Seth Godin - The Practice Of Shipping Creative Work | Modern Wisdom Podcast 241

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Imposter syndrome is the…

   1. SGSeth Godin0:00

      Imposter syndrome is the feeling of being a fraud, of being unprepared. Why did they pick me? Who am I to show up and do this? More and more people would come up to me and say, "How do I get rid of this?" And they're surprised at my answer, which is, "Not only can't you get rid of it, you shouldn't want to, because it's the sign that you're healthy. It's a sign that you're doing good work." Because if you're trying to invent the future, of course you're an imposter, because you haven't seen the future yet. It's not here. You are acting as if. You're putting something into the world that you cannot be as qualified to be as someone who's a street sweeper, 'cause the street sweeper swept that street yesterday. They know they can do it. There's no imposter going on at all. But if you're imagining that people are gonna be moved or changed or influenced by what you're about to do but you've never done it, you're an imposter. So when it shows up, the answer is, "Thank you. Thanks for letting me know I'm onto something. Here I am, doing this work and feeling it." The same way, you run a marathon, you better get tired, 'cause if you don't get tired, you're not trying hard enough.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:59

      (wind blowing) What is The Practice?

   3. SGSeth Godin1:01

      Well, there are only two kinds of successful people in the world. Um, what they have in common is that they've solved interesting problems, that they've shown up and made something better, that they did something original, something important. Maybe they did it by waiting for the muse to touch them, by getting picked, by somehow getting permission. But more likely, in my experience of talking to lots of people from every line of work, is that they have a practice, that they show up on the regular, that they have a way to see forward to produce this work even when they don't feel like it, especially when they don't. And so I wrote a book about this process of shipping creative work, and it counters so many of the myths that people have about, what does it mean to even be creative? What does it mean to do this work you're proud of?

   4. CWChris Williamson1:50

      What are the biggest misconceptions or the things that most people get wrong about creativity?

   5. SGSeth Godin1:57

      Well, they think that you need to be in the mood, that it happens when you find flow, that, uh, all criticism is the same, that writer's block is real, that the muse, uh, can be summoned. A whole bunch of things that put it outside of you, that turn it into some sort of gift or talent. No one talks that way about plumbing. No one talks that way about most of the things in our life. Why do we talk that way about this important thing? And it's 'cause we're afraid.

   6. CWChris Williamson2:29

      Yeah. Uh, I recently had your friend, Steven Pressfield, on the show, and I see a lot of parallels between The Practice and The War of Art and Turning Pro. Is that, w- were you influenced by him when writing this book?

   7. SGSeth Godin2:40

      I don't think it's fair to call them parallels. I think it's fair to say I'm stealing from him. Um ...

   8. CWChris Williamson2:47

      (laughs) I was trying to be so diplomatic, Seth.

   9. SGSeth Godin2:51

      Steven- Steve is a dear friend, um, and he and I differ about a couple things. He, um, actually, uh, is more spiritual about, where does this stuff come from? But what I tried to do was share my personal experience. You know, I discovered The War of Art 10 years ago when I was writing Lynchpin. I can't believe no one told me about it beforehand. Um, and what I believe is that we are not involved in an epic battle against resistance. I believe we are dancing with feelings that exist to protect us. And you can't win the battle, but you can learn to dance with them.

   10. CWChris Williamson3:32

       It's a really lovely way to frame it. I have to say, of the stuff that Steven puts forward, the more esoteric, kind of, um, metaphysical stuff that's there is, for me, as someone who's quite salt of the earth, is a little bit more challenging. But by hook or by crook, I think the outcome is correct, and I definitely see the, the similarities. I love the way that there's certain aphorisms and maxims in The Practice that are really, they sort of spearhead a big, big chunk of work, and they, they kind of drive it home. So let's define our terms. Before we can do anything, we have to define our terms. How do you define creativity? What is it to you?

   11. SGSeth Godin4:14

       So creativity is not painting or writing an opera. It's simply solving an interesting problem in a generous way that might not work in a way that only a human can do it. So there are elephants who can paint oil paintings-

   12. CWChris Williamson4:28

       (laughs)

   13. SGSeth Godin4:28

       ... but they're not, they're not being creative. And there's that famous, uh, selfie that a macaque, uh, monkey took in Indonesia. It's not a selfie. It's not a selfie 'cause the monkey didn't know to be nervous when it pointed the camera at itself. And so you've gotta have this human element for it to meet my definition of creative.

