- Hey everybody, what's up?
It's Chase, welcome to another episode
of the Chase Jarvis Live Show here on CreativeLive.
You all know this show.
This is where I sit down with incredible humans.
I do everything I can to unpack their brains
with the goal of helping you live your dreams
in career, in hobby, and in life.
My guest, you will know him immediately
as I start revealing some of the things about him.
He's, I think he's done 18 books, global bestsellers.
He created a couple of start-ups,
he is the creator of altMBA.
We're here to talk about his new book
called "This is Marketing".
It's the one and only,
the inimitable Seth Godin in the house.
(energetic percussion music)
(applause)
We love you.
- Thanks, man, thank you for having me.
- Thank you so much.
- Been looking forward it.
- Oh, well, I confess, we were talking a little bit
before the camera started rolling.
We have done another interview a couple of years ago
and I, it was super engaging for me.
I personally have watched it a couple of times
to take the nuggets out of it
that you have put into your books.
I just devoured this, I got galley.
Thank you for overnighting it.
I don't know, maybe, Stephanie or someone--
- Yeah, she's great.
- Overnighted it and just crushed this thing
as I was flying across the country
to come sit with you today.
This to me feels different than a lot of your other books.
You know, books like the Purple Cow,
there's 18 of 'em so I won't list them,
but I felt like those all took on very specific things
about marketing, about audience, about engagement.
This to me is like a bible.
This to me is like you put it all into one place.
So was that intentional, am I reading that into it
or is that intentional like you packaged it all?
To me this is like--
- Yeah, I don't think that was the intent;
it's what happened.
The intent was--
- You started out with something and, yeah.
- No, I spend a lot of, I don't do any consulting,
but I spend time with people I care about
helping them achieve where they're trying to go
and it tends to be something that many people
would call marketing problem.
And to help them, I built this online seminar
called The Marketing Seminar and 6,000 people have taken it.
And the cool thing, as you know from doing the same thing
is you can watch what's resonating, what's changing people.
- Yeah.
- So it's 50 lessons, it takes 100 days.
And I'm taking notes and adjusting it,
and then I realize some people
aren't gonna devote that kind of time.
- Yeah.
- I have something I wanna teach them
and that's what led to the book.
And as I was writing the book I realize it's really a book
about how we market to ourselves,
about the story we tell ourselves,
about our sufficiency, our worth,
our assertions, our contribution.
And so I had to lay that whole groundwork out.
And then on top of it talk about how other human beings
hear us and see us. - Yeah.
- So there are no pages that say,
Tuesday afternoons are the best time to tweet.
And there's nothing that says,
here's how you make SEO work better
Because those are tiny, tiny tactics.
And they don't separate winners from losers.
What matters is doing work that matters for people who care.
And a lot of the people who are watching this
want to do work that matters.
But we trip ourselves up because we think
that we then have to become an evil marketer
and spam the world and I don't think that's true.
- Well, you've laid out a very convincing case
and there's lots of places where
we could start this conversation.
I don't wanna just talk about the book--
- Absolutely, yeah.
- But I do wanna like get right into it because it's,
having just consumed it's very, very fresh for me.
But talk about the smallest audience.
- So that's probably the most controversial idea
for the first pass through the book.
You may have heard about lean entrepreneurship
and you should make the minimum viable product.
- MVP as they call 'em.
- And if you look back to the early courses you launched
you wouldn't launch one of those today.
But you need to put it into the world,
not 'cause it's lousy, 'cause it wasn't lousy,
but because it's primitive.
But what primitive means is I solved a small problem
for somebody and I can see how it works,
and that has been proven to work over and over again.
Well, in marketing, I wanna argue
that we've all been trained to pitch
the largest possible audience.
Because for spams-- - Total investable market
where we've got all these acronym--
- Exactly.
- And talking about how you're supposed to only think big
and words like scale total addressable market
that drive me crazy, but--
- Exactly, gross rating points, gross, right?
What if we did the opposite?
What if we got specific?
What if we said, if there were 100 people I changed,
200 people I taught, 1,000 people who were my patrons,
what if we could do that, would it be enough?
It wouldn't be magic, it wouldn't be a homerun,
but would it be enough?
If the answer is yes, then we become specific
and obsessed with that.
Because if you can't pull that off,
well then you're not an artist.
But if you can pull that off, you know what they'll do?
They'll tell their friends.
Because it's so extraordinary they have to share it
and then it gets bigger and bigger.
But we begin by having the guts to be specific
as opposed to hiding behind infinity.
