How to Overcome Resistance — Seth Godin

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Tim Ferriss 4:14 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, and this is one of my favorite types of episodes. Of course, I'm speaking to world-class performers of all different disciplines all the time, but one of my favorite people to ask for advice is Seth Godin. And this is a walk-and-talk, which means Seth and I were walking and talking while we recorded this, and I had many burning questions I wanted to ask. He did not fail to deliver a lot of sage advice, tactical, practical wisdom. And what more can I say? The guy's a gem. He delivers every time. "Who is Seth Godin?" you might ask. Seth Godin is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work. His books have been translated into 38 languages, and Seth's books include Tribes, Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. Seth writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, 8,500, 8,500-plus daily blog posts, just to put that into perspective, and two of his TED Talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the altMBA, the social media pioneer Squidoo, and Yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies. His latest book is The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams. You can find him at sethgodin.com, and you can find Seth's blog at seths.blog. So you can go to both of those for a lot of resources. And I'm gonna just reiterate why we did this format the way we did it, because there's too much sitting in the world. It's not good for you. We weren't evolved to do it, and I am trying to counteract the ... trend, the impulse, all of the incentives to do podcasts in a fixed location. This isn't good for my health, and it's certainly not good for your health to force you to consume it that way. So I'm at least experimenting with being out and about, doing something that we are designed to do, and that is walk. So without further ado, please enjoy my wider engine conversation where I ask for a lot of help from Seth Godin. [upbeat music]

Tim Ferriss 6:29 All right, here we are. So thank you again for taking the time, and the subject, I suppose, relates to time, attention, all these good things, which is how to make Tim Ferriss's incredibly long-form writing shorter, or how those two things fundamentally are different in terms of long and short. I texted you asking if, if there's any secret sauce, any tips or tricks for writing short blog posts, 'cause I consider you the undisputed king of consistently good short blog posts. And that kind of uncorked all of this. So here we are, and, uh, I suppose where I might wanna start is with our initial text thread. And one of the points that, at least as I read it, seemed to resonate, was treating blog posts more as a question than an answer, or a provocation rather than a prescription. Could you expand on that a little bit? Because I think it relates also to the posts that you so kindly proofread, where I may have misinterpreted how best to think about that.

Seth Godin 7:37 I would be delighted to dive in. There's so many places to start. I'm gonna start with this. You are a gifted and generous writer, and you have been since I began tracking what you do. And blogging is inherently a generous act because it's hard in 2024 to justify it as a financial endeavor. You're doing it to illuminate. And what does it mean to write in this form? A short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway, probably not. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Six words, it's perfect. In six words, your heart breaks. That's not scalable, practical, repeatable. You can't sign up to write six-word short stories that break people's hearts every day. Because that level of condensing, that level of being able to get at the heart, none of the words had more than seven letters, none of the words have more than two syllables. That's magic, right? We can't repeatedly do that. So when we look at the form of a blog, we say, "Well, you know, Seth's blog posts have 100 to 1,000 words in them. All I have to do is take my idea and make it shorter." And when we try to do that, resistance kicks in, Pressfield's resistance. And we say, "But I need to clarify this sentence and add a parenthetical to that sentence, or else I will be misunderstood." So this first sentence in this paragraph, which is rich and detailed and recursive and layered, goes like this: "Growth agents have a place in medicine, parentheses, some types of hypopopulitarianism, wasting syndrome diseases-

Tim Ferriss 9:27 [laughs]

Seth Godin 9:28 ... surgical care, et cetera, and some sports effectively require them at higher levels. But there are always trade-offs when you turn on the dials on complex hormonal cascades and feedback loops."

Tim Ferriss 9:39 Yep.

Seth Godin 9:39 Everything in that is true, and someone could study that sentence in college for a month because there's layers below layers below layers. And unfortunately, the blog reader in general is not ready to consume that level of condensation.

Tim Ferriss 9:58 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 9:59 And so we shouldn't even try because that's not what a blog is good at.

Tim Ferriss 10:06 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 10:06 What a blog is good at is what Scott McCloud taught us about comics. Scott McCloud's book about comics, which is a must-read-

Tim Ferriss 10:16 I have read it, or Understanding Comics is the one that I read. I think he has a few.

Seth Godin 10:19 Yes, Understanding Comics. Thank you. Yes.

Tim Ferriss 10:21 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 10:21 The key lesson is this: comics work because something happens between the panels.

Tim Ferriss 10:27 Ah, right.

Seth Godin 10:29 In panel one, Superman sees a problem. In panel two, Superman is with the villain. We don't see how Superman got from panel one to panel two. That happened in our brain. So the reason bad comics and bad graphic novels are bad is because the creator didn't understand that. They didn't let our brain do the leaping. They just decided to add a lot of pictures to a story that would be better in words. So what a blog post does is it says, "Here's a sketch over here, and now I'm over there. You figure out how I got from here to there. And by you figuring it out, the reader, you will grow, you will explore, you will be a voice in this dialogue. It is not just me talking."

