Seth Godin Returns (Full Episode) | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

Seth Godin 0:00 Optimal minimal

Tim Ferriss 0:01 At this altitude, I can run flat-out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time.

Seth Godin 0:10 What if I did the opposite?

Tim Ferriss 0:12 I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

Seth Godin 0:16 The Tim Ferriss Show.

Tim Ferriss 0:23 This episode is brought to you by gymnasticbodies.com. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment, and I don't get paid any commissions or anything like that. You may have heard Coach Sommer on the podcast, who designed the program, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am not easily impressed, and I've just been completely blown away by the sophistication of his programming and the elegance of his programming. I've been using Gymnastic Bodies for just a few months now, and I feel more flexible, stronger, and younger than I have in years. And it sounds cheesy to hear myself say that, but it's true. That's the hardest part to believe. [laughs] And you can check it out, gymnasticbodies.com/tim. If you go to that landing page, gymnasticbodies.com/tim, you can take a look at the fundamentals course, which will help you diagnose your weakest points, areas to improve, et cetera. And I highly encourage you take a look at this bodyweight training system. It is incredible. Gymnasticbodies.com/tim. This podcast is brought to you by Trunk Club. I hate shopping with a passion, and you guys know this. And I'm honestly not any good at it anyway, which means I end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless. This is where Trunk Club comes in, which provides you with your own personal stylist and makes it easier than ever to shop for clothes that look great on your body, even if you suck at picking clothing. Just go to trunkclub.com/tim and answer a few questions, and then you'll be sent a trunk full of awesome clothes. They base this on your sizes, preferences, all that jazz. The trunk is then delivered free of charge both ways, so you only pay for clothes that you keep, so you have prepaid stickers and whatnot. If you keep none, it costs you nothing. It's super easy. Trunk Club is not a subscription service, which I wanted to avoid. There are no monthly fees. Also wanted to avoid that. Your stylist is free, shipping is always free, and you have 10 days to try on the clothes risk-free. And Trunk Club is backed by Nordstrom, which means they have the highest standards in quality and customer service. If you care about saving time or looking good, check

Tim Ferriss 2:29 it out at trunkclub.com/tim. Again, that's trunkclub.com/tim. Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease apart the habits, routines, favorite books, et cetera, dozens of things that you can act on from people ranging from chess prodigies to four-star generals, special ops commanders to billionaires, everybody in between, professional athletes, you name it. In this particular episode, we have an in-betweenisode with Seth Godin. His last episode, which covers a lot of his bio and everything else, we really dug into the weeds, super fun, is long. That one was about two, two and a half hours long. This one is short. It's about 30 minutes long, and you can think of it as philosophical [laughs] steroids. I listen to this. It takes a couple minutes to get warmed up, so be patient. But there are some incredible gems that I listen to a few times, including how to keep track of the right things and creating a narrative that serves you as opposed to handicaps you. It's very, very simple, but it's a foundational skill and mindset that I try to practice myself, and this was a fantastic reminder. There are just some really pithy, actionable things that you can implement, uh, and I would suggest that you reflect on in journaling and so on. Seth is the author of 17 bestselling books. He is @thisissethsblog on Twitter. They've been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the way ideas spread, marketing, strategic quitting, leadership, and most of all, challenging the status quo in all areas. His books include, and I'm sure many of you have read more than one, Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, Purple Cow, What to Do When It's Your Turn, and It's Always Your Turn. He's founded companies. His blog, which you can find by typing Seth into Google, is one of the most popular in the world. In 2013, he was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, and he is constantly shaking things up and pushing the envelope, testing the impossible. Very, very brilliant guy. And with all of that said, please enjoy this round two with Seth Godin.

