you should either write a book or write a memo and say here in an asynchronous way. This is what we know.
If you're going to show up live in person in real time synchronized you are performing and the goal is to not deliver the information but to deliver a motion cause a change in the people who are hearing you that is its purpose. What change are you seeking to make so when I give my classic presentation is different every time but basically it's a hundred and fifty to a hundred ninety slides delivered over the course of 45 to 50 minutes.
And in that period of time I will tell a large number of stories and I will change the emotional state of the audience up and down and back and forth and it will be better because other people are in the room with you that is critical the same way Twitter works better if your friends are on Twitter my talk works better. If you are not the only person in the room and yet almost every talk I've ever seen that's not true.
And then when we move to the virtual world most conference organizers completely missed the memo and they think their job because they're buying status is to cram a TED talk into a zoom room and that just doesn't work. It works to deliver some level of status in the sense that we got this person to come live. But what I can tell you is I could deliver and as live talk pre-recorded that eliminates All Tech castle and all synchronous.
And you can just hit play a no one will be able to tell that I recorded it a week before and yet most organizers don't want that because they think what they want is the status not that energy and what I believe in a virtual talk is if you're going to do it synchronized they'll goal is to change the energy in the room to sell people on the idea not to say here's the idea. It's a difference between Sushi and
Old fish on rice right Sushi is the sales process called fission Rice's what it actually is. What we have is the opportunity to say we all came together here. You can see the other people you can feel that I am sincere and what I am doing you can engage with QA you can stress test this and when you leave you will have seen the look on the other people and realize People Like Us do things like this. This is the way it's going to be around here from now on that is what makes
A good talk. And so I think we're on the cusp of Zoom actually become a useful tool. But what is holding it back is status focused management then wants to make sure there's butts in seats and enforcement as opposed to using it as the peer-to-peer magical tool. It could be
really appreciate that inside. It sort of makes me wonder now. What is the goal of a book and what is a good book?
So a book when we say book, we're not talking about Shakespeare or Steve Martin. I think we're talking about this kind of advice how to in miscellaneous that you and I trafficking I think well, I know when I first started I did a hundred twenty bucks as a book package or that was my job and I woke up in the morning and I said, I need to invent a book today or I will not get paid.
But after permission marketing it wasn't my job anymore and the last 19 books. I've only written because I had no choice because the idea would not let me just turn it into a blog post because I would argue of my 7000 blog post. I could easily have turned 200 of them into books. They could have carried a book but
I did the blog posting that it's off my chest I'm done a book is two things first. It's a signal to the reader to say this person who you know could have written a blog post decided to devote a year of his or her life to handing it to you in this complete form that is timeless and shareable and the second part is and now you can share you can have a book group. You can hand it to somebody else and say this let's talk about this.
And those two pieces together are what everyone in the successful books I've ever done have in common that permission marketing helped invent email marketing as an industry because you could hand it to people you hired and say this is what we do around here and tribes has been used by people on every side of the political spectrum and other forms of organization because it's a touchstone and that's what the practice is supposed to be two.
What do you think most books get wrong?
The authors of most books are looking for many of the Magical elements of status that come from successfully being published. They pay attention to the bestseller list. They game it. They pay attention to reviews. They worried about what their friends think of the book even though their friends don't read books, even though it wasn't written for those people and they listen way too much to risk averse.
Editors who are going to do fifty or a hundred bucks a year. Those people are only going to spend three days total on your book. And then there's going to be another one. Whereas this is your book and you should write it at the length. You need it to be to make it singular and idiosyncratic and peculiar because we don't have any information shortage and we don't have a book shortage.
Why is it that we can get a thousand compliments and then one criticism and we
Is relentlessly on that one criticism, even if it's from somebody, we don't know don't like don't respect hasn't even read the book perhaps but that's what sticks in her mind. Why is that?