   14. CWChris Williamson4:50

       Yeah. You say that creativity's an action, not a feeling, and that you, you put a lot of emphasis onto people showing up and doing the work. You use, as a good example yourself, that you don't blog because to, uh, you have to blog. You blog because it's tomorrow, and each day, another piece of art- another article comes out. One question I have there is, how do you not kill your love for a topic or a creative output by brute forcing your work rate?

   15. SGSeth Godin5:20

       Well, I am in favor of hobbies, totally in favor of hobbies, but don't try to sell them to people. Do your hobby 'cause you love it. Do your work 'cause it's your work. Now, it is possible to learn to love your work. You can learn to love being a plumber. You can learn to love being someone who paves roads in a steamroller, right? That I don't think that we should try to find our passion. I think we should be passionate about what we do, 'cause it's way easier to end up happy if you can make that decision. So at the beginning, writing a blog post every day felt like a lot. And if someone had said, "Now you need to do it 7,000 times in a row,"... like everything that humans deal with, we get used to it. If your job had been, 15 years ago, to sit in front of a tiny screen and spend two to three hours doomscrolling your way through the state of the world for money, people would've had a nervous breakdown. They would've killed themselves. Now people do it voluntarily.

   16. CWChris Williamson6:24

       (laughs)

   17. SGSeth Godin6:25

       And so, the thing is, you can seek to do the work for good reasons, and then you can fall in love with the work. You don't have to worry about killing your joy if you choose to find joy.

   18. CWChris Williamson6:37

       I really like that. I think that's a, a lovely distinction. One of the examples that I loved, one of my most favorite examples, is about you teaching people to juggle. Can you explain what learning to juggle has to do with our process and a desire for an outcome?

   19. SGSeth Godin6:52

       So I've, uh, taught thousands of people how to juggle. I'm not a great juggler, but I know how to teach it, and ... Because they're not related, being a good juggler and being a, a juggling teacher. W- when I ask people if they wanna learn how to juggle, they say, "Oh, sure," and they grab three balls and they start throwing them. And inevitably, what happens is people have seen jugglers before, and what they pay attention to when they see a juggler is the catching. Juggling is mostly about catching, that we root for the person, if we're on their side, to not drop a ball and if they do, we go, "Aw." And so as soon as you start learning how to juggle, within two or three throws, not you because you're, uh, an extraordinary athlete, but in general, you lunge for a ball. It's out of place, you lunge to catch it 'cause catching's what you're supposed to do. Well, once you've lunged to one side, now you're way out of position for the next one, and then the balls are gonna drop and you're gonna fail, and then you're gonna say, "I hate juggling."

   20. CWChris Williamson7:52

       (laughs)

   21. SGSeth Godin7:52

       And you're done. And that's why almost nobody knows how to juggle. So what I do is I say, "This is gonna take about an hour, uh, and it will not take less than that. So here we go. We're gonna spend 20 minutes throwing one ball and not trying to catch it. Throw, throw, throw, throw. It drops on the ground, we pick it up. And then we're gonna do it with the other ball. Throw, throw, drop, drop. So half an hour into it, we've done throw, throw, drop, drop over and over and over again, which means that you're now really good at throwing. And if you're good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself." And we live in a culture that rewards people who lunge, that rewards the emergency save. But that's a mistake. What we need to do is reward the throwing and not worry about catching. You get the throwing under control, if you learn the practice, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to catch.

   22. CWChris Williamson8:52

       I love that. It's one of my two favorite quotes. First one, "Our work is about throwing. The catching take c- takes care of itself." And the second one, "Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions," from Elizabeth King. Like, that unfulfilled life, you know, they say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person who you could have been, and-

   23. SGSeth Godin9:15

       Oh, yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson9:16

       ... that process saves us from the poverty of our intentions. Wow. That is ... I love that. Um, th- the hack trap, take us through the, the trap of becoming a hack, the race to the bottom. Tell us about that.