Seth Godin 4:53 Thanks, Tim, for having me. What a pleasure to be back. I will start by pointing out how, uh, erudite, intelligent, good-looking, generous, and thoughtful most of the people who listen to this podcast are. I was optimistic that as we dive through these questions and as Tim continues the long arc of what he's trying to talk about, people will see over and over again that in, in an economy based on connection, real connection comes from people who seek to contribute to the community first, and that that asset, the trust that comes from that, is priceless. So looking through these questions, skipping the one about why I look like a lizard and, uh, a few other questions that have to do with, um, what it was like to be in a movie with James Franco, who I've never met, so I've never been in a movie with James Franco. I find that there are a few groupings. One grouping was, uh, talking about education and parenting. Another grouping was- The mechanics of marketing. And I would say the biggest grouping was an understanding of the fear that each of us has to deal with in order to do this original work. I tried alphabetizing the questions and grouping them, and I failed at that. So maybe what I'll do is go through them, and as they prompt other thoughts, I'll weave

Seth Godin 6:24 those together. So let's start with, uh, James Roloff, who kicked us off with the question, "What's the one thing that most marketers do wrong?" And this is easy. Uh, we're selfish. We are narcissists, infantile narcissists who believe that our need for more and our desire for attention trumps everything else. We justify and rationalize our work and interrupt people, spam people, yell at people, deceive people, and play the short-term game again and again and again. Successful marketers are successful because they don't do that. And it turns out that that's scarce. The folks who are willing to build a story that's true, to earn permission, to create a product or service that spreads merely because it's remarkable, that mindset almost never

Seth Godin 7:25 shows up. Next question is from Pavan Kanwar: "How do you build a tribe from scratch?" So the idea of tribes, I think, is fundamental to humanity. It's been around for thousands and thousands of years. But in the modern world in which we live, we can get confused because it might seem that our job is to build a tribe from scratch. But most of the time, that's not what happens. Nike did not invent the running tribe. There were already runners before Nike showed up. Harley-Davidson did not invent the outsider tribe, a group that called themselves the 1% long before the other 1% showed up. That what we do when we lead a tribe often is we find people who are already connected, and we merely show up to lead them. And for most businesses, most opportunities, we don't even lead them. We merely service a tribe that already exists. So that when you find a group of people who share an instinct, an interest, a connection, a leader, a goal, and you give that group of people something with which they can take action. The way I abbreviate that long sentence is people like us do things like this. Once you are able to say, "People like us do things like this," then you have found a tribe that can revolve around what you do.

Seth Godin 8:57 Switching over to the fear side, Jenny Westercamp asked, "What limiting self-beliefs did I change in order to become successful, and how did I change them?" Uh, this was actually work that I did on myself, uh, in college and have tried to continue doing on myself for a long time since then. The self-limiting beliefs infect all of us because all of us like being competent, we like being respected, we like being successful. And when something shows up that threatens to undo all of those things, well, then it's really easy to avoid it. And what goes hand in hand with that is the sour mindset, the mindset of we are not getting what we deserve, the mindset of the world is not fair, the mindset of why should I even bother? It's probably not going to work. And one thing those of us who are lucky enough to live in a world where we have enough, where we have a roof and we have food, uh, is we find ourselves caught in this cycle of keeping track of the wrong things. Keeping track of how many times we've been rejected, keeping track of how many times it didn't work, keeping track of all the times someone has broken our heart or double-crossed us or let us down. Of course, we can keep track of those things, but why? Why keep track of them? Are they making us better? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep track of the other stuff? To keep track of all the times it worked, all the times we took a risk, all the times we were able to brighten someone else's day? That when we start doing that, we can redefine ourselves as people who are able to make an impact on the world. And it took me a bunch of cycles to figure out that the narrative was up to me. And if a narrative isn't working, well, then really, why are you using it? The narrative

Seth Godin 10:58 isn't done to you. The narrative is something that you choose. And once we can dig deep and find a different narrative, then we ought to be able to change the game. So moving just a tiny bit sideways from this, Chill Ellington, best name of anyone who asked a question so far, asks my opinion on quality versus quantity in the age of the constant hustle mindset in online marketing. Can you win without being everywhere? Of course you can. The real question is, can you win while being everywhere? None of us are everywhere. There are... Most of the people on Earth have never heard of you or me, and most of the people online have never connected with either of us. It's a trap, a giant trap, a trap designed to suck our attention and our content away from us and give us very little in return. Maybe a little heart-shaped thing or a button that points up or a trend that makes us feel like we did a good job. This is all a trap. This isn't what's causing people to succeed. It's not causing- people to be able to make the impact that they seek. My suggestion is whenever possible, ask yourself, "What's the smallest possible footprint I can get away with? What is the smallest possible project that is worth my time? What is the smallest group of people who I could make a difference for or to?" Because smallest is achievable. Smallest feels risky because if you pick smallest and you fail, now you've really screwed up. We want to pick big 'cause infinity is our friend. Infinity is safe. Infinity gives us a place to hide. So I wanna encourage people instead to look for the small, to be on one medium in a place where people can find you, to have one sort of