- So you said, I gotta make that enough.
Enough for what?
Enough to get started, enough for life, enough for,
like what's the enough for?
Give me the-- - Exactly.
So there are two kinds of enough.
The first enough is, is it enough for me
to make my next piece of work?
Is it enough to fuel this journey?
Because artists can be insatiable.
They can want more 'cause they think
they have something to give.
We've noticed that.
(laughs)
But then the second enough,
which I don't talk about in the book
which I'll talk about a lot in my book,
is what happens to your happiness,
what happens to your craft when you define
whatever you have as enough for now?
Because if you can live in sufficiency,
it's way easier to be generous 'cause you're not drowning.
Drowning people don't offer life jackets to other people.
But the act of offering a life jacket to somebody else
that connection that comes from that
actually supports our craft, but we have to tell ourselves
the story of sufficiency, not I'm done.
But I did that, this happened, now what?
- Yes, I think there's something about
it feels complete, the way you just phrase it,
it feels completely different than our product
because you're just,
you're trying to give people that,
in that small subset in experience, an 11 experience--
- Exactly.
Exactly, right?
- And it feels, to me they're like tours of duty,
I don't like military analogies really,
but it's like you get in, you did a tour of duty,
you gave them what they needed at that moment
and then you're learning.
And it's not, I've always had this debate
inside of CreativeLive or whenever I looked at
other founders and friends who are building products,
you hear this MVP, and if you look at a triangle
of like the bottom is like it actually does
what it supposed to and then the middle is like
it's got some nice polish and the top is like
it's extraordinary, everybody tries to slice
through the bottom middle section,
like it does a little bit of something
which there's no emotion around it.
I hate minimum viable products--
- Well, but that's a wrong definition of MVP.
That's what people are telling you an MVP is
but they're wrong.
- They're slicing it the wrong way.
- Correct.
- Yeah, I don't remember, I saw a diagram somewhere.
And so the fact that I don't love MVP
helped me really get into this very quickly,
but I think that the idea of a small audience
is it feels risky to people.
- That's right.
- And is it a thing you have to get over
or is this a risk that you have to sell
inside of your organization?
Like what's, how do we think about it?
How do we give, people who are considering doing this,
how do we give 'em tools to persevere?
- This is brilliant.
You should edit my next book.
These are brilliant questions.
There's a difference between feels risky and is risky.
The risk is-- - Say that again.
There's a difference between feels and is, okay.
- Right?
The riskiest thing you can do is make average stuff
for average people and pitch it to the masses.
The riskiest thing you can do is, say,
we're gonna be the next Banana Republic, right?
This is like not a lot of chance that that's gonna work.
The safest thing you can do is, say,
there are eight people at table four,
if I can go bring magic to table four
even though I've got a long shift ahead of me
if I act like it's there, the only chance
those people ever gonna have 'cause it is,
to have the experience of a lifetime here, right now,
that's the safest thing you can do.
Not worry about the people who haven't
even clicked on open table, not worry about the people
who are thinking about a restaurant to go to.
Table four, what's happening at table four
'cause if you can change their life even this much--
- Yeah.
- They'll come back and they'll bring their friends.
And when you think about the growth of my projects,
of your projects, isn't that what they're about, right?
Like the brilliant insight, I was telling my wife
about the brilliant insight of here it is,
it's live, for the, people came for free, great,
and now it's going to cost.
How can that make sense?
Well, because the people you changed
are now your sales force.
- Yeah. - Right?
And so does it feel risky, you bet.
Why does it feel risky?
It feels risky 'cause you have to make an assertion,
because you have to go to people and say, I made this.
And if you say to a special person I made this
and they say I hate it, it hurts.
Whereas, if you just stand on the street corner
and say to everyone I made this,
there's so many bystanders, you feel safe.
So what I'm pushing people to do,
because the internet feels vast.
- Yeah.
- It's not a mass medium, it's a micro medium.
It's the smallest medium ever created
next to a billion other small media.
So you don't get to be in front of the internet.
When I was at Yahoo, the homepage was sold out
two years in advance 'cause amateur marketers with money
say let's buy the internet, buy the homepage.
But it wasn't worth anything.
- Remember those takeovers and stuff, I remember that.
I remember that, yeah. - It was worth nothing.
Because it was way better to be in front of the right person
on the right day for the right reason to say,
this thing, instant yes.
And if you can't build an instant yes,
then all the spamming of your friends and family
isn't gonna make it any better.