   25. SGSeth Godin9:28

       Well, I wanna do Elizabeth King for just one more minute, because I wouldn't have been able to do the book without having, uh, stumbled upon her and her work, watched her documentary, and now proud to call her my friend. Um, what does it mean, the poverty of our intentions? Well, let's go back to this whole idea of a workout. If you negotiate with yourself at mile one of a run, you will never run nine miles. That is the worst time to decide how far you're gonna run. You should have the discussion at the best part of your day. "Tomorrow, I'm gonna run nine miles." Now you've made the decision. When your intentions show up later and you are negotiating for it to be less, that's not the moment when you're gonna make art. And so what the practice says, what the process is about is, "I'm not gonna decide that I'm not gonna have a blog post tomorrow. I made that decision 20 years ago. There's gonna be a blog post tomorrow. So now that decision is made, doesn't matter what my intentions are, there's gonna be a blog post tomorrow." And that feels fairly draconian.

   26. CWChris Williamson10:32

       (laughs)

   27. SGSeth Godin10:33

       But what it does for me is it lightens my cognitive load enormously. I don't have to have a meeting with myself about this. I also don't have to have a meeting about being a vegetarian or watching television. I made these decisions a really long time ago, and so then I can go back to work, right?

   28. CWChris Williamson10:51

       That, that ties in really nicely with a few things that I've been thinking about recently. I'm a big advocate of sobriety for productivity use. I think it gives you more time, more money, and more calories to spend on things that you care about. But my background is a club promoter, so I've run nightclubs for 14 years.

   29. SGSeth Godin11:05

       (laughs) Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson11:06

       Um, uh, uh, so there's a little bit of a juxtaposition there, but I made a commitment to myself, and anyone who asks and anyone who's listening to this, go back and just search Modern Wisdom Sobriety, it'll pop up wherever you're listening. Um, what I tell everyone who wants to go sober, who says, "I, I want some of those gains," is, "Pick an amount of time you're going to do it for. Don't have an open-ended window, 28 days, three months, six months, one year, whatever it might be." I'm 26 months into this particular stint of it for myself, um, uh, uh, for precisely that reason. It doesn't give you the opportunity, it lightens the cognitive load, whether you believe in ego depletion and the, the, um, sort of desecration of willpower throughout the day, there's some interesting stories about CEOs in Silicon Valley always wearing the same clothes because it means they don't have to make that decision. They can save that decision-making for the decisions that matter.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   I read last night…

   1. SGSeth Godin15:00

      or a professional who's engaging in a contract with someone and saying, "Yeah, you're hiring me 'cause I'm a professional. I'm gonna change the game for you. We're gonna take it to a new level, but don't ask me to do hack work, 'cause hack work's easy for me to get, but I don't want to do that. I want to do work that will challenge me to solve interesting problems." And so, in the book, I try to outline for people, you can e- do either, but don't be confused. Don't be a hack and pretend you're an artist, and don't be an artist and act like a hack.

   2. CWChris Williamson15:30

      I read last night The Toxoplasma of Rage by Scott Alexander. Have you read this?

   3. SGSeth Godin15:38

      I haven't. I know about Toxoplasma, and I know about Scott Alexander, but I miss the connection. So, go ahead, tell me.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:44

      It's an unbelievable blog post, widely cited as the most important blog post on Slate Star Codex. Um, so anyone who is interested, that's a big, that's a very big shout. I know he's a prolific... Him and Eliezer Yudkowsky are, uh, two people that probably would compete with you for volume of, of blog posts written over the last couple of decades. Uh, and basically, he talks about precisely this, that the stories which are the ones which are most newsworthy are the ones that cause the most vitriol and, um, debate from either side, which inevitably reduces their effectiveness. So, PETA, as an animal change organization, garners more support from the press because it does stuff that, uh, is outrageous. But by its very nature, it polarizes people as opposed to... And he gives some examples I can't remember of, uh, more conservative-

   5. SGSeth Godin16:37

      Yep.

   6. CWChris Williamson16:37

      ... sedate, chilled animal change organizations who don't get the easy wins in terms of exposure, but do get higher conversions of those people that they reach. And I think... Like, read it last night. Like, just stumbled upon it, decided to read it last night.

   7. SGSeth Godin16:53

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson16:53

      It appears completely in line with what we're talking about here.