Seth Godin 13:00 interaction with one tribe, with one group where you don't have a lot of lifeboats. This is what you do. This is what people need to look to you for. So before I dive into a bunch of good questions about education, I wanted to talk about the long cut. One of the cultures that's present on the internet is this idea of the shortcut, the life hack, the way to get into the innards of a system more quickly and easily. I'm an outspoken proponent of the long cut because it seems to me that the long cut is the most direct route to get to where you seek to go, that the brands that we are aligned with, the institutions that we care about, the people we admire, they all took the long cut. The long cut is The Beatles playing in Hamburg for months and months, or Bob Marley slowly but surely working his way from where he was to where he ended up. That the long cut is a different game. It's not, uh, give and get. It's not even give and give and give and get. It's just what does this community need? And more important, how do I do a kind of work that matters, that's mine and mine alone, that's identified with me, that's difficult? So whenever possible, I'm looking for the long cut because it turns out that that is the single best way to make the change that

Seth Godin 14:32 we seek to have happen. Which leads to education. Carlo D'Angelo asked us about public school. And I've got a book he-- a question here from Jason Habish, who wants to know how I would approach mastermind groups. Uh, there are other people who have asked about, um, the altMBA, including two of the altMBA grads who are following you. I'm looking for their names as I s- Justin Taylor wants to know how the altMBA would look, uh, for grades K to 12. John Robinson and Bill O'Neill both ask questions about it as well. So here we go. In Stop Stealing Dreams, I basically pointed out that public school is an artifact of the industrial age, that it was invented by industrialists who need compliant factory workers. This model is fading. It's leaving people in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt without the jobs that they seek. The idea that you could go to someone and say, "Tell me what to do," and then they will pay you a lot of money is fading faster than ever. And it's being replaced by people who know how to do two things, which is what I think school ought to be teaching. One, how to solve interesting problems, meaning how to do a thing you can't look up on the internet, meaning how to do something where no one can tell you how to do it. And two, lead. Have the guts to say, "Follow me." These things are in scarce supply, and the main reason they're in scarce supply is 'cause people aren't taught to do them, and our culture isn't organized around them. So what do we do about school? Well, the first thing we do when it comes to thinking about parenting is not to tolerate but to embrace the idea of free-range kids, kids who are learning what works by figuring out what doesn't, that the lessons that we remember are the lessons we learned the hard way. I can't remember the last time I said to myself, "Oh, when I was in fifth grade or seventh grade or tenth grade, we read about this in a textbook." But I remember really well something I screwed up in second grade and then I learned how to fix on my own. So when the kid comes home with a solid B+ average and then one grade that's a C-, the industrialist mindset is cause trouble around the C-. Figure out how to make someone well-rounded. Help them understand how important it is to meet spec. The alternative is to encourage our kids to find things that don't work, to experiment with things that they're not good at, to explore yet another thing that didn't turn out right if they approach it in the right spirit, if they approach it with the right intent. And that process of learning through exploration is too often missing. And one of the ideas that I'm really enamored with is the idea of enrollment. Enrollment is not what happens when you sign up with the nearby school and then they threaten to throw the parents in jail if the kid doesn't show up in class. Enrollment is what we call it when someone is eagerly present. When a consultant has enrollment from a client, the client is saying to her, "Yes, we want to move forward. Show us how." As opposed to the consultant having to cajole and push and basically, uh, encourage the client to go forward. Enrollment is different. Enrollment is something we want to do. So the key element of the altMBA begins with enrollment in that you're not there to get a piece of paper 'cause there isn't one. You're not there because it's accredited, because it's not. You're there because you want to level up. That online courses like, uh, Coursera, which Michael Sweeney asked about, and other MOOCs and self-directed learning, all of them work best when they are things we choose to do. This is an important distinction because most of the education that most of us have had is not education we enrolled for, or if we did enroll, we enrolled once at the beginning, and then we were waiting for the two-year MBA to be over, or we were waiting for the driver ed class to be over. We weren't actually seeking to engage in the work itself. So what we have to figure out how to do, whether it's for third graders or for a MOOC, is continue to amplify this cycle of enrollment, continue to create an environment where people would miss it if there was a snow day. They would miss it if someone said, "We don't have to do that page." Uh, there's a famous bar review course that used to happen in New York called Peeper. And what Peeper would do... You pay thousands of dollars to take this course... is he would stand in front of the class and read his notes. And then every once in a while he'd want to stop and tell an anecdote, so he would say, "Not for your notes," and everyone would drop their pencil and start talking to each other, ignoring him until he would then say, "Notes." No one took the bar exam course 'cause they wanted to learn something. They all took the bar exam course so they could get the bar exam over with. And I think what we're seeing in our culture now as it's being rearranged is we get to do what we wanna do if we care enough.