Tim Ferriss 11:10 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 11:11 So when you ask me to review your writing, some people are tempted to proofread, and they don't really mean proofread, they mean copy edit.

Tim Ferriss 11:21 Right.

Seth Godin 11:21 And copy editing means fix the errors. And what I'm trying to do when I'm editing a friend's work is say, "Are they even asking the right question?"

Tim Ferriss 11:32 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 11:32 'Cause they can fix their own errors. They don't need my help to do that. And so here, what I'm trying to say is, what is this post for? And what it's for, I think, is to help someone who's not paying attention to realize that there are seven things they might wanna think about. And seven is a lot, so what I pitched back to you is this is actually seven blog posts in a series. And what the first one says is, you know, there's some things you're not thinking about that you might wanna think about. Here's one of them. And the idea, if I just say to somebody, "Biceps are temporary, baseball helmet sizes are forever," they visualize that immediately.

Tim Ferriss 12:16 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 12:16 And then they're like, "Hmm, what?" And then they wanna think about what you meant by that. It's a haiku, it's a puzzle, it's a shadow. Where is the light and what is being reflected? So now you've gotten permission to tell me in a paragraph or two what you meant, and then I can... You get to say, "Da, da-da, da-da," and I say, "Da, da." And that is the form. That is what blogs are good at. But, and I'm gonna end my rant now-

Tim Ferriss 12:44 [laughs]

Seth Godin 12:45 ... the downside is you will be misunderstood, and that is why there are no comments on my blog, because people who misunderstood a post would then respond by making me feel bad, so I would overwrite and overwrite so they wouldn't do that anymore. And then it wasn't a blog anymore, so I had to stop. And basically what I'm saying is, if you don't get it, ask a friend, and if they don't get it either, come back tomorrow and we can discuss a new thing. And I think the king of this is actually the magic of xkcd, which is a blog in graphic form.

Tim Ferriss 13:21 Yeah, it's outstanding. I agree

Tim Ferriss 13:23 on that. And as you're talking, a few things come to mind for me, and maybe as a backdrop, the impetus for a lot of this, for me at least, is, number one, to get back into writing and to experiment with a new form, a new style, a new approach to writing.

Seth Godin 13:41 Mm-hmm.

Tim Ferriss 13:41 And number two is to explore ideas. To explore ideas in various ways, to clarify my own thinking-

Seth Godin 13:46 Yep

Tim Ferriss 13:47 ... which ended up happening in this short piece, the no biological free lunch piece that you proofread. I suppose my question, not copy edited, which is certainly a very different thing. In this particular case, if you were writing this, would you be inclined to make it a series, or would you make each of these a standalone piece? In other words, of those seven bullets, as you're thinking through not just the word count, right? This is my mistake-

Seth Godin 14:15 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 14:15 ... where I basically said, "Okay, instead of writing a 5,000-word blog post-

Seth Godin 14:18 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 14:19 " ... I'm gonna make it less than 1,000, but I'm gonna try to still somehow get all of the concepts into this shorter form," seems like there's a conceptual constraint that makes things powerful. But would you take those seven, make them into an interrelated series? Would you make them all kind of independent after you introduce them in this one piece? How would you think about divvying this up conceptually for yourself? And I should also just add one more thing, which is-

Seth Godin 14:46 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 14:46 ... fundamental to all of these observations and questions and goals and dreams of mine is, how do I make this sustainable for me, right?

Seth Godin 14:55 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 14:55 Which is part of the feedback you gave in the comments on the draft of this blog post was, I'm paraphrasing, but if you try to just make the 5,000-word thing 1,000 words, it's gonna be exhausting for you and most likely also exhausting for your readers [laughs] which I agree with.

Seth Godin 15:12 It's about genre. So-

Tim Ferriss 15:14 Mm-hmm

Seth Godin 15:14 ... my blog is a long-running series. It has been a series of 8,500 daily posts. So if I was starting today, I have to figure out what is the genre of my work. If you think about David Letterman's TV show-

Tim Ferriss 15:30 Mm-hmm

Seth Godin 15:30 ... he needed to have a series called Stupid Pet Tricks, 'cause the show wasn't Stupid Pet Tricks, but there was a regular recurring stupid pet trick.

Tim Ferriss 15:39 Right. [laughs]

Seth Godin 15:40 The show was a series of David Letterman shows.

Tim Ferriss 15:43 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 15:44 So if your genre as you reenter blogging is, uh, there is a post from Tim on a regular basis, and all of them are about the things we put into our body and performance, then you're fine. If that's not the case, then the question is, when the reader shows up, do you need to do a lot of throat clearing to get them back on track for what you are writing about today? And so since you're starting with largely a blank slate, I said, "Well, if the first seven of these are in this series, then you only have to clear your throat once on the eighth day and say, 'Okay, now we're talking about this.'" And you could do one of those, or six of those, or 12 of those.