- So you talked, I loved how you framed it
which is, it's actually the least risky thing you can do
is focus on one table.
But you have to believe,
like somewhere in the back of your head,
you're letting fires, other fires, burn.
- Sure.
- 'Cause like you said, somewhere
someone's having a problem on open table,
somewhere, I love the restaurant analogy by the way
and I think a lot of us had been servers
at some point in their lives so we can relate,
and you've got table six which they just got sat
and you haven't given them their drinks
but the willingness to focus on table four,
is it table four, I'm already lost.
- Yeah, table four.
We love table four. - We love table four.
But the willingness to focus on them.
When you put it as you have,
it's unequivocally the right thing to do.
And then the challenge, the next challenge that I see--
- Exactly, is what do you do with your resources?
- Is, yeah, what next?
So I did, I was super excited,
I did a great job with table four, but now--
- Does doing a good job with table four take time
or does it take love?
And that's the distinction.
So most of us are super lucky,
we don't do physical labor anymore,
we don't dig a ditch for a living,
we don't work in an overheated nuclear power plant
fixing gaskets, right?
We do emotional labor.
And emotional labor is also exhausting but it's different.
So you have seen in the last 12 hours
a receptionist or a frontline person
coasting through their day.
They're not getting paid enough,
they're not led well, they have bad conditions
so they're not exerting emotional labor.
The question is in the same amount of time,
could they have made a difference for you?
A flight attendant, a waiter,
a senior vice president of talent relations
go anywhere on the spectrum.
What does it mean to look someone in the eye and say,
I'm really glad you're here, 'cause that exchange
didn't take any longer than your tables over there.
- Yeah. - Right?
So I'm not arguing that we need
to make every restaurant the Union Square Cafe.
What I'm arguing is the sense of sprezzatura,
this Italian word for "effortless care", right?
I'm here for you, that takes emotional labor
just as much emotional labor as making a painting
that isn't like everybody else's painting.
In both cases, we're having to wrestle
with that other thing inside of us
called heart, if you want.
That is why most conversations about marketing
tend to be about tactics 'cause now I don't have
to expose my fear.
- Right.
- And that's not where I'm going.
I'm trying to help people see
there's more opportunity than ever
but you're not gonna find it by learning tactics,
you're gonna find it by marketing to yourself
and believing that the world deserves what you have to say.
- So I wanna hinge Max's question
around the point you just made about seeing.
So give us the connection between seeing and being seen.
- Right.
- I think it's a really central point of the book.
I think, it might even be--
- The subtitle, yeah. - Yeah, is it?
Oh yeah, you can't be seen until you learn to see.
So help me understand exactly what you mean by that.
And I think, I understand you don't want it
to be too tactical, but what does that,
what precipitates when you understand
that you can't be seen until you see.
What precipitates from that?
- So toddlers have a deservedly bad rap
because they're selfish, narcissists.
(laughs)
Me, me, me all the time.
The toddler never comes up to you and says,
how was your day, right, 'cause the toddler
just wants to be seen and fed.
Marketers are like toddlers and that they've worked hard
to make something and now me, bring it on,
I want more clicks, I want more page views,
I want better Google traffic, right?
The thing is that selfishness cannot stand
in a world where we have lots of choices.
'Cause if I can bestow my attention on anybody,
why should I bestow it on a toddler?
I don't need to.
I'll just go over here.
So what it means to see before being seen
is to say that person I seek to serve,
what's the story in their head,
what's the narrative in their head?
There's this great new word called sonder
which means realizing that other people
also have a noise in their head
that way you have a noise in your head.
And for most of us that's a revelation.
You mean other people have a noise
and it's not the same as my noise?
So once you accept that there's that noise in their head
that they don't know what you know,
that they don't want you want,
that they don't believe what you believe
you can learn to see them for who they are
and where they're going.
If you can do that, you know what they're gonna do?
See you in return.
But we have to go first.
And particularly when we're not a Fortune 500 company,
when we're the sole practitioner, small folks
like you and me and the artists,
that's all we got, but it's enough, it's more than enough
because everyone is thirsty for that.
And in the altMBA we spend an enormous amount of time
teaching people to see, to see the world as it is,
to see that other people have their own narrative.
And once you gain that empathy you can serve better.
- So that makes a ton of sense to me.
And I'm, as, I think hopefully everyone who's watching
and listening they're like thinking about
how this applies to them.
So I'm sitting here doing the same thing, selfishly,
trying to create a conversation here--
- It's not selfish at all.