   9. SGSeth Godin16:57

      Yeah. No, Scott's extraordinary. And, uh, I highlight one of his posts in the book. Uh, we've met just once, but he fell out of my blog reader because of the whole fight he had with The New York Times. So, I got to put him back in because otherwise I would have read that already. So, Toxoplasma, we need to talk about that even though it's off topic. Toxoplasma is a real thing. It is a disease/organism that afflicts rats. And what it does is it makes rats attracted to the smell of cat urine, because this microorganism that lives in the brain of a rat cannot procreate unless it gets eaten by a cat. So, it takes over the rat, causes it to die so that it can reproduce. And I've been working on something about the media, so now I got to go read this because it's totally related, which is, we believe that we see the world as it is, but we live in culture, and culture changes what we see. And culture is driven by media, and media is driven by a business model. What's happened in the last 20 years is the business model of media has dramatically shifted, and it has...... decided that it profits the most when we are on edge, insecure, and feeling insufficient. So even though as, um, we see from Steve Pinker's great book, the world is safer and healthier than it has ever been before, even counting COVID, no one thinks that's true. And the reason people don't think that's true is because the media doesn't want us to think it's true 'cause it sells "papers," in quotation marks. So yeah, it's interesting to, to make the analogy to Toxoplasma. It's just so fun to talk about Toxoplasma. But he is correct that the way we change the culture is not by getting a trending headline in social media. We change the culture by establishing that people like us do things like this and persistently and consistently chipping away at the edges.

   10. CWChris Williamson19:02

       I gotta give you-

   11. SGSeth Godin19:02

       So thank you for letting me rant about that.

   12. CWChris Williamson19:03

       Oh, absolutely. Toxoplasma Gondii has appeared in two newsletters as well, and I only started it halfway through this year. So we're all... We... This is the Toxoplasma fanboy podcast right now. Me and Seth are here, party of two. Um, I, I gotta give you another, another thing, uh, that I've recently come across from Stuart Russell's Human Compatible, which is about the control problem for artificial general intelligence, very similar to Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom or The Precipice by Toby Ord if you're into existential risk. And one of the things that he brings up there is that the optimization algorithms on social media feeds like YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, not only are they trying to, uh, produce content that you are most likely to click on, it wants you to click on the things there. The easiest way for the social media algorithm to do that is to make your preferences more predictable. And people who are out at the extremes and are polarized are much easier to predict what they're going to click on. Someone who's centrist and has a nuanced view will tip one way, then on the next thing, they'll tip the other way. And again, with that, like, I know we can tumble down the, uh, uh, malicious techno sort of cratic world that we're in at the moment as, as hard as we want. But the point is that there are a number of different forces at play here, both conscious and unconscious, both automated and creative, that are all kind of racing to the bottom.

   13. SGSeth Godin20:29

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson20:29

       And I think that, I think that what you talk about there, I know it's not necessarily the single important outcome, but all of this highlights that if you go towards something which is a creativity, which is virtuous and you speaking your sort of highest form of art forward, that's a competitive advantage because it's a game that very few people are playing.

   15. SGSeth Godin20:49

       Correct. It's a game that most people don't even think they should or are allowed to be playing. And, you know, Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants, is a must-read. It will change the way you see so many of these issues. Kevin's the founding editor of Wired Magazine. He is a, a sage. Uh, this is his best book. And basically, he argues that technology is a species and it is evolving and forcing us to change as it does. And if we figure out what technology wants, we start to understand things. And I was talking to, uh, an executive who had worked both at Facebook and Twitter, and watching how facile he was at justifying all of the bad decisions that they make, because nobody there, in my experience, is particularly evil, but everyone there is doing in the short run what they feel like they're supposed to do, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, "Yeah, that might work, but what would I be proud of?" And that is inherent in art. Art, when you're not being a hack, has to be something you can point to and say, "I made that." And the number of people who work at Facebook who are saying, "Yeah, I invented it so it would end up like that," not very many people are saying it 'cause they don't want to own it. They're hacks.

   16. CWChris Williamson22:08

       I think, uh, the guy who co-created The Infinite Scroll says that it was the single worst invention he's ever made in his life, his single biggest regret of his life. Like, oh my God. (laughs) It's terrifying. Uh, okay. So how do we deal with criticism? You talk about criticism in the book.

   17. SGSeth Godin22:25

       Right.

   18. CWChris Williamson22:26

       Uh, someone whose platform is growing now, this is something that personally for me is a, a really important thing. I'm starting to garner sufficient traffic that criticism comes thick and fast. How can I deal with it?

   19. SGSeth Godin22:37

       Yeah. So old dad joke guy goes to the doctor and, uh, says, the doctor says, "Uh, you got trouble. Your heart's gonna give out in a few weeks." He says, "I want a second opinion." And the doctor says, "Okay, you're ugly too."