Tim Ferriss 16:28 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 16:29 But people do better if they understand that they're going to see Dune not read The Power Broker. Those are different genres, and you need to give them a hint as to what they're gonna get.

Tim Ferriss 16:40 I like the idea of recognizing that my tendency is to... How should I be generous with myself? [laughs]

Seth Godin 16:48 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 16:48 Be comprehensive. [laughs] I was gonna say overcomplicate, but let's be nice. Try to be comprehensive. I would rather, as we talked about earlier, I'm, I'm walking by tennis courts right now, and I remember taking a tennis lesson and I kept hitting the ball into the net, and the coach said to me, he's like, "You can do anything. Now, next step, you can hit the ball straight up in the air, you can hit a home run. The one thing you cannot do is hit it into the net." [laughs] And I was like, "Okay-

Seth Godin 17:13 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 17:13 "I got it." And I kind of feel like I need to give myself some marching orders like that for writing to counterbalance some of my tendencies. So I like the idea of writing self-sustaining, sort of independent pieces to restrict-

Seth Godin 17:29 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 17:30 ... myself from the desire to say, "You know what? I'm not gonna overwrite this, but it's gonna be part one in a 12-part series," [laughs] which is, uh, maybe a workaround, uh, for tricking myself.

Seth Godin 17:40 I'm gonna interrupt you for a little bit. The, the-

Tim Ferriss 17:42 Please do.

Seth Godin 17:43 You are extraordinarily skilled at not overcomplicating your writing or your narratives. That's how you got this far. That there's very little that you have published where you were the primary researcher and the breakthrough creator of the original science. What you've done-

Tim Ferriss 18:03 Mm-hmm

Seth Godin 18:03 ... is helped people simplify, understand. What's happening here is resistance. You are adding parentheticals to protect yourself.

Tim Ferriss 18:14 100%. Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 18:16 So what I'm pushing you to do is to come up with boundaries so that you can say, "I did a good job," and ship the work.

Tim Ferriss 18:26 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 18:26 Now, that could involve having very, like the rules of haiku, very significant rules where you must have a tagline, a come-on line that's less than 18 words, and you're allowed to have two footnote links, but the rest of it has to be a narrative that you would say to somebody on the telephone.

Tim Ferriss 18:47 Hmm.

Seth Godin 18:47 And instead of typing them, you are just recording each one and letting someone on your team type them. If that would be the model, you would have to let go of it, because you only have a five-minute phone call, you're gonna say it as clearly as you can. You can add two links when you're done, and it's done. You gotta ship it, right?

Tim Ferriss 19:05 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Seth Godin 19:06 But that's not letting the reader down, 'cause you've announced to them that that's what this is.

Tim Ferriss 19:11 Right.

Seth Godin 19:11 The genre matters.

Tim Ferriss 19:13 I asked you one question related to how you know when you're done. And-

Seth Godin 19:19 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 19:19 [laughs] I'd love for you to answer that again, because I suspect I'll have some follow-up questions. And either before or after that, I would love to know for yourself what type of rules you have imposed, or constraints/boundaries when you have had your better streaks of writing, let's just say.

Seth Godin 19:42 All right, well, I'll do the first part first, 'cause it's easier. You asked, "How do you decide or know when a post is done?"

Tim Ferriss 19:48 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 19:48 And I texted back, "I don't."

Tim Ferriss 19:50 [laughs] Sure.

Seth Godin 19:52 That's the point. And then I wrote, "Imagine how hard it would be to have a conversation, or even a text thread, if we had to think through whether our turn to talk was over before we stop talking." Right? So my model, my ritual is I write blog posts in advance, and then the night before I review them, I rewrite them, I delete them, so if I get the stomach flu, there's still gonna be a blog post tomorrow.

Tim Ferriss 20:21 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 20:21 And when I rewrite a blog post, the rule is you wait, get points if you make it shorter. You don't get points if you make it longer. And if I can't boil it down more than it already is, and it's not deliberately deceptive, it's done.

Tim Ferriss 20:40 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 20:41 Because the purpose is tell people something they already sort of know in a way that they would be grateful for the chance to forward to other people.

Tim Ferriss 20:50 Can you say that one more time, Seth? That seems important.

Seth Godin 20:53 If I can show up with something in your bones that you know to be true or interesting or worth thinking about, but I can say it in a way that would benefit you if you could share it with your friends and colleagues, that's a great blog post.

Tim Ferriss 21:10 Benefit you in what possible senses?

Seth Godin 21:12 I will give you a trivial one first.

Tim Ferriss 21:15 Uh-huh.

Seth Godin 21:15 Which is more than once I have blogged about how stupid it is that there's a pull-down menu when you're checking out of a shop and there's all 50 states listed. That isn't helping anybody. We have AI that can speak English. It knows how to turn NY into New York.