Seth Godin 20:37 But caring enough means we've gotta figure out how to move forward. We have to figure out where the fear is and engage with it. So I have a question here from Wade Johnston. Do I ever have fear? If so, how does he deal with it, and if not, when did it stop? Well, I don't think it's ever gonna stop. And I-- Most of the people I know aren't sociopaths and psychopaths. They have fear as well. Fear is hardwired into us. Fear kept our ancestors alive. Fear isn't stupid. But lately, fear is incorrectly processed, that being afraid of public speaking is a bug in our operating system. 'Cause public speaking isn't actually dangerous. It just feels dangerous. Can you make the fear go away? Well, some people say they can. I'm not sure that it's true. I think that what we can do is dance with the fear. So one of the things we do in the altMBA is we put people through thirteen different projects in public, some group, some solo. And one of the reasons for that is to create a cycle of shipping. Why? Because once you get into the cycle of shipping, you begin to associate the fear with producing work of value. And that idea that

Seth Godin 22:08 you can use fear as a compass, that you can say, "Why is this making me nervous?" Maybe that nervousness is pointing me where I need to go, not the other way around. Okay, jumping around a little bit. David Mooring wants to know, if I didn't have my blog, my email list, my books, my network, how would I go about building a tribe and making a ruckus today, starting with zero? Given the amount of noise and the amount of content produced today, do I think I could go back to my current level of prominence and impact? You know, my current level of prominence and impact is largely based on luck. I showed up a lot, but so did a lot of other people. I wrote a lot, but so did a lot of other people. I had some good ideas, but so did a lot of other people. And every day I remind myself that someone had to get lucky in certain respects, and it was me. There are other things I tried, other things I built that didn't work. Other people got lucky in those areas, not me. I'm not vain enough to believe that it's all my doing. You know, I won the parent lottery. I grew up in the right decade, in the right country at the right time, and some lucky breaks along the way made a big difference. But that wasn't your question. Your question was, how would I make an impact today? Here's where we get back to that idea of the smallest possible market. Too often, and I really don't like the blog posts about companies that raised another ten million dollars, the companies that were valued at another fifty million dollars who don't even have a product yet. This is not news. This is not success. This is another step along the road, but it's not something that we need to aspire to. What those organizations are generally doing, there are exceptions, but what they are generally doing is postponing the day they need to say to a customer, "Please pay me money." That we do lots of things to hide from that day. We say we're planning, we're prepping, we're raising money, we're, uh, trying for a bigger market. What's wrong with a small market? Can you create something of value for three people? Can you create something of value for nine people? Is there a tribe of 12 skateboarders down the road that you could engage with, that you could have an influence with, that you could make a profit with? Because if you can't do it with 12, or you can't do it with 20, or you can't do it with 50, what makes you think you're gonna be able to do it with 5,000 or 50,000? It doesn't get easier. It gets the same. That postponing it, waiting for the perfect tribe, waiting for the perfect idea, the perfect book title, the perfect this, the perfect that, or worse, looking for shortcuts and hacks and ways to conceal ourselves from what we're capable of doing, I think these are all mistakes. I think the win, the giant opportunity, is to change one person. Teach one person. Influence one person. Find a market where someone needs what you have. So I started really professionally as a soloist in '86 selling books to book publishers. Now, in 1986, book publishers needed more books than they had. That almanacs and detailed, long pop books are hard to write. There weren't enough people who could write them. I was one of those people. I built a team that could package and create these books, and I got rejected again and again and again and again until I understood how to talk to people in that industry in a way that they could hear me, in a way that they could understand and respect, and then I was able to sell them. And the magic of this is it pays for itself. You don't do the book until someone pays for it, and once they pay for it, you have enough money to do the book. So I didn't need funding. I didn't need somebody to support the prospect of what I was doing because the client was paying for it, and that's not always true. There are certainly important businesses that have been built with a more slow approach, where people don't pay for a long time to come, where Google was busy, you know, being Google for a lot of people before they made a penny. Those businesses have a place, but they don't have to be your business. Your business can be about engaging with people who trust you, delivering value to them, and making enough money to do it again. And we can hide from this, but we shouldn't pretend that that's not the best plan. Going public isn't the purpose. Selling your company isn't the purpose. The purpose is creating value for someone who will pay you for it so you can do it again. So then there's some questions about personal brand. Uh, John wants to know how I define my own personal brand. Uh, Niels Witteveen wants to know when the right time to start working on your personal brand is. Uh, then there are a couple questions here from people