   20. CWChris Williamson22:50

       (laughs)

   21. SGSeth Godin22:50

       And the thing is, I would value the doctor's opinion on the first thing, but on the second, none of his business. None of his business. Because you're in a relationship with someone who doesn't think you're ugly. The fact that the doctor thinks you're ugly is irrelevant. So the key here is that all criticism is not the same. Just because someone found two earbuds and listened to your podcast doesn't mean you care about their opinion. It may very well be that they should listen to somebody else's podcast. You're not trying to be Joe Rogan. So if they want to listen to Joe Rogan, they should go over there. If they start saying, "You need to do these things to be more like Joe Rogan so I'll like you," you need to say, "Joe Rogan's over there." And that was a huge lesson for me to figure out who are we seeking to serve? Where is the smallest viable audience and how do I ignore everyone else? So 15 years ago, I took comments off my blog and there was an outcry. "This is not a real blog. There's no comments. Don't you care? Blah, blah, blah." I realized if I left the comments on, I was going to write every blog post a little bit longer, explaining myself a little bit more, trying to get rid of any place for someone to criticize me, and eventually I'd have no blog. So I had a choice, blog with no comments or no blog. And I got rid of the comments. And 10 years ago, I stopped reading the reviews on Amazon. Haven't read one ever since. And my writing has gotten better, not worse.... because a one-star review doesn't tell me I did a bad job. It tells me the wrong person read my book.

   22. CWChris Williamson24:28

       I love that. I, I also think that it ties in a lot with enacting whatever you feel is true to yourself in creativity, because if it's something that is genuinely unmolested from what you want to do to its creation, you don't second-guess it. I think criticism probably strikes at people who are playing this meta game or perhaps being a hack or 20% hack, 50% hack, whatever, particularly harshly.

   23. SGSeth Godin24:57

       Yes. Now, there's something that goes with this that's super important, which is, just 'cause it's what you wanted to do doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work. Those are two separate things, right? So if you want to compose a symphony that's played entirely on raw pieces of fish, please do, but do not expect a commission from the London Symphony Orchestra. They are different things. And so part of what we do as a creator is we, we've got to figure out, who do we seek to change? What change do we seek to make? And then we have to make it for those people. Those people are the ones who are seeking to change, not necessarily ourselves. If it's a hobby, that's different. But if it's professional work, you're not allowed to hate your customer. You're not allowed to hate your fan. Because you're there for them just as much as you need them to be there for you.

   24. CWChris Williamson25:51

       Do you advocate a formalized process before people, the explore before you exploit, sit down, work out your core values, trying to think about what the project means to you and avatars of perfect audience members and stuff like that? Is there a way that people can kind of synthesize this into something more real?

   25. SGSeth Godin26:09

       Yeah, we talk about this, uh, I talk about this in This is Marketing, and we cover it in the marketing workshop. So I believe that intentional action, sometimes called design thinking, saves a lot of time and energy. Who's it for? What's it for? What do I seek to accomplish? These three questions. How will I know if it's working? You don't have to answer those questions, but then you're stumbling around in the bla- in the dark trying to knock a pinata out. This is different. This is saying, "I'm here on purpose, with an intent, with a reason." That's hard, 'cause it puts you on the hook. And people don't want to be on the hook, because if you announce it, and it doesn't happen, then you gotta say, "I failed. I could do better. It didn't work." Whereas if you don't announce it, there's a lot more wiggle room. And so Bob Dylan, who makes up stuff even in his own b- autobiography, tells this story of what happened after he went electric at Newport. And what he did was, uh, he had a very specific idea about the music he wanted to make, who he wanted to make it for, and what change it would make. And he had a problem, which is his fans didn't want him to do that. So in that moment, you decide, do I want to be a hack, or do I want to make art? And so he said to his promoter, "Here's the deal. We're going to go to all these cities three years in a row. Every year, we're going to go to the same town." And the promoter said, "That doesn't make any sense. You gotta give the town time to cool out." He said, "No, here's why I want to do it. The first year, we're going to show up in St. Louis or Denver or wherever, and we're gonna get booed. And the second year, those people mostly won't come back. And the third year, the people who like me will bring their friends." And it took three years to clean out the audience. But by doing that, he could get back to making the music he wanted to make for people who wanted to hear it. But first, he had to be specific in mind, not, "I'm going to change the mind of people who want the old stuff," but to say, "I'm going to bring in a whole circle of people who want the new stuff."