Tim Ferriss 21:32 [laughs]

Seth Godin 21:34 And we do this because 40 years ago, or whenever the web was young, 25 years ago, it was a hack that made s- life slightly easier for certain programmers, and it's just been sticking around ever since.

Tim Ferriss 21:48 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 21:49 There are people like me it really vexes. And if I say this and you are one of those vexing people, now you can forward it to your webmaster and say, "See? See? I said we shouldn't do this." And so I just gave you a useful thing to share.

Tim Ferriss 22:01 [laughs]

Seth Godin 22:03 That's trivial.

Tim Ferriss 22:04 Uh-huh.

Seth Godin 22:04 But that's sort of the idea.

Tim Ferriss 22:06 Uh-huh.

Seth Godin 22:06 Is that if you have a brother or a son or a colleague or a daughter or a sister who would benefit from the insight that you think I'm onto, you're gonna forward it to them-

Tim Ferriss 22:18 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

Seth Godin 22:19 ... and you're gonna have a connection with them, 'cause I opened the door and made it possible for you to do it. Every once in a while, I do post something about Claude AI that you didn't know about, and, oh, you go, "Oh, great. I use Claude. Thank you very much." But that's not really the service my blog offers. The service my blog offers is not I'm breaking news.

Tim Ferriss 22:38 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 22:38 It's I am trying to illuminate things that already resonate with people.

Tim Ferriss 22:43 Not to add too many parentheticals to this conversation.

Seth Godin 22:45 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 22:45 But what is Cla- but what is Claude AI?

Seth Godin 22:49 Claude.ai, I can't believe I know something you don't know. Claude.ai-

Tim Ferriss 22:54 [laughs]

Seth Godin 22:55 ... is significantly better than ChatGPT at certain functions.

Tim Ferriss 23:01 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 23:01 And I think part of it is 'cause it doesn't read the web, or it says it doesn't read the web, so it's not easily distracted. But I'm launching a software project in six weeks, and the business plan took more than a year and a whole bunch of contributors. It's 40 pages long.

Tim Ferriss 23:17 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 23:17 And I uploaded the business plan to Claude and I said, "Please review this. Highlight contradictions, paradoxes, and obvious errors."

Tim Ferriss 23:26 Hmm.

Seth Godin 23:26 And in less than 10 seconds it wrote me a page-and-a-half MBA-quality memo-

Tim Ferriss 23:31 [laughs]

Seth Godin 23:32 ... that nailed it. It just nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. And I was like, "Okay. Uh, you got me. That's great. That's great."

Tim Ferriss 23:38 [laughs]

Seth Godin 23:38 So I use Claude AI every day to read other people's writing, my writing, critique it, give me insight. You could send your post to Claude and it might not have the insight I had, but it would definitely have something to say.

Tim Ferriss 23:53 Incredible. All right. [laughs] Well, end parentheses.

Tim Ferriss 23:56 What are some other elements or practices or constraints or fill-in-the-blank that have helped you with consistency in terms of blog writing? Because I have attempted and- Failed a number of times to build up momentum writing shorter posts, and I think a lot of what we've already discussed will help. Is there anything else that you would add to the it helps my consistency streak category?

Seth Godin 24:27 Well, I would say two things. First, I think you're talking about consistency in terms of showing up at the ballpark every day.

Tim Ferriss 24:34 Cadence. Yeah, exactly.

Seth Godin 24:35 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 24:35 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 24:35 So I'll do that one second. The first one, I have never met Larry David-

Tim Ferriss 24:39 [laughs]

Seth Godin 24:40 ... but I'm guessing that there are some days that Larry David is actually a nice, thoughtful person.

Tim Ferriss 24:45 [laughs]

Seth Godin 24:46 And there is a character named Larry David as well.

Tim Ferriss 24:51 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 24:51 So the person who writes my blog is a character named Seth Godin.

Tim Ferriss 24:56 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 24:56 And I am the only person who has ever written my blog. I'm the only person who ever will write my blog, but when I am doing it, I am playing the character named Seth Godin. So if it doesn't sound like me, if it's just me authentically being tired or annoyed-

Tim Ferriss 25:13 Mm-hmm

Seth Godin 25:13 ... I don't publish those because that's not what my character would do. It's, this is not me exposing some mystical, mythical Seth Godin to the world, it's me portraying the character Seth Godin, 'cause it's a service. And then the second thing is, streaks are usually used against us by software, and y- if they make you feel bad, it's not a helpful thing. But I write blog posts every single day, whether I use them or not. And I learned that from Isaac Asimov when I worked with him all those years ago. If you know that tomorrow morning you have to start typing, tonight when you go to sleep or today when you're walking around, you will be noticing things so that you have something to type. And, you know, I've have enough in reserve that I don't have to do it every day, but I do it every day because I eat lunch every day and because I take a shower every day.

