Seth Godin on LINCHPIN: Are You Indispensable?

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Seth Godin is the world’s most listened-to marketing Artist. This new interview is a classic. There is no road map to success. Just be an Artist, don’t go to traditional school, shut down you’re Lizard brain and your on your way to success!

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Interview Transcript

Randy Webster: Hello Everyone, I’m Randy Webster and Welcome to Bookblade, where we educating the world one book at a time. Today I want to thank a very special person – Seth Godin is with us today! He’s the Author of a lot of books. National Best sellers, New York Times best sellers, number one business and marketing blog in the world. He’s an agent of change an immense entrepreneur. And he’s with us today to talk about Linchpins. Seth, I want to thank you so much for coming on today.

Seth Godin: It’s my pleasure, thanks for having me and thanks to your wife for making the whole thing work.

Randy Webster: You bet! Firstly, I would like to ask you, have you always been an entrepreneur since a young age?

Seth Godin: Well, an entrepreneur is somebody who makes money while they sleep, builds a business bigger than themselves. I think I was a freelancer from the time I was about fourteen. I would start an idea, get out there and sell it. But, I didn’t become an entrepreneur where I was actually building entities that could actually live and die without me until I was about much older than that.

Randy Webster: Oh, that’s a good definition.

Can I take you back to when you were fourteen?

Seth Godin: I had hair like this.

Randy Webster: You were selling Biorhythms?

Seth Godin: Yeah, I don’t know if you remember those. There was this superstition like Astrology that believed there were three cycles that went up and down every month. There was an emotional cycle, a social cycle and an intellectual cycle and the theory was that if you could track where your cycles were, you could do things when they were up and avoid things when they were down. So, I found this computer program in my High School that generated them and then I donated custom biorhythms to the public television auction so people could donate a to the TV station those biorhythms for people.

Randy Webster: Did you make money on them? I didn’t catch that.

Seth Godin: Well, the idea was that I certainly wasn’t going to make money on the ones I gave away for charity but the thought was that those people would come back and buy more from me. Which was a lot in those days. Until I got a letter from somebody who said, “Please, I’d like to order Biorhythms for everyone in my family, the reason is because you did some biorhythms for my brother and he died on a triple zero day and so now I believe all this and I really need them for everyone.” I was thinking Whoa, that is way too serious for me so I shut them down.

Randy Webster: That’s awesome man. Well, you have a new book coming out but first I would like to thank you for all the other books you have written. They’re still magic today in my life. I can’t forget about THE DIP. It was handed to me sometime ago when I had a small problem, losing a couple hundred thousand dollars when something was working really well a few years prior to that. I figured it out. A friend of mine said “You are in the dip my friend”. Then I read your book and I had to cut my losses but it did give me a realization in such a special way. You come to a conclusion and your told never to quit but that’s when I had to cut and go from there. I had to share that with you because it really got me “unstuck” if you will out of a bad situation. So, thank you.

Seth Godin: Well, I’m glad it helped. You know the myths in our society a lot of them I talk about in the new book but THE DIP really addresses a critical one which is this whole Vince Lombardi – Winners never quit and quitters never win mind set. In fact, we quit stuff all the time we don’t still take ballet lessons or tap dancing like we did when we were seven. So, what is this whole thing about quitting? And it turns out, quitting the right stuff is critically important. Quitting the wrong stuff is a big problem. Lot’s of people quit after they go to the gym two times or they quit a job when they should really stick it out. But, the flip side of that is we get stuck thinking that we will be a failure if we stop doing something that doesn’t work and I think the people who are most successful and happiest are really good at quitting stuff that doesn’t work.

Randy Webster: Right. I’ll tell you, I had a struggle with that, but that immensely helped me get out of what you just explained. And I think it was more the ego. I just couldn’t let it go and it was dragging my pockets so, thank you.

Seth Godin: Right.

Randy Webster: And the next is and I know where going to talk about Linchpin but again, THE PURPLE COW! You have a unique way of writing; a style of really embedding a principle in your head to really look at things differently. It’s funny, because I was hiking over from Mulholland down to Sunset the other day with my family. I have hiked this several times but I just recently read “THE PURPLE COW” and there are these beautiful sprawling hills and mansions and I look over to the left and there’s the biggest purple house I’ve ever scene. So, right of the bat, I’m thinking of your book and I want to paint a purple cow on that house and I think of Prince a lot more. But, my point is it embeds something now where it’s totally transformed my way of thinking and looking at an idea. And it really is to separate yourself or to put into a niche or to be remarkable in other ways. And again, THE PURPLE COW has had a tremendous effect on me and other people I have talked to about your style of marketing and your brilliance behind writing. Anything more you can tell us about how that came about?