   26. CWChris Williamson28:13

       I did a lot of research before I started my newsletter this year, and one of the little maxims that I came across there which I really loved was, "Never fear the unsubscribe."

   27. SGSeth Godin28:23

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson28:24

       And I think that that's precisely the same. You actually want as many unsubscribes as possible. You want to prune that audience down. Uh, and this leads us nicely into something that I get a lot of messages about, uh, imposter syndrome, which is a hell of a drug. Um...

   29. SGSeth Godin28:38

       Mm-hmm.

   30. CWChris Williamson28:38

       (laughs) How can we get past imposter syndrome?
3. 30:00 – 44:00

   I think that ties…

   1. SGSeth Godin30:00

      get tired, 'cause if you don't get tired, you're not trying hard enough.

   2. CWChris Williamson30:04

      I think that ties back to what we were saying before about this kind of, I guess, the compromising of how far you're pushing the boundaries, the competence, your domain of competence, right? That a lot of people perhaps might feel that imposter syndrome, which gives them a, a sense of a lack of confidence, and then compromise by copying what someone else does. So their imposter syndrome gets downregulated because they know-

   3. SGSeth Godin30:30

      Yup.

   4. CWChris Williamson30:30

      ... maybe I haven't made this work, but if I do precisely the same thing as Joe Rogan or Scott Alexander or whatever, whatever, like my hero within this industry-... I don't need to worry because I, I just followed the formula.

   5. SGSeth Godin30:43

      Yup, I'm off the hook. And that's why people ask me for tactics all the time and why I don't give them tactics, because we don't need the next Scott Alexander. We already have one.

   6. CWChris Williamson30:55

      Two would be good, though. It might keep, it might keep the, uh, the human race going a little bit more. Um, what does, "Be paranoid about mediocrity," mean?

   7. SGSeth Godin31:06

      So perfectionism and mediocrity are both the same thing, and what they are are places to hide. Perfectionism means I will never be finished because how could it be perfect? And perfectionism feels like a worthwhile endeavor because we say, "What, do you want me to just ship junk?" And so we hide behind perfectionism. Mediocrity, the flip side of that is, "Well, what the hell? I just put it out there. Can't hold me responsible. I didn't really work very hard at it." Again, I'm off the hook. So medioc- mediocre is another word for average, and most organizations make average stuff. Most creators make average stuff for average people. That's what makes it average, most. And if your average stuff doesn't happen, no one will miss it, 'cause there's plenty of average stuff to take its place. But if you can figure out how to do something that's beyond mediocre, not perfect, but simply changing the situation, solving the interesting problem, that we would miss if it weren't here. But there's all this pressure on you to make it average, and the easier way to deal with that pressure is to say, "Let's call it mediocre instead."

   8. CWChris Williamson32:21

      I'm going to guess that, again, this, all of these threads tie together. If you are pushing the work rate of the work that you do, there also has to be a point at which you accept it is good enough. If you need to release a blog post every day and you work on it until tomorrow, it's tomorrow. Like, you have to press the publish button at some point.

   9. SGSeth Godin32:41

      Correct. So you just used a two-word phrase that I really like, which is "good enough." So let's be really honest about what good enough means. We defined good enough in advance to mean it's good enough. Anything better than good enough, either we've made a mistake in our definition or we've wasted time and money, right? So when they made the Lexus to compete with Mercedes, good enough meant it has to be higher quality than any Mercedes ever built. But it didn't have to be perfect. It didn't have to be a car that would go two million miles on a gallon of gas, right? It just had to be better than the best Mercedes. That was their definition of good enough. And then you ship it. And so if you're having trouble defining good enough, go work on that. But once you define what good enough is, that's spec, and the definition of quality is meeting spec. So instead of good enough, we just call it quality, but they're the same thing, meet spec.

   10. CWChris Williamson33:44

       That liberates you to increase this work rate as well, as we've said before.

   11. SGSeth Godin33:49

       Which makes you able to learn more, because work that doesn't ship doesn't count. And one of the reasons it doesn't count is it can't fail, and if it can't fail, you don't learn anything.

   12. CWChris Williamson34:02

       There's a Twitter account run by my good friend Jack Butcher from Visualize Value called Advice Inverted, and the top pinned post at the moment is, "Intentions matter more than actions."

   13. SGSeth Godin34:17

       (inhales deeply) There you go. I love that. That, there's a lot of layers there. That's great.