That's why I came, yeah.
- I'm trying to like learn in the process.
And I remember writing a blog post
some time ago and it was called
Stop Trying to Get Everybody to Like Your Work.
- Yeah.
- And it's I think been shared 18 or 20,000 times
or something-- - Deservedly.
- And what I realized at some point is that
if you're so busy trying to get everybody to like your work
when the reality is, is just do the math for a moment
and like how many do you actually need with,
especially if you're an independent artist,
solopreneurs and like that,
how many people do you actually need
to make your thing successful?
And what I learned from you is it's not even successful,
how you like do tour of duty number one,
like what is that number, and when you realize
how small that number was--
- It's even worse, though,
'cause if you try to please the person in the back--
- Right.
- You're gonna stop pleasing the people you care about.
So I gave a speech in Mexico six months ago
and I'm ashamed at what I did.
And I'm saying this story out loud
so I could tell it to myself.
So it's in a convention center,
worst place to give a speech.
It's simultaneous translation,
worst conditions to give a speech.
And it's 2,000 people and I'm up there
and I'm doing my work and I feel like
I'm doing it pretty well and in the third row
is a woman on her cell phone.
She's not listening to her cell phone, she's talking.
- Oh.
- She's talking on her cell phone in the third row
while I'm up there doing my thing.
And I just, my mentor Zig Ziglar taught me not to do this
but I couldn't help myself.
I focused all my energy on this woman
and I kept interjecting references to social media
and how we can't put it down and hang up the phone.
- She's talking louder. - Right.
I got, can you be quiet, please.
I'm on the phone here.
And I know that I deprived the people in that room
who were there for me of my best self.
How dare I do that?
And it's even worse when there isn't someone on the phone,
you're just imagining so that when you're sitting there
typing or drawing or, you're imagining the troll,
you're imagining the non-believer
and what they're gonna say.
Maybe it's your mother-in-law, maybe, who knows.
And then you start averaging it out to make them happy.
You start delving it down to make them happy.
No, no, no, no, wrong, do the opposite.
How can you make them even more unhappy?
How can you make it even less of what they want?
So if you're a contemporary artist,
don't make it more like Norman Rockwell
because Norman Rockwell already did Norman Rockwell.
He's taken.
Make it more like you.
And the person, the Morley Safers or whoever,
who hated contemporary art, not for you.
Don't even come in the building.
- Yeah. - Not for you.
Warning sign: this is not for you.
And as soon as you have the freedom
and the confidence to do that,
your work keeps getting better.
- It takes guts, though. - Yeah.
- I think this is, like you have to let things burn.
And part of, especially for new,
oh, actually I came to say I like it.
And every table that I've ever sat at
at a bunch of different levels
that is not the commonly held belief.
- Right.
- 'Cause there's a desire to please.
- Plus we gave the critics a microphone.
They didn't used to have one, now they do.
- Right.
So I'm gonna reference Brené Brown,
she keeps a very short list of people,
about six people, in a little teeny piece of paper,
fold it up in her wallet, she brought it,
she showed it to me before which is a great,
I think it's a great way of thinking
which this is what I care about,
these are the people that I care about what they say
and if you're not in the arena, you're not in this list,
I don't care.
And what I took from your book is that
if we can take a similar mentality
and focus it on how we talk about our products
or services and who we are--
- Yup.
- That we're gonna be infinitely better off.
- Happier and more of service
to the people we're trying to serve, right?
If you run a non-profit and you're trying to raise $100,000,
who is the best person to raise $100,000 from?
Someone who's never given money to charity
or someone who gives money to charity?
It's pretty clear, right?
Okay, among people who give money to charity,
do you wanna call on people who donate
to the American Care Society,
the American Heart Association
and one other old school charity
or do you wanna go to people
who are eagerly on the frontlines?
Well, it depends what kind of charity, right?
So you're doing work that matters for people who care
and they demonstrate how much they care
through their actions.
So find people who are already acting like people who care
and make something for them that they can't help
but be glad you made.
- Smallest possible audience.
- Viable.
'Cause possible is one, you can't live on one.
So what's the viable, what's the one I can live on
that will get me far enough to do it again?
And my friend, Brian Koppelman talks about the question
he gets asked the most, is how do I get an agent.
Because the mindset is my agent will help me get picked.
- Yeah.
- Well, the way you get an agent is actually
doing work so that an agent will call you.
- Yeah, totally, being so busy--
- So that an agent will find you.