Seth Godin 27:43 like, uh, Eric and Ian and, uh, Jeff about how I pick what my next project should be and what size. I think these are related, so let me try. What's your brand? Is your brand your logo? Well, that's stupid because we're humans. We don't have logos. So what is your brand? I think your brand is the promise that you make implicitly or explicitly. What do I expect from you when I hire you, when you show up in my headphones, when we engage? What's the promise? Brands that keep their promises are consistent. Brands that keep their promises earn trust and, through permission, awareness. You have a brand whether you want one or not. From the minute you engage with your boss or your coworkers or a prospect or a customer or even the person at the Avis rent-a-car counter, you have a brand. You're branded as the impatient customer who's not listening, or you're branded as the calm professional who gets the job done, or you are branded as the short-term hustler who's always looking for an angle. But yes, you have a brand. So when should you start working on it? Yesterday or a year ago or five years ago. If it's too late for that, the next best time is right now. Your brand is a story, and it's a story that helps people tell themselves a story about you. So your appearance, your handshake, your pricing, how long it takes you to deliver the goods, where you're located, your accent, how tall you are, even the way you spell your name are all parts of the story that other people tell themselves about you. And most of those stories are unfair. Most of those stories are based on prejudice and a lack of information and fear and fear and fear. The stories people tell themselves about you are never true. They can't be. No one knows you as well as you do. I've given 1,000 speeches. No one has heard all of them except for me, right? I've written 18 bestsellers. Most of you haven't read all of them. Written 6,000 blog posts. Again and again and again you go down the list. So many things we don't know about you. So many things we don't know about what you're capable of, what you dream of, what you want to produce. So yes, you have a brand, and no, it's not the same for everyone. But it's up to you to consistently and persistently show up in a way that amplifies that brand, that if you are the kind of person that can justify doing the next thing you do 'cause it's an emergency, well, that's part of your brand. If on the other hand, there are things that others would do that you wouldn't in this moment, that also is

Seth Godin 30:45 part of your brand. So when I was a book packager, I had a brand at the beginning, which was that I was a Stanford MBA who was going to great pains to show how prepared he was and professional he was, and yes, smarter about the market than the editors I was selling to. And they responded to my brand by buying nothing from me because it didn't match the story they needed to tell themselves about what they were doing. So I deliberately and intentionally changed my brand. Stopped putting spreadsheets in my proposals, stopped wearing a suit to my meetings, worked hard to listen to what it was that they were trying to tell me and what it was that they needed from me so that I could deliver to them on the promise they wanted me to make. That mindset requires you to commit to the marketplace you wanna be in. Because if one minute you're selling steam shuffles, and the next minute you're selling life insurance, and the minute after that you're helping people beat a traffic ticket, no one can figure out who you are. No one can figure out what to expect from you next. So as my late friend Zeke used to say, there's a difference between being a meaningful, specific, and a wandering generality. A wandering generality is looking for the next thing all the time, and as a result, they can't possibly