Tim Ferriss 26:10 Two follow-ups. So the first is related to the playing the character of Seth Godin. It sounds like, if I heard you correctly, you're saying your writing should reflect how you feel in the world at the time that you're writing. Am I hearing that correctly?

Seth Godin 26:27 No. It's the opposite of that.

Tim Ferriss 26:29 It's the opposite.

Seth Godin 26:30 There's no should here, first of all. If someone wants to write a blog that's just the unvarnished version of them in the moment, go for it. I don't care.

Tim Ferriss 26:39 Right.

Seth Godin 26:39 I'm not the blog police. What I'm saying is, I can read a blog post I wrote 14 years ago, and I might not write the same one today, but it rhymes with the one I would write today, because there's a voice that this character has that I am very comfortable with. I did the first thing that all writers do when I got ChatGPT, which is I asked it to write like me, and I was pleased to discover it was a parody of me.

Tim Ferriss 27:08 [laughs]

Seth Godin 27:08 And being able to be parodied is a really good sign.

Tim Ferriss 27:13 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 27:14 And that's what it is to have this voice, is to say, I could exaggerate it in six different directions and people could tell I would be parodying it. But like, you know, the Peanuts comic strip, Charles Schulz did it every single day, and it's very hard to tell which decade a Peanuts strip is from.

Tim Ferriss 27:35 Totally.

Seth Godin 27:36 And that's, that's what I'm after.

Tim Ferriss 27:38 So just to unpack that a little bit more, I know we've talked before, or I should say I've asked and listened to you discuss how the authenticity fetishizing [laughs] that goes on-

Seth Godin 27:48 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 27:48 ... is often, not always, but often very misplaced and just kinda overvalues this oversharing. What are the things that make Seth the character Seth the character? Is it 80% voice that you've developed such that ChatGPT can imitate you and parody you? What are the other ingredients that make Seth the character who writes on Seth's blog?

Seth Godin 28:12 You know, I've not ever pushed myself to name them because seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees. But-

Tim Ferriss 28:21 [laughs] Yeah

Seth Godin 28:22 ... I guess I'd highlight a couple things. The first one is, I try to begin from a place of the benefit of the doubt, of there probably aren't bad people, there's just situations that cause people to do things that are troubling, and a level of optimism to go with it. I try to reduce ideas to their essence without becoming hyperbolic, because the voices of social media amped up the hyperbolic part. That's not a simplification. That's an exaggeration.

Tim Ferriss 28:57 Right.

Seth Godin 28:58 I try to eliminate parentheticals unless I really have no choice. So I will avoid saying something like, "All tall people are very brave," because that's ridiculous. But I will not write, "Tall people are brave," parentheses, "Except for this person, this person, this person, and this person," because now it's not worth reading, right?

Tim Ferriss 29:23 [laughs]

Seth Godin 29:24 So there's an assertion at the beginning that creates a tension and then a release of that tension that lands an idea. So the shortest blog post I ever wrote, which I'm really proud of, is, first line is, "You don't need more time." So that's an assertion. It's controversial. People who feel overwhelmed wanna challenge it.

Tim Ferriss 29:50 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 29:50 And then the delivery is, "You just need to decide." So that flips it upside down, takes the blame off the system and the people who are making you busy, and puts it right back on you, giving you agency and authority and responsibility to simply decide and then get back to what needs to get done. And so in just a few words- That's an example of a short Seth Godin blog post. And a longer one is one where I will try to teach somebody details about something they didn't know, but frame it in a way that they're comfortable with because that's how they might have framed it as well.

Tim Ferriss 30:33 Let me ask a quick question, and maybe that I've cut back on my caffeine too significantly, but [laughs] you don't need more time. You just need to decide. What are people deciding?

Seth Godin 30:45 Well, folks who say, "I'm gonna figure out which college I want to apply to soon. I just need to do more research. I just need to think about it."

Tim Ferriss 30:53 Hmm.

Seth Godin 30:53 Right?

Tim Ferriss 30:54 I got it. Right. Close the open loops. Get it done. Make a decision.

Seth Godin 30:57 Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss 30:59 Mm-hmm. That makes a lot of sense. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, just like mine, you obviously want to find quality professionals that are right for the role. Mistakes are expensive. Things can be complicated. You want a simple solution. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help you find the right professionals for your team faster and for free. LinkedIn is not just another job board. LinkedIn has a vast network of more than a billion professionals. It gives you access to professionals you cannot find anywhere else, and it does all that while making the process easy and intuitive. So easy, in fact, that 86% of small businesses get a qualified candidate within the first 24 hours. And they just launched a feature that helps you write job descriptions, making the process even easier and faster. So join the 2.5 million small businesses that use LinkedIn for hiring and post your job for free at linkedin.com/tim. That's linkedin.com/tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Tim Ferriss 32:11 All right. The other bookmarks follow-up I had [laughs] and I'm sure I've asked you this, so I apologize, but I can't remember the answer if we have discussed it. What are some other things you picked up from Isaac Asimov? I mean, this guy's a demigod. [laughs] At least a lot of people would consider him one. What are other things you absorbed or observed with Isaac?