Seth Godin: Well, I really appreciate it. Those are very kind words. I think it’s been misunderstood by a lot of people so let me make it as simple as I can. The cheapest way to spread an idea, the cheapest way to spread an idea, the cheapest way to build a business, the cheapest way to have a movie or a restaurant or anything you do succeed is to make the thing itself worth talking about. Not to make average stuff for average people and then promote it like crazy. That leads to failure. It used to work. Bob Hope movies were average from the first to the last . . .

Randy Webster: Right.

Seth Godin: But they were promoted by a major studio, in a major way. There weren’t a lot of choices so people went to watch them. Now, the only things people go to see are stuff their friends recommend. The only things we buy, the only restaurants we go to, the only places we go to on vacation are places that other people decided to tell us about. How does that happen? It doesn’t happen because you slap a purple coat of paint on something. It happens because the item itself, the service itself, the person itself is worth talking about. Becoming remarkable means worth making a remark about. And a lot of the people have trouble with that because it scares them to do something remarkable.

Randy Webster: Yeah. That’s good point and it does scare them. And you say to be outrageous but with all those other principals you just talked about. And I’ve done that, to try to come outside the box of your own personality and to become more of you and you can get a little outrageous, and it’s okay. And that segways right into LINCHPIN and talking about school. Now, schools to me were well, I was lined up and was somewhat of a cheater. I would put my hand up and say I didn’t know this or I didn’t know that and I would get ostracized for saying that. The teacher would always look at my paper and say my gosh, this looks like Jimmy’s math Randy. And I’m like, yeah, I know, it is his math because he’s great at math. I just found the best people in school and one time I turned in a paper and she said it looks like Cynthia wrote this thing and I go well, she did she’s a brilliant writer. So, I was always in the Principals office and I didn’t do well in school. I went in and out of college, didn’t care and just couldn’t do it. Then I read something you wrote. When you get out in the real world you seek the people who have unique abilities. I don’t know if it kills their creativity. I mean, some people do very well in school. I don’t know if you were touching upon that in Linchpin. Can you elaborate on that?

Seth Godin: Well, doing well in school is proof of exactly one thing. Which is that you can do well in school. So, if your looking for a profession where you sit in straight rows, take notes about stuff that’s easy to find and then write it back down on a test every few months then, your perfectly suited for that. Because that what you did in school. School was organized by powerful people, usually corporations to train compliant factory workers. That’s the function of school. The second function of school is to teach people to consume stuff to fit in and to feel good about themselves. Those are the two things that people worried about in the 1910’s and the 1920’s when factories were being built. That we would run out of factory workers and that we wouldn’t have enough people to buy all the stuff we were making. So, we built the system to train generation after generation to actually do what we needed them to do. All those things are useless now. We don’t need to buy more stuff. Buying stuff doesn’t make us happy and we don’t need more compliant factory workers because there cheaper in Costa Rica or there cheaper in China or anywhere else a couple of clicks away. You can pull into a drive thru at McDonalds in California and your talking on a little microphone and the person your talking to you is not on the other side of the wall. There in South Dakota typing away your order and then shipping it back to the computer in California. It’s cheaper for McDonalds to do that long distance than it is to hire someone to stand in California and take your order. The point is, you will not win by being more compliant than everybody else. You will not win by being more average than everybody else and yes, doing well in trigonometry is not particularly useful either.

Randy Webster: Right. So, what does Seth Godin do? How do you continue learning? Do you continue to learn, continue to read, continue to educate yourself on change in different areas?

Seth Godin: Well, yeah. If the internet didn’t exist, I would have to invent it. It’s my favorite tool. I read two or three books a day, a couple hundred blogs on a regular basis. Just absorbing it, noticing things. You know, not to delay me, not to stall, not to keep me from doing the work. Its part of the work. And the work is seeing the world as it is and seeing a new path through it. You can’t make a difference in the world. You can’t do what I call “Art” unless you can see the world as it is and to do that you have to find what your interested in and be informed about it. That doesn’t mean that you have to know everything but it means you have to know the lay of the land. You have to have what they call Prashna to see the real thing.

Randy Webster: Wow. Well, thank you. I call you the comedic boxer with your writing. You have an underling comedic edge to it, but when you get that message, it punches you right in the face. But you get it. I was telling my wife, you can talk about a pizza and it relates to my whole family life. I don’t know. You bring in great elements and great stories and great analogies and great metaphors about things. Is that just your style?