Seth Godin 32:17 build a brand. So then Tom M says, "Well, how do I decide what is essential, indispensable, or what is useless to pay my attention on?" It comes back to the brand, to the promise, to what you stand for, and as Michael Schrage has pointed out, to the change that you are seeking in the world. If you're trying to make a specific change, it becomes much easier to decide what is essential. If you're trying to make a specific change to a specific person or group of people, it becomes much easier to not be abstract but specific. That as Jack Schuss is wondering about, yes, there is practical advice once you decide what change you are seeking to make, that it's really not that difficult for Nike to decide to do something or not do something because they stand for something, because they've made a promise. Should Nike get into the corn chip business? Well, they could probably make money in corn chips, at least for a while, because they have a lot to invest, and they know how to run ads, and they have distribution. However, corn chips don't match the story that Nike is telling to the people they're trying to tell it to. I, I'll give you a little branding aside here. The story was told years ago that Nike was sold in Sears stores, and that Nike and Sears had an agreement that Sears would never run an ad in the Sunday circulars, the FSIs that run in the Sunday paper for Nike shoes. Well, some low-level person at Sears meaning well ran an ad once, and Nike responded by pulling all of their products from every Sears store in America. Well, that freaked out the leaders at Sears, and they frantically called and called Phil Knight to see if they could fix things, and Phil Knight refused to speak to them. So taking matters into their own hands, they flew to, uh, the West Coast, to Oregon, to meet with him. And Phil had them sit in the lobby, not outside his office, but in the main lobby of the Nike building from nine o'clock in the morning to five o'clock at night, and then he sent them home. Now, I don't think I would ever humiliate somebody like that, but he did it for a reason, because every one of his employees walked past these two people from Sears sitting in the lobby being punished in public because they had done something that didn't match the promise that Nike was trying to make. Part of Nike's promise was to big retailers, which is we're not gonna treat you particularly well 'cause we stand for something other than treating the retailers really well. But a big part of the promise was we're serious about what we do and how we do it, and our customers understand that, and we need to understand it as well. So part of what we seek when we build one of these brands as a human is a narrative, boundaries, a way of figuring out what we stand for and what we don't stand for. Not to everyone, but to the people we are seeking to change. And one of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of online comments is online comments are open to everyone, not the people you seek to change. Online comments are anonymous, not the people you seek to change. So hearing

Seth Godin 35:50 from those people will push you to be more average, more normal, more low-key, more in the middle. But that's not where brands are built. Brands are built around the edges. We have a couple questions here about Purple Cow, about standing out in a field where everyone is trying to. Meir Jobinputra and, um, Tone Ravna Jornsted ask similar questions. How will marketing change as more people leave full-time and get into the gig economy? How are we supposed to stand out in a crowded field? How can you keep The cow purple. Well, you're right. Neophilia, the desire for the new, eats its own young. It means that Jackson Pollock is old-fashioned. It means that Hamilton is yesterday's play, or it will be one day soon. That if you decide to live on that edge, sign up for what you're getting. And what you're getting is this industry where what's new is the dominant question. But it turns out human beings don't merely need that. What human beings really need is to be connected, to be seen, to be understood, to get what they need when they need it. And that means that you can find a group of people, it doesn't have to be very many, where you are the consistent, regular choice. You're not going for neophiliacs in this place. You're going for people who are happily engaged in the center of the market doing productive work. And when you become the key supplier to these people, you're not getting that gig because you do a commodity a little cheaper than everyone else. You're getting that gig 'cause you're better, better at knowing them, better at being flexible, better at going the extra mile, better at keeping your promises. That we un-commoditize our work by making our work more human. And that is so hard because when you make it human, it means you're responsible. And responsibility is different than authority. Responsibility is taken. Authority is given. So we can each take more responsibility by becoming better at our craft, trusted by a group of people who need and want to hear from us. Okay, and to wrap this up, we have questions from Jeff Shore and from, um, a