And the way that happens is you make YouTube video,
it doesn't work, you make another YouTube video,
it spreads a little, you make another YouTube video,
500 people watch it, now you're on to something.
Your next one maybe will only reach 5,000 people
but it will change them, it will change the way they see,
the way cameras work, whatever it is.
Oh, now the phone rings, because you did something
worth seeking out.
- How do we get people, I'm saying,
well, maybe people refers to me
or someone who might be listening,
how do we
lean in to this concept?
I can understand intellectually that,
hey, as soon as I make something for everyone
I've actually made it for nobody.
I understand the math but actually doing that thing
and it's sort of an inward journey--
- Yup.
- How do we make that habit
when it is certainly not intuitive?
It's not what you've been told.
This information is not in other books,
it's about total addressable market,
how do you make a product that scales--
- Exactly.
- And I know and understand and respect those people
who build those huge scale businesses,
the Airbnbs, the LinkedIns that they've been on the show.
- Sure.
- So how do you reconcile
that we have to make something small
and individual and unique and (mumbles).
- Try this trick.
- This is what I'm looking for.
I tricked you into giving me a trick.
(laughs)
Yes!
- Think about the best teacher you ever had.
This teacher did not use test in measure compliance,
standardized testing, and this teacher
was not the best teacher everyone ever had.
This is the best teacher you had.
What happens if instead of thinking about yourself
as a marketer, you think about yourself as a teacher?
And you are teaching not everyone
but people who are enrolled in the journey
where you are going.
And I would argue, Airbnb and LinkedIn
are perfect examples of businesses
that did not try to be everything to everyone.
They try to be important to a very small group of people.
And those students of theirs who were in the early classes
said, oh, teach me about this,
teach me what it's like to be an Airbnb member,
teach me what it's like to have these
kinds of interactions in LinkedIn.
And as students, you didn't have to yell at them
because they were enrolled in your journey.
And as a teacher, you're thinking,
oh, that leap was a little too fast,
let me go back and do this a little bit slow,
let me find out where that person is holding back.
And once you realize that you're a teacher,
a generous teacher, not the kind who's yelling at people,
but a generous teacher, everything that I'm talking about
suddenly fits into place.
- I figured I kinda shot myself in the foot
'cause as soon as I've asked that
and you started talking, I was like, wait a minute,
and so I had Joe from Airbnb on and he was like,
what they did is they, originally it was for,
they rented their apartment
and literally put air mattresses on the floor
at South by Southwest because they knew that the city
would be sold out and they needed
to make money to make rent.
So talk about small.
And then ultimately what tipped was they came,
they opened the market in New York
and they came here and they, individually,
the founders and a friend,
and photographed the insides of Airbnbs
'cause they realized that the photographs
were very unappealing.
- Yup.
- Very non-scalable, very, I think they did 20 in a weekend.
- Exactly.
- And that was the thing that Joe credits
as tipping the business.
- Right, which leads to this next cool idea as you scale.
And you have done this masterfully,
which is people like us do things like this.
That sentence is what marketing is.
People like us do things like this:
establishing the culture.
So if you're a supreme fan, that's,
you know when to go to the store,
you know which one hat to wear
and which hat you're not gonna wear anymore,
you know what to sell and what not to sell, right?
That if you ride to Staten Island Ferry everyday to work
you know what people like us do when we commute.
The rules are very clear.
Where they did they come from?
They're not laws of physics,
they're just the rules in this moment.
So people like us, contemporary artists
who are working in 2020, what do people like us do,
where do we show, what is our format?
People like us do things like this.
So who gets to invent those rules?
The cool thing is we do.
- Yeah.
- So you're either a victim of those rules
or you're following those rules
or you are the inventor of those rules.
And because of the way I came up as a teacher,
as someone who helped run a summer camp,
inventing cultures, this is what we do.
We use expressions like this, not expressions like that.
And when I was running my internet company,
there were 50 of us in one big room,
and there was one person who had a bad temper
and I knew that because he had status,
if he persisted, it would be okay to have a bad temper
in my company and the culture was brand new.
And I took him aside and I said,
if you lose your temper again in the office
there's no warning, you're just fired.
And he knew I was serious and he never did it again.
He needed to leave the room then he could lose
the temper all he wanted when he wasn't around us.
But people like us, we do things like this.
And that's why it's different when you walk
to the halls of IBM than to walk to the halls of Microsoft.
That wasn't an accident.
Someone picked people like us do things like this
and you get to do that with your work.