   14. CWChris Williamson34:25

       He's a smart, smart, smart fella. Uh, talking of actions, one of the things, upon reading James Clear's Atomic Habits last year, um, was this kind of identity-based change that I've really realized, um, and you say that we become what we do, um, which is an interesting, uh, how would you say, symbiotic relationship-

   15. SGSeth Godin34:47

       Yup.

   16. CWChris Williamson34:47

       ... between we have a inclination, we feed it, it gives us something back, it becomes this kind of self-sustaining process, and before you know it, you've become the work, the work is you. You know what I mean? It kind of this, it starts to roll downhill.

   17. SGSeth Godin35:04

       Yeah, and it's not just the work. I mean, a lot of people are waiting to become an honest person and then they'll go tell the truth. Well, but if you want to be an honest person, start by telling the truth. If you want to be a runner, you don't need a permit. You just need to run 30 days in a row. Then you're a runner. If you want to be a writer, just write 30 days in a row. Then you're a writer. Do the work and then you can get the mantle. Then you become the thing that the work represents.

   18. CWChris Williamson35:30

       Is there something, is there a single thread that you see amongst creative people, uh, a, a unifying characteristic which is most prominent in them?

   19. SGSeth Godin35:42

       It tends to, um, have two poles, and they might be related, I just haven't found it yet. One of them is the ego strength of the "I" in "I made this." "I" and "I" alone solved this problem. "I" showed up. You know, this is the symphony conductor who cannot be replaced. Uh, the other one is the restlessness of seeing defects in the world, that interesting problems beg to be solved. No credit necessary. I just need this problem to be solved. Uh, I can do both, not usually at the same time, but I've felt both inclinations. So, you know, if I'm at a, uh, back in the old days when I was at a restaurant, I'm sitting at a restaurant and the door keeps slamming because the spring was disconnected. And there's, you know, 30 people in the restaurant, and everyone's annoyed by this. So I just got up and put the spring back on.... because I just couldn't sit there knowing that all it needed was the spring to be hooked up, and I didn't wait for the manager to tell me it was okay. The manager wanted the spring to be off. They could take the spring off later. That instinct is something we see in creative people all the time. It often happens when we're seeing organizations do creative work. On the other hand, there's definitely, thanks to the media, the impresario, uh, you know, Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford thing of I and I alone invented the future, and a lot of times, we benefit from that. And sometimes megalomaniacs pay a big price.

   20. CWChris Williamson37:24

       (laughs)

   21. SGSeth Godin37:24

       Or we all pay a big price for megalomaniacs.

   22. CWChris Williamson37:26

       Yeah. When we look at those people from the outside, I think everyone loves the idea of being Elon Musk, but no one really knows what it's like inside of his head when he goes to bed at night. This is a big-

   23. SGSeth Godin37:36

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson37:36

       ... a big insight from Naval Ravikant and Tim Ferriss about, "I cannot take part of someone's life. I have to take the whole." Like, do you want to pay the price, the wholesale-

   25. SGSeth Godin37:45

       Yup.

   26. CWChris Williamson37:45

       ... not piecemeal, ship it in bulk, one unit, do not assemble at home, Elon Musk internal monologue price, because that's the-

   27. SGSeth Godin37:54

       Well said.

   28. CWChris Williamson37:54

       ... that's the (laughs) price that you would have to pay. Um, I have one, one question that I, I really want to ask you, which I'm going to finish on. But before that, um, which company is doing some of your favorite marketing right now? Is there anything you've seen in 2020 that you've been particularly impressed or happy with?

   29. SGSeth Godin38:11

       My answer is, any company that someone can name that they feel like they have a relationship with, that they feel like is doing something that works for them, is on my list. It's not necessarily the one I would pick, but the fact that someone feels that way is proof that they're onto something. So, you know, there were brands 20, 30, 40 years ago that had that relationship with people, and now they're just churning it out. And then there are other brands that didn't use to mean very much, but now they do. And that's the symptom, that somebody there found the smallest viable audience and decided to do creative work. I have found that anytime I write about a company, the owner gets into enormous amounts of trouble for bad behavior or something, and so I don't do that anymore.

   30. CWChris Williamson38:58

       (laughs) That's a fair, that's a fair point. Yeah, I understand. Do you think it's possible for companies to scale up to the sort of hyper-structure, like the sphere in the, in the upper ash- ethelons of the, of the atmosphere and retain that level of creativity?

Episode duration: 44:00