Seth Godin 32:31 Isaac was in his 70s. I was 24 and a half, maybe 25. It was one of my first projects. It was one of his last ones. And we would hang out at his apartment near Lincoln Center, and I got to spend time with his wife. The thing about Isaac Asimov is the character of Isaac Asimov was a know-it-all egomaniac for the time. Today, he would be seen as humble. But he published 400 books. He invented the modern conception of a robot.

Tim Ferriss 33:02 [laughs]

Seth Godin 33:03 He wrote seminal work on an enormous number of topics, a definitive book about the Bible, I mean, all over the place. But in person, he was humble and funny, and as a project partner, he was completely hands-off. He spent time with me to make sure I understood the boundaries of what an Isaac Asimov project was, and then he said, "Go for it." And he didn't micromanage a thing 'cause he trusted me and my understanding of where the robots universe could go. And it spoiled me 'cause I thought that was gonna happen again and again and again.

Tim Ferriss 33:49 [laughs]

Seth Godin 33:50 And you know, I got Stanley Kaplan into the test prep book business, and it took seven years, and by the time we published the book, Stanley was long gone from the project 'cause he had sold the company. But talk about micromanaging with a well-known name. So on one end-

Tim Ferriss 34:05 [laughs]

Seth Godin 34:05 ... of the spectrum was Isaac Asimov, and on the other end was Stanley Kaplan. Go figure.

Tim Ferriss 34:10 You know, your story about Asimov makes me think a little bit of Rick Rubin where [laughs] right out of the gate, LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, he's like, "Oh, this is easy. This is how it works."

Seth Godin 34:20 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 34:20 Fantastic. What was the project that you were working with Isaac on?

Seth Godin 34:24 Okay, so before DVDs, lots of people had VCRs. And-

Tim Ferriss 34:28 Yes, I remember

Seth Godin 34:28 ... a company called Parker Brothers took their board game Clue, and they made it into a VCR game, and it was dumb. And it sold more than a million copies at $40 each.

Tim Ferriss 34:38 Wow. Good for them. [laughs]

Seth Godin 34:41 And so Peter Alatka, the greatest game designer of his generation, and I invented a murder mystery game you could play on your VCR. So there was a movie shot with real union actors in a set in New York City. It lasted 38 minutes and took place on another planet about robots and murder and detectives. And six times during the short film, a screen came up that said, "Hit the pause button and play a card." So you would hit pause, and you had a stack of six cards, and each card had two sides. And you would throw a card down, and it would be a clue, like there are no fingerprints on the gun, which might mean it was a robot 'cause robots don't have fingerprints, right?

Tim Ferriss 35:25 Right.

Seth Godin 35:26 And on the other side of the card, it said there were fingerprints on the gun, so now you know it's not a robot. So it turned out that two to the power of six is, uh, 156 or whatever, and if you added up the code numbers on the top of each card you played, it told you which page in the answer booklet had the answer to that thread through the game. So you could play the game hundreds of times, and it would be a different outcome each time.

Tim Ferriss 35:51 Hmm.

Seth Godin 35:52 And we sold the rights to Kodak. And Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up and advertised it on the Olympics, like the full thing. It was fascinating.

Tim Ferriss 36:01 Wow. Where were you in your career that that opportunity presented itself, or you found that opportunity? What had led up to that, outside of what you just described?

Seth Godin 36:12 So before I did that, I had only one real job, and my job was at Spinnaker Software. We invented educational computer games, and I built the first Brand of illustrated computer adventure games. I worked with Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton. I got rights to games. I worked with Byron Preiss. He had a team of programmers, and I had a team of programmers. We did The Wizard of Oz, and I loved it. I could still be doing it to this day, but the world changed, and I was out on my own after a couple years as a book packager. But Peter and I knew each other, and the momentum from the interactive game thing led me to Isaac's editor, and no one had ever asked for the rights. The rights were inexpensive, and then once I had the rights, I found Kodak, and Kodak was able to put up the money so we could build this thing and own part of the back end.

Tim Ferriss 37:08 So if I zoom out, I have a macro-level question for you, which has been on my mind a lot, if you don't mind, which is a question of how you choose next chapters or projects. Because I'm-

Seth Godin 37:20 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 37:20 ... coming up on the tenth anniversary of the podcast next April, so in a few months, and figured that would be a good a time as any to pause and reflect on things and think about-

Seth Godin 37:31 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 37:31 ... where I wanna go. Love doing the podcast, don't plan on stopping it, but there are a lot of trends driving it towards effectively turning podcasts into fixed-location television shows, and I don't have much desire to do that.