Seth Godin: Well, here’s what I discovered, people don’t buy anything based on facts. They don’t buy rugs, they don’t buy bedding, they don’t buy a back rub or Chiropractic care or a Doctor’s office. Facts aren’t what they’re considering. When you recommend a doctor, are you recommending her because you did an analysis on the outcomes of her treatments or are you recommending her because the waiting room is furnished in a cool way, she has a nice nurse and she doesn’t make you wait too long? You know, those aren’t facts that are particularly relevant to the surgery your recommending but they are because we look at cues and clues and all this stuff around us to compile a story. And its stories that people believe its stories that make people change. You know, I like to say when I’m doing a seminar, please don’t take notes because no one takes notes at church. No one takes notes on a date. No one takes notes when there doing anything that is going to cause them to change and my writing style is not to say here’s a bunch of data, I am proving that I am right. Cause, I don’t even know if I’m right. What I’m saying is, here’s a bunch of stories. Here’s a way of thinking about the world we’re in and if it resonates with you, maybe you’ll change yourself because you’re the only person who can make yourself change, not me.

Randy Webster: Right. That is eloquently said and what we get from your books. It’s not really this “how to”, it’s such great stories and it triggers all these elements in your mind to really think differently and that is a great gift you have. One other question that I had, with a person like you that reads a lot, writes a lot, thinks a lot. You have a lot going on. How do you balance it all? Do you have a calendar of what you do daily? I get so caught up in what I should be doing, what I should be reading and family life. Do you have a balance or do you just for it as far a balancing it?

Seth Godin: Well, I think it’s really important that no one care in the slightest about what you do or what I do. Everyone does this kind of thing differently and to model where someone else is coming from is probably not going to work for anyone. What I will say, which I’ve found effective is that haven’t watched television in seven or eight years. And, if you save three, four or five hours a day from television that gives you an enormous amount of time to do other things. So, that is one tip that I’ve found travels pretty well. You know, in terms of balance, unfortunately a lot of people think that their personal life is what they do with whatever time is leftover after there done working. I don’t buy that and I think that you only get to do this whole thing once and you might as well figure out what is important and allocate the time for that. You know the people who run the world, the people in The White House, the people running fortune five hundred companies, they don’t get anymore hours than you and me. So, how is that there getting so much done? Well, one answer is they understand the power of leverage. Its way easier now as Tim Ferris will tell you to hire people to help you do work that they can do cheaper and faster than you can do. You shouldn’t assemble you own computer, someone should do it for you. Maybe you shouldn’t answer your own phone calls, maybe you shouldn’t do your own typing. If you are productive as an Artist creating high value interactions then there will be plenty of money left over to hire people to do things for you. Now, in my case, I decided to do everything with my name on it myself. I decided to write every word. I answer every email. I answer every phone call. I have no desire to leverage any of that because the craft of doing it is an important part of what I do all day. But, that doesn’t mean that’s the right strategy for you. I know people who run very successful companies who don’t use email, you know there’s someone they hired and they pay that person a good wage to be their email and when that person has a question, they ask him. They say it out loud and they answer. They find that efficient. The goal here is not to follow someone’s tactics. The goal is to have a passion and a vision and a goal and go do that thing and don’t use anything as a distraction or an excuse to get in the way of it.

Randy Webster: Right. Wow, your writing and watching and listening to you have helped me out tremendously. Just in the point and I know you talk a lot about Twitter and the following and the Facebook crowd and how many people are really following. You still bring it back to that one loyal fan or that one person who’s really listening to you instead of trying to please the whole crowd and build it from there and those words have been so helpful in progressing and staying in the process. That’s really important. And I think I’m using your words if I’m out of context you can tell me but is that your vision of it? Just please those who want to be pleased by you or who are really your tribe?

Seth Godin: Well, I think that we have to divide the world into several groups. One of them is the people you need to please. That doesn’t mean you are pleasing them already. It’s not about being surrounded by a posse that are telling you your right. What I’m arguing for is ignoring people you don’t need to please. You know, if you talk to Spike Lee, he does not make movies for the critics. He doesn’t care what the critics think and intentionally ignoring them makes his movies better. Jerry Garcia didn’t try to please the record executives at Warner. They weren’t his audience. He didn’t need to worry about if this would make them happy or not. The problem with online is that any anonymous schlub can speak up on Twitter or on your blog or whatever but you may not care about that person, where they are coming from. Decide in advance, who are you trying to please? That’s your constituency. They might not be your Tribe yet but they are the people you are trying to touch, change and influence.