Seth Godin 38:23 few other people about how I choose projects, what scale I want the projects to be, how I keep from getting distracted in the middle of a project. My answer here, and for the people who want me to give you practical step-by-step bullets, I apologize, but my answer here is simple. At some point, you need to decide who you are. You need to decide the scale of what you build. You need to decide what the brand is when people hire you, when they engage with you. I used to make 700-page reference books with teams of four or five people who would work for over a year to make something that could really stand the test of time. That's a choice. I was able to go into a publisher and confidently say, "I do that." Do I do Broadway shows? No. Do I do TV series? No. I do this. And we can't, once we pick our scale and our project, jump to the next thing instantly, nor can we complain that picking one scale keeps us from doing the other thing. We have to embrace it. The fact is it helps us that we have a sinecure, that we help... That we have a niche, that we have a thing that we do. 'Cause then when other people want to be in our space just for kicks, they can't, 'cause they're not us at our scale with our contribution to make. And so when we look at social media, when we look at all the opportunities, when we look at all the conferences we can go to, we say to ourself, "Does this advance me in the change I am trying to make to the community? Does this help my customers because it makes it easier for me to keep my promises?" Years ago, my dad, uh, who used to run the biggest hospital cook company in the country, bought a laser cutter. Not one of those little Kickstarter laser cutters, but a laser cutter that cost a million dollars. Buying a laser cutter that costs a million dollars when you run a multimillion-dollar hospital cook company is a really smart thing to do because that asset, and it's an asset, you own it, you use it, that asset enabled him to transform the quality of what he was making, the time to market. It helped him make all of his promises better. That's what happens once you own the decision. So I'm gonna finish by thanking you and Tim again, and hope that you've taken away from this, and thank you for lending me your time. These ideas about fear, and the compass, and the promises, and the brand, and about doing work that's yours and yours alone, and owning it, and connecting to people, finding a tribe, and contributing to them. I hope you'll go make a ruckus. Thanks.

Tim Ferriss 41:18 [upbeat music]

Tim Ferriss 41:22 Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is 5-Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And 5-Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up [laughs] in the, uh, the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance, and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is brought to you by Trunk Club. I hate shopping with a passion, and you guys know this. And I'm honestly not any good at it anyway, which means I end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless. This is where Trunk Club comes in, which provides you with your own personal stylist and makes it easier than ever to shop for clothes that look great on your body, even if you suck at picking clothing. Just go to trunkclub.com/tim and answer a few questions, and then you'll be sent a trunk full of awesome clothes. They base this on your sizes, preferences, all that jazz. The trunk is then delivered free of charge both ways, so you only pay for clothes that you keep, so you have prepaid stickers and whatnot. If you keep none, it costs you nothing. It's super easy. Trunk Club is not a subscription service, which I wanted to avoid. There are no monthly fees. Also wanted to avoid that. Your stylist is free, shipping is always free, and you have 10 days to try on the clothes risk-free. And Trunk Club is backed by Nordstrom, which means they have the highest standards in quality and customer service. If you care about saving time or looking good, check it out at trunkclub.com/tim. Again, that's trunkclub.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by gymnasticbodies.com. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment, and I don't get paid any commissions or anything like that. You may have heard Coach Sommer on the podcast, who designed the program, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am not easily impressed, and I've just been completely blown away by the sophistication of his programming and the elegance of his programming. I've been using Gymnastic Bodies for just a few months now, and I feel more flexible, stronger, and younger than I have in years. And it sounds cheesy to hear myself say that, but it's true. That's the hardest part to believe. And you can check it out, gymnasticbodies.com/tim. If you go to that landing page, gymnasticbodies.com/tim, you can take a look at the fundamentals course, which will help you diagnose your weakest points, areas to improve, et cetera. And I highly encourage you take a look at this bodyweight training system. It is incredible. Gymnasticbodies.com/tim.