Well, I don't think that's true for everybody because narcissists and sociopaths don't have that problem. So if you do have that problem welcome because you're quiet reassurance is futile reassurance that we seek is like a warm bath. It feels great and then
Need more of it because the future is unpredictable. And when the future doesn't match what you hope for the reassurance you used to have isn't enough you need more reassurance reassurances part of our armor against the criticism that helps us feel like a fraud that amplifies our imposter syndrome that makes us believe that for every person who had the guts to criticize us. There's 10,000 people who feel
just as badly about the work we did but don't want to speak up and I have a hunch. It's because a high school. I think it's a combination of high school and mortality. I don't know about you but most of the people in high school and me that was brutal the idea that there's kids at the other lunch table who are talking about you behind your back when the thing you most want from an evolutionary biology point of view is to procreate and it's
you know think about what happens if you're in a tiny village on the Savannah and the chief kicks you out you're going to die that we have deep deep need to be in community and to be part of something in harmony because it connects to our survival and criticism feels not like the generous Act of a professional which is a different kind of criticism, but it feels like an assault and
I'm not surprised it in our head we've weaponize it into this threat.
You've said that creativity is a choice. It's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else. Can you explore that for me?
Yeah this really rub some people the wrong way which makes me like it even more. What does it mean that creativity is a choice. Well first thing
Have you ever been creative once in your life? Have you ever solved an interesting problem told a funny joke said something to somebody else. It needed to be said I've never met anyone who said no, everyone has been creative at least once so what does it mean to be creative more than once it means that you have to extend yourself with empathy to the person you are seeking to serve to the person who the work is for and you have to extend yourself not just through space but through time.
Into the future announcing something that might or might not work. You don't know yet. That's what makes it creative. If you exert the emotional labor to do those two things. Sometimes you will have a successful creative outcome. That's a choice. So the people who say I don't have any questions. Well, no, it's impossible. You don't have any questions where you're actually saying is I don't care enough.
To ask a question that might embarrass me. That's what you're actually saying and that's a euphemism for I don't want to make the choice to be creative.
I have this theory that one of the biggest things that holds us back in life. Is that were unwilling to look like an idiot in the short term to be successful in the long
term. Yeah. That's brilliant. You should write that one down.
What does it mean to trust
yourself? So the original title for my book was trust yourself. I even own trust yourself.com which is
Lying mostly dormant and it wasn't an expensive when we say I am talking to myself. Nobody thinks that's a weird thing to say, who is I and who is yourself? Why does it feel so normal to have two voices in our heads because we all do one voice is hyper literate and verbal and vocal and a Critic it is responsible for getting
Us to fit in all the way the other voice not that good at being verbal that self is the one that wants to make things better that's curious is inquisitive. They might color outside the lines and it's the first voice that is mostly in control. And so when we look at Great shortcuts in hacks, like morning Pages, they exist to bypass the first voice that so many of the things that created.
People do as part of their practice exists to make the first voice the monkey mind be a little calmer so that the other voice can be trusted enough to speak up that doesn't mean it will always work and it doesn't mean we should let that voice do whatever it wants to but it should at least be allowed to present its agenda. So that are more cognition focused brain can make a
decision.
What does it mean to be a professional you said doing what you love is for amateurs and loving what you do is for professionals. Can you expand on that and then explore some other differences?
Okay. So there are very few amateur surgeons, right? You want a professional surgeon you want the surgeon to show up and do her work beautifully, even if she's in a bad mood and you want her to keep going to continuing education classes to be a stent understanding the state-of-the-art not because they are fascinated by how the
Annie works, but because they said to you I'm really good at knee surgery and I will take care of you a professional makes it promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it amateurs get to be authentic whatever that means amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make. I love being an amateur at some things don't sell your hobbies do your hobbies for you, but if you're going to be a pro
It means you need to understand the state of the art needs means you need to raise the bar. You need to understand who it's for. And what's it for what change do you seek to make there's a whole bunch of obligations that go with being a professional that put you on the hook and for years. I've had uniforms at work. I don't usually wear them in public they change from time to time. The beginning was a lab coat lately. I've just been trying the Japanese volunteer fireman. Hoppy coat because when you put on the uniform
You've just sent yourself a message. Do your work at your workspace do it at the appointed hours. Never ever miss a deadline never ever go over budget because professionals don't miss deadlines don't throw tantrums and don't go over budget and every once in a while a creative breakthrough because they're doing their hobby for money and they do those things. They miss their deadline level and people applaud them and then eventually they fade away because the industry is rework.
Kin, they want to work with
professionals. How do we Define work?
Well, there's the work and then there's work the verb for me the work is what the professional said they would do and there are definitely times that I permission marketing the phrase that enabled me to be an author came to me in the shower. Right but it didn't come to the meteor shower. Accidentally. It came to me in the shower with intent I went.