Seth Godin 37:44 Yep.

Tim Ferriss 37:45 I don't wanna be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian. That's its own trap, or set of traps, but I know you've been very deliberate, for instance, in choosing not to start a dozen startups and in favor of choosing to spend your time on other things. How do you choose or think about kind of next chapters, or how... What advice might you give me as I contemplate the what's-next type of question?

Seth Godin 38:11 You know, I think it's very kind of you to say I'm very good at it. I don't think I'm good at it, but because I'm sort of in public and I do it in a certain way, it's noted. You know, I did five years of Akimbo. It was in the top one percent of all podcasts, and then I just stopped, and I stopped not because I didn't love it. I did love it. I stopped because if I kept doing it, there's something else I wouldn't do instead. And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum. But if I just keep doing the thing, then there is no vacuum, and sometimes the technology changes. That's why Spinnaker went away. That's why you couldn't keep making VCR games. It's why my head start in the CD-ROM business was worthless, 'cause CD-ROMs went away. I liked, in every s- time I did this, being a pioneer in a new media space, 'cause that's, for me, the funnest spot. And then when the technology changes, I gotta move on. But podcast technology's never gonna change. I mean, you're noting there's a change in the production format, and that is a change. So in my case, what I'm trying to do is not maximize my income per hour spent, nor am I trying to maximize the size of my audience. What I'm trying to maximize is, are the people I'm serving glad that I did, that I showed up to solve an interesting problem? And two, as I build the stack of things on the bookshelf behind me, can I point to them and say, "That was interesting and generous, and I'm glad I did it"? And, you know, that's part of a limited-attention-span theater, so it's not for everybody, but my whole point of view is that life is projects. It is not a job.

Tim Ferriss 40:01 And when you stopped the podcast and created that vacuum, did you already have something kinda warming up in the batting cage that was pending that you need to create that vacuum for, or did you create the vacuum and then wait for something to get pulled into it? [laughs] Not to strain the metaphor, but you get the idea.

Seth Godin 40:19 No, you're not straining it. If there's something pending, it's not a vacuum. There have been times when something so good came along, I did it and then had to remove things so I could do it. You know, when a few of us started Squidoo, which was one of the first social networks, I had to completely org- reorganize my life because we built the fortieth biggest website in the US with only eight employees. So we were busy. This is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you're never gonna work again, where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up, and that's hard to do.

Tim Ferriss 40:55 [laughs] Yeah, it is hard to do. So just to put a, put a microscope on that, I have, as means of backstory, done this for periods of time and have found it deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Sometimes fruitful, oftentimes not terribly fruitful. In part, I think, because when I create that vacuum, I don't know if the best way to embrace the vacuum is to basically just stare at the wall and watch paint dry or to do something else, and my mind just kind of folds in on itself. You create the vacuum, and then what do the next few weeks look like in terms of how you spend your time day to day or week to week?

Seth Godin 41:32 I think a fundamental difference between you and me, there are so many of them, but one of them, as I am here talking to, what, the world tango champion?

Tim Ferriss 41:41 Former world record holder. Long time ago, but yes. [laughs]

Seth Godin 41:44 Is the only thing I have a world record in is being part of the largest coauthor book signing in history, in which me and four hundred other people all signed our book at the same time. Because I am not a high performer. I am interesting, and being interesting is really important to me. But I am not holding myself to the standard you hold yourself in so many ways. And so I could imagine that the thing that gives me comfort might not make you happy.

Tim Ferriss 42:19 Right. For sure. I agree with all of that. And how does that difference translate to what you would do in the weeks following creating- ... the vacuum after, say, stopping the podcast? 'Cause I guess you have activities that you're still carrying forward. It's not like you're completely idle. You're writing still-

Seth Godin 42:35 Oh, yeah

Tim Ferriss 42:35 ... presumably.

Seth Godin 42:36 If someone looked at me from the outside, I think that they would see that my days aren't that different. I'm not shipping public work, because I don't ship junk, but I am internally creating lots of mediocre work, and basically creating straw people and saying, "What would this be like?" And then, "What would that be like?" And, "Here's this thing," and I've sat with my 60 or 80-watt laser cutter and I cut this thing out. What do I think of that? And, um, that invention cycle is joyful, but I can't do it forever because I also need the satisfaction of shipping the work and not giving into resistance. So what I'm doing, when I was a book packager, we sold 120 books in 10 years, a book a month, but I had more than 800 books on my hard drive ready to go. Not finished, but two-page, five-page proposals. Because the only way to have a finished proposal for me is to have an unfinished one that you didn't ship.

Tim Ferriss 43:43 What is it, uh, and this is probably a fundamental question I should have asked earlier, but what do you get from writing and having written as consistently as you have and do? What is the payoff? Like, why do that?