Randy Webster: I got that. You talk in your books a lot about fear or emotions. Do you get fearful when you are releasing a book? How do you manage you fear or emotions going forward.

Seth Godin: My goal is really simple. Everyday I try to do something that scares the pants off of me because you know there’s a big difference between fearless, reckless and feckless. Right? Fearless is that ability to ignore the voice in your head that says, Oh maybe you shouldn’t do that. Reckless is nuts. Reckless is when you do something where it’s likely your going to get hurt and feckless means your totally helpless. My goal is to be fearless but not reckless. My goal is to do something everyday, write something everyday, say something everyday that pushes me to an edge where I’m worried that I went just a little too far. Because, if your not doing that, your coasting.

Randy Webster:Right, it’s kind of pushing you out of your comfort zone everyday. I think you get in trouble when you’re in your comfort zone a lot. I mean, I’ve been there many of times. I’ve been vacationing maybe too many months in a row and your like, wait a minute, I’m in the wrong place. I’ve got to get a little weird, feel a little weird again. But you know the lizard brain. I just loved that. You have no idea how that just stuck on my run today. It sticks all the time. I’ve seen you talk about it. The lizard brain is what stops a lot of people right?

Seth Godin: Well, that is it’s job right? It’s a myth that we have one brain. We have many brains. Physical brains in our heads, the amygdala, which is right back here is our prehistoric brain stem it’s responsible for survival and revenge and anger and lust and things like that. If the lizard brain is activated, it’s going to take over. It’s the lizard brain that makes you honk on your horn when someone cuts you off. It’s the lizard brain that gets some drunk guy in a bar to pull out a knife. It’s the lizard brain that says, whoa, maybe you shouldn’t do that job because your not qualified and people will laugh at you and in the old days when we had saber tooth tigers, the lizard brain was really important because the lizard brain kept us alive. But now, the lizard brain is actually wrong almost all of the time. The stuff the lizard brain says you shouldn’t do is exactly what you should do cause it’s what makes you stand out.

Randy Webster: How do you silence your lizard brain. I mean, I know I had to get over how I used to. How do you silence it?

Seth Godin: The purpose of my book is to persuade people that it exists and to sell them on conquering it. I give them lots of little examples on how you can deal with it but there isn’t one way that always works. If it was easy than everyone would do it already. So, I don’t want to say do this or do this or do this. What I want to say is acknowledge its presence, hear its voice. Commit to defeating it and once you make the commitment you will find new ways and new ways and new ways to do it. You know it’s interesting Elizabeth Gilbert says people get writers block but no one ever gets engineering block and the reason is that engineers aren’t doing anything that scares the lizard but writers are and what we need to do is seek out tasks that frighten the lizard.

Randy Webster: Exactly. That’s interesting Man. You also talk about mediocre obedience in here. A genetic fact for most of the population but it’s interesting to note that this trait only shows up after a few years of schooling. Well, we talked about the school thing but do you want to elaborate any more on that?

Seth Godin: Well, you know would being more obedient make you more successful? Would having a company filled with more obedient people make the company more successful? You know that even the Army has now acknowledged that if you’ve got feet on the street in Iraq or Afghanistan you don’t want those guys to be obedient. You want those guys to be smart and perceptive and connected. Obedience is way overrated.

Randy Webster: You also touch on it in you are a genius. You made a point here that a genius is someone that looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck. I guess that ties back.

Seth Godin: Yes, I mean that’s part of being a human being I think. Everyone has done this. Everyone has solved a problem other people could not solve. Everyone has connection other people could not make. Everyone has done something that surprised people and I guess my question is that if you can do it once, why can’t you do it more than once?

Randy Webster: Well, this time it’s personal with Linchpin.

Seth Godin: Yes, I’m in hurry. This is a moment in time. There a revolution going on and some people are going to miss it and I hope that it’s not the people who are watching this right now. There’s more tools, more leverage, more abilities, more opportunities right now today than anytime in history and the question is, ten years from now are you going to look back and say oh I missed that one.

Randy Webster: Right and seems to me that a lot more people are listening. People that wouldn’t listen before. Maybe the lizard brain is talking to them a little more. It seems like a time like that.

Seth Godin: Could be. Could be.

Randy Webster: Is there anything I didn’t cover?

Seth Godin: This is great Randy. I really appreciate your time. Its, obvious, you did the homework and I hope we can make a difference for at least a few people.

Randy Webster: Me too Seth. You are an idol. I want to thank you so, so much for taking your valuable time and coming on today.

Seth Godin: Well, see you. Goodbye.

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