To the shower and I was getting close to the self-appointed deadline and I said I'm going to stay in the shower until I have a name for this thing. We do here even if the water gets cold and we only had a 40 gallon hot water tank at the time. So I knew I didn't have a lot of time I was in there to do work and I think as we get more and more privileged where our work looks so much more like what people used to think of as Hobbies.
We can get confused by the fact that our work is a hobby. It's not and treating it like our work. I think helps us make it better
you mentioned earlier something and I forget the contacts, but maybe you can expand on it about meeting the spec talk to me about that.
I know I've been ranting. So thank you for giving me this platform.
This is beautiful keep going then there's there's lots to be
said about spec first. Let's talk about Edwards Deming and what spec?
Quality Meat quality is not luxury quality is not expensive quality is not that you love it quality is just one thing it meets spec. So if I look under an electron microscope at any part of a Lexus, which is by any measure, the highest quality car, there is under electron microscope is filled with defects, but they're not defects that matter because their defects that are within spec.
And so we begin by understanding. What is the spec of the work we're going to do if it meets spec not only is equality but it is good enough and good enough is not a slur good enough. Is it definition? It met spec. So once it's good enough we ship the work if you're not happy with that change your spec, but let's be really clear about what the spec. Is that what it meant for Alexis to be good enough when they first came out was it?
To be a standard deviation better than a Mercedes that was there a definition if someone's going to say no. No, we can't ship this Lexus because it's not perfect. The product managers should say no. No, it was never supposed to be perfect. It never can be perfect. It's simply met spec. The hard work was in defining the spec aspect that will get you to the next step
two questions about suspect. Do you think that applies in a world of Leverage where the difference between something that's
It's you know meets back and something that exceeds spec can be massively disproportionate.
Yeah. No, I think that we're having a semantic discussion here. But if the massive shift that you're looking for that comes from Leverage is important that should be part of the spec.
Okay. And do you think we hide behind Perfection? Oh, yeah all the time talk to me all the time double click on that.
So if we've had a hundred years of industrialism
And industrialism has been all about don't ship things that are defective if we have brainwashed every human being who is alive who's been through organized schooling into understanding that in a is better than a b and there are wrong answers in right answers on the test. Well, then it's super easy to say good enough and perfect are the same thing. So when I was in college the logic in symbolic logic was with my favorite class.
Isis the symbolic logic exam was not only open book open note. It was unlimited time in the room. So you got there at 8:00 a.m. You could say as long as you wanted I decided when I got to college I would take as many classes as I could because it was all the same price and I wasn't going to care about my grades because I didn't want to be tempted to go to law school. And so if I could take a class pass/fail, I would kiss Peck was easier to meet right and after three and a half hours at the
In the logic exam I said I could probably get a few more points here, but I have met my spec and I left and I was one of the first people to leave but someone stayed there for I think it was 18 hours. And the question is what did they get in exchange for that focus on perfectionism because I know what I did in the other 15 hours that were free to me and I think unless you believe you're immortal.
Using your time wisely is probably a good practice.
I like the way that you think about that in terms of spec. I often think about it as the bar sort of and there's areas where you want that bar to be raising and there's areas where you just want to sort of do the do the table Stakes for the bare minimum possible and you need to decide what those leverage points are for you and those areas that you care about and then identify people and surround yourself with people who are going to encourage you to raise that bar.
So here's a great
Approach which is next time you're working on a project turn on Kind of Blue from Miles Davis. First of all surround yourself with the right people the people who joined him in the studio for those four days with the right people, but secondly, he made one of the most important one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time in four days.
And the question you need to ask yourself is if they had spent four more days in the studio. What would have happened?
That's a great point. I'm going to listen to that after this talk to me a little bit about shame. We avoid Shame by avoiding blame. Can you expand on
that? Okay, so what has happened in my lifetime and it happened hundreds of years ago in Salem, Massachusetts and it is happened in many other places. Is that shame has
Been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance that would people have figured out is that shame is a soft spot on almost everybody and if you press that spot people will shrink they will run away. It is particularly used against women, but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action. It's
a ridiculous method because it doesn't scale. It's not you main it is not kind and it's unpredictable and yet we use it all the time how dare you is not said often enough to people who are seeking to shame us.