Seth Godin 43:56 Okay, so the biggest payoff is simple. Not in terms of equity, its stock value, but in terms of the noise in my head. The biggest benefit is I will be writing tomorrow because it's Friday, not because I've written the perfect blog post, that every single day something gets published by me, 'cause I decided that 24 years ago, not because I have reconsidered each day whether this one is good enough.

Tim Ferriss 44:23 Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin 44:24 And even if no one read my blog, I would still do it, and I'm very fortunate that people give me the benefit of the doubt knowing that I am not guaranteeing this is the best thing I ever wrote, and they're still willing to look at it. So that's lovely. In terms of my professional practice, again, back to genre, having a sinecure, a platform where for a long time if you type blog into Google I was the first match, because I just showed up more than just about anybody. There's a lot of value to saying, "This is my lane, and you can count on me in this lane." And for someone who is as peripatetic as I in their creative pursuits, having one of those turned out to be a really useful thing.

Tim Ferriss 45:14 You mentioned a word that I don't recognize but I love the sound of, sinecure. What is that? [laughs]

Seth Godin 45:18 Yeah. It's a safe haven, a niche-

Tim Ferriss 45:21 Mm

Seth Godin 45:21 ... a place to hide, a fortress.

Tim Ferriss 45:24 What a great word.

Seth Godin 45:26 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 45:26 All right. Mental note to use sinecure. [laughs]

Seth Godin 45:29 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 45:30 Well, I don't want to take up a ton of time here, Seth. This is all incredibly-

Seth Godin 45:35 This is the best-

Tim Ferriss 45:35 ... incredibly helpful

Seth Godin 45:35 ... the best part of my day, and I know that you're not publishing this as written, but I just wanna say as, for the people who were wondering what's in this magical thing you wrote, it includes the line, "Like Patagonian toothfish has become Chilean sea bass on fashionable menus worldwide." Right there.

Tim Ferriss 45:54 [laughs]

Seth Godin 45:54 That, that's gold, Jerry. That's just gold.

Tim Ferriss 45:57 [laughs]

Seth Godin 45:58 And so you need to liberate these things and explain-

Tim Ferriss 46:02 Yes

Seth Godin 46:02 ... to people what the ... I know what you're talking about, but the fact is that entire species are becoming extinct because somebody figured out a clever way to market an animal that we eat. There's a lot to be said about that one little riff, and you have 40 of them-

Tim Ferriss 46:19 [laughs]

Seth Godin 46:20 ... in one post.

Tim Ferriss 46:21 [laughs] Thanks, man. Yeah, the, the no biological free lunch. It's one of those things that I've said so many times to friends in conversation and I was finally like, you know what? If not for any other reason than I am tired of repeating this Gettysburg Address speech-

Seth Godin 46:36 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 46:37 ... to every wayward friend who calls me up about to consume-

Seth Godin 46:41 Yes

Tim Ferriss 46:41 ... really potent drugs.

Seth Godin 46:43 I have, I have some of those. If you go to Seth.blog and type advice for authors-

Tim Ferriss 46:46 [laughs]

Seth Godin 46:49 ... there are two posts with the same title, 'cause that's the ... I wasn't being clear, that I wrote a year and a half apart, and they have each like a dozen or 15 bullet points. And now I have a sig in Superhuman that I can call up if, when someone sends me a note, a friend or whatever, I can say, "Oh, I've already thought about this question. Here you go."

Tim Ferriss 47:09 [laughs] Oh, I love it. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is 5-Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called 5-Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back down, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device, it was recommended to me by friends, called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side, and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting. This helps. Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great. You can split the zones, and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and save $200 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep this winter. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. This episode is brought to you by 1Password. I have been using 1Password for more than a decade. It is one of my favorite products. I met the founding team early on, love those guys, and I have made this product a requirement for everyone on my team. Data breaches affect everyone. They can be catastrophic. And my feeling is, since that is the case, you need 1Password. 1Password combines industry-leading security with award-winning design to bring private, secure, and user-friendly password management to everyone. I use this dozens of times a day. It is an award-winning password manager trusted by millions of users and more than 100,000 businesses from IBM to Slack, even including my little team. It beat out 40 other options to become Wirecutter's top pick for password managers. 1Password lets you securely switch between iPhone, Android, Mac, and PC with convenient features like autofill for quick sign-ins. All you have to remember is the one strong account password that protects everything else, your logins, your credit cards, secure notes, or the office Wi-Fi password. 1Password creates as many strong, unique passwords as you need and securely stores them in an encrypted vault that only you have access to. You can also use it for one-time passwords where you scan the QR code and it gives you two-factor authentication with the countdown with unique numbers, that type of thing. So instead of using a separate app for those types of authenticator-type functions, you can use 1Password. Plus, regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty keep 1Password at the forefront of security. And right now, my dear listeners, get a free two-week trial at 1password.com/tim. That's two free weeks by typing the number one, then password.com/tim. One, the number one. 1password.com/tim.