That what we need to do is take shame off the table because it extinguishes part of our Humanity when we shame people and shaming yourself. There's that trust yourself think shaming yourself is something we do all the time. There's a rant in my book called the world's worst boss and I just gave away the punchline, but basically if you had a boss who woke you up in the middle of the night scold you for not working hard enough criticized all your work and told you you were
Never going to amount to anything. You would not work for that person for very long and yet most of us that is our own boss. That's who we work for that voice in our head. And if that voice is shaming you you need to figure out how to undo that internal narrative because it is extinguishing your work.
How do we learn that? Like, what does that process look like?
Well, I'm a huge fan of cognitive behavioral therapy and trained CBT practitioners certainly better at it than I am.
But catching ourselves when we begin the Cascade is the key to the whole thing because once the Cascade of Shame begins, it is very difficult to stop. Hmm. But if you can figure out what are the trigger points, where are the moments? What is that phrase and in that moment intercede and replace it with a different one and that's part of why I wear a uniform and I like the idea of being a professional because now and this is
Ski, the work is not personal the work is the work in the resources. I had allocated I did the best work. I could to meet the spec. Here it is. This is not me. This is the work if you don't like the work teach me so I can change my spec for next time but I will not shame myself nor will I let you shame me because that's not helpful. What's helpful is to learn from this interaction of what we put in the world.
And you know some of the workshops inside akimbo in the alt NBA people give and get between 400 and 600 pieces of feedback a month from fellow Travelers who are doing what they're doing and what they say is that's more feedback that I got in two years and it's useful feedback from people who know how to give criticism and it doesn't come with shame. It's just information and that's so
Freeing, you know, I learned the first year I was in the book business. I sold my first book the first day and then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. I would go to the mailbox every single day and there'd be letters there with stamps on them. It's someone who paid for to write me a letter saying we don't like your idea day after day after day sometimes five or 10 or 15 in a day.
And learning to separate the feedback of this idea isn't working for us from you're a bad person who will never amount to anything was a key part of my internal development as someone who could do this work.
How do you think about the difference between coaching and criticism?
That's a really good question. So Michael bungay stanier has written the best book on coaching and I would be
If you guys to chat, he's in Toronto coaching is not telling someone the answer and I think I heard you talking to Derek about what happens when you make someone's idea 1% better. We make someone's idea of 1% better. You actually disincentivize them not incentivize them and with little kids saying to a little kid, you're so smart or the horrible. You're really cute or beautiful is not helpful. What's helpful.
Is helping people see what they are capable of giving what they told you was important to them criticism is completely different criticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge who is not trying to earn status by hurting you is able to help you see the world as it is.
And those three pieces are the key right? Because most of the criticism I've gotten in. My life has come from people who felt like they would feel better if I felt worse and then it made me didn't verbalize that to themselves, but we certainly see that I mean, you know, I don't know what Canadian Thanksgiving is like but that's one of the things that happens with American Thanksgiving all the time stock analysts. Do it all the time the person who said Amazon dot toast.
No one remembers their name, but at the time they were a sensation because one person Mighty enough to take on Amazon and then but the part about domain knowledge is critical because you not only have to know it when you see it. You have to be smart enough and practiced enough to put it in words to teach someone else. So years ago American Express hired me to interview Diane Von Furstenberg, and it was absolutely fascinating interview because I felt
Unprepared because I don't understand the Fashion World very well. So I read both of her autobiographies as I was talking with her asking her questions. I realized not only hadn't she written her autobiographies. She hadn't even read them but leaving that part aside she was unable to describe why the things she had done that succeeded had succeeded and she was unable to describe.
Herb why the things that had failed had failed. She was just completely intuitive. She just had a hunch she saw it, but she didn't have words to explain it. So she didn't have domain knowledge. She had locked into good taste what she liked his what other people liked and if you can hire somebody like that you should do it, but you shouldn't work for somebody like that and you shouldn't have somebody like that as a client because it's going to be really hard for you to get better.
And when I met two of my colleagues from the book industry Michael cater who still the most influential person in the book business, he writes Publishers launch every day and John Boswell who did French for cats and OJ's legal pad. They were the first two people in the book industry who could explain to me in words why things that worked worked and they weren't always right, but they gave me a grounding a taxonomy and as somebody who thinks with both sides of
Their brain that was really useful to me because I need a taxonomy and that's why I love media because I had a set of theories about how the internet works. If you read unleashing the idea of Iris, which I were 20 years ago. I was right about so many things because I had a theory and once you have the taxonomy you can say and then maybe this and then maybe this and then maybe this I didn't on the other hand trust myself enough to invest in any of the companies that change the world because that's not what I do, but
Learning a narrative and then changing it based on new data. I mean that's what you've been doing for years. It's super generous work. Who is the first person that ever bet on you? My parents did
do you remember how you felt in that moment when you realize that they were doing that
the high school thing was really painful and seeing them show up.
With more than parental obligation was I mean it was 10 years of fuel it made a huge difference to me.
Do you find your biggest mistakes in life are commission or Omission
Omission for sure people. I didn't help things. I didn't start things. I didn't say folks who I could have given the benefit of the doubt to who I didn't I worry a lot about the
In ones but there aren't that many of them. The Omission ones is a endless list.
What are some of the hard-earned lessons that you've paid for in business that we can benefit
from? I would think I think the biggest one is people don't want what you want.
Employees don't want what you want customers don't want what you want. You know that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and Founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They're not not even close. It's this sort of a prize pool at the end of the game show and it ends up becoming a massive demotivator in almost every organization because it hasn't cashed out yet. Right like you promised me and in people's minds 100 shares.
Not knowing any percentage numbers. They've just decided that that whatever so people don't want what you want. And that means we have to extend ourselves and go to where they are. Like, I already read the book but everyone who's going to read the book hasn't read it yet. So they need something. I don't need right or what fuels someone to go to work every day is different than what fuels me to go to work every day. So I was part of it number two is if you play any game in which money is in
involved the fact that people have a different story about money.
Will cause you to make mistakes and they will either be mistakes because other people are better at piling up money than you are which is extremely likely and so a part of what you're seeking to do is play on that axis.
They'll beat you if they have the chance because they think that because it's easy to measure and socially acceptable that is all that matters. And so people the phrase it's just business is really a horrible phrase, but lots of people mean it which what they're saying is Art. So when I worked at Spinnaker for David cease in 1983, he love board games and I've been a game designer since I was 16 and so we were playing diplomacy me and the
Another senior people at the company and David and I formed an alliance. He was the president. I was 23, they'll he was Russia and I don't remember who I was and we had a mutual non-aggression pact and around five. I double-crossed him and knocked him out of the game. It took a year for our relationship to recover because my whole thing was it's just a game. That's the way you're supposed to do in diplomacy.
And his thing was there was this overhang of yeah, but I'm your boss's boss and I'm your Mentor. You're not supposed to go double cause somebody else and I didn't learn nearly as much as I could have about some people story of money until much later and then I'd say, you know, we talked about the criticism thing, you know, I had a guy on my board when I had my first startup who gave me not one useful piece of
And completely maximized his income through the interaction and I took it all personally as opposed to realizing that that's this the game Larry played. He was very transparent about it and I just assumed he would act the way I would act if I were as in his shoes, but I wasn't in his shoes. He was in his shoes and he was acting in a consistent way for him. And then I guess the last one is finally coming to grips with the smallest.
It's viable audience and not just settling for but completely embracing the fact that 1,000 true fans is more than enough. You don't need to be on the cover of a magazine. You don't need to be on a bestseller list that the status games are really significant that I used to go to Ted. And there's some really cool people there. But there's also way more cocktail party status games than I can handle.
And I felt like I was failing because I wasn't good at them and didn't enjoy them and then I realized I don't have to go anymore.
And that was just so freeing because I'm not here to make those people happy. I'm here to make the people. I made my promise to have because that's my professional work. And who else is sitting with me at the lunchroom table. I got done with that in high school and I want to stay done with it.
That's a great place to end this thank you so much for your generosity and your telling
well, this was worth waiting for it. But I hope we wait as long before we do it again. I would like that.
Hey one more thing before we say goodbye. The knowledge project is produced by the team at Farnam Street. I want to make this the best podcast you listen to you. And I'd love to get your feedback. If you have comments ideas for future shows or topics or just feedback in general. You can email me at Shane FS dot blog or follow me on Twitter at Shane a parish. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at f-- s dot blog / podcast if you found
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