And as you build your call them a tribe, the community,
whatever you want, you're the one who's determined
what those are if you can make assertions
and if you could own it and then we get back to the fear.
Who am I?
Well, you're you that's why we picked you to go do this.
- That is like, I think that's a major unlock
for a lot of folks.
And let's go back to the individual creators,
the entrepreneurs, people wanna start something for whom.
Deciding, there's this fear, I remember this fear
in my own work that, but I wanna show a portfolio
that has everything in it.
Because when I'm showing a prospective buyer
and they're gonna look at it and say,
oh, he shoots, not just action sports,
he also shoots puppies.
- Right.
- And because I want, I need the money--
- Yup.
- I need to, but of course I quickly realized
that this is sort of poison because this is nobody,
this is, I do everything for everybody--
- Yeah, this is $12 an hour.
- Yeah.
- So let's do the freelancer rift 'cause it's important.
Freelancers are different than entrepreneurs
and most of the people watching this are freelancers.
- Yeah.
- I'm a freelancer, I like being a freelancer,
nothing wrong with being a freelancer.
But stop pretending you're an entrepreneur.
Freelancers get paid when they work.
They don't build an asset bigger than themselves, right?
- Yeah.
- So I don't have a building.
Okay, great, you're a freelancer,
how do you move up as a freelancer?
The answer is you can't work more hours,
you need better clients.
Better clients challenge you to do better work.
They respect your good work.
They pay you more, they tell other people.
Your good work spreads the word that's how you move up.
Get better clients.
So if you go to people and say, I will do what you want,
what do you need, that's the kind of client
you're gonna get.
But if you go to a client and say,
I have a point of view and I'm leading,
the only clients you'll get are ones
who have a point of view and are leading.
Is that who you wanna be?
So will it be much harder for you to get those clients
at the beginning?
For sure, that's a dip. - Yeah.
- But the ones you get through
and get to the other side, right?
What you want are people in the world saying,
get me Chase, and someone says, Chase is busy,
they say, okay, get me someone like him.
That's what you want to have happened.
But first, you gotta have that first sentence,
be true about you, and if you're the one
who does sports photography and puppies,
no one's gonna ask for you.
- For sure.
There's something also about, let's go back to the story
we need to tell ourselves to believe that we're good enough
and we're worthy, I think that's, for,
again we're gonna, we'll stay on freelances
or independent creators.
There's a I'm not worth it, I haven't earned it,
I had plenty of advantage,
I grew up in a safe home, I don't have this brutal,
artistic struggle in my history,
I don't have anything to say, I don't have a point of view,
how am I gonna be, how am I gonna breakthrough?
And what would you tell someone,
because I believe that of the 10,
if there's 10 people listening or watching right now
that eight and a half of them have that feeling.
So what do you tell them-- - Me too.
- Yeah, okay, me too, that's good.
What do you tell them?
- The first thing I'd say is
you're probably not good enough,
and no one is, but you could get better.
And if you keep getting better,
then sooner or later you'll be better
and that's the journey.
So at the beginning, we're going to people
who have a problem and we're going,
not in our head, but trying to get it into their head
what is your problem.
Your problem is you have a deadline.
Your problem is you have to tell your boss
you got this problem solved.
Your problem is you feel insufficient.
Your problem is the last three people
feel like that, blah, blah, bla.
But you know what your problem isn't?
Your problem isn't that you can't find a freelancer
who is the world's best at blank,
because that's actually not part of your narrative at all.
That may be the freelancer's narrative,
is that I'm insufficient and incompetent,
but that's not what the client's problem is.
So if you present to the client as this person
who will make promises and keep them,
who will exert emotional labor to be easy to work with
or difficult to work with if that's what
the client is working for, right?
But you make an assertion about what role you are playing
as their teacher in that moment.
If that's the story they need to hear
you're doing them a service.
And that service is just like the service you look for
when you go out for a nice dinner.
When you go out for a nice dinner,
the chef isn't saying to himself,
I'm better than David Chang,
the chef is just saying, I'm making a promise,
and if you want this dinner for $24 here it is,
and if you don't want my point of view about food
there's an Ethiopian restaurant right down the street.
But in order to be a productive professional
we have to present to world and say,
I will make this for you, and they keep the promise.
And if you wanna get better at it tomorrow,
please, go get better at it tomorrow.
But you can't wait until you're perfect
before you can present to the world
'cause you're never gonna get there.
- That goes back to the non-MVP, MVP,
and when I put something out in the world--
- Exactly.
- Make it better, make the thing that you do,
make an 11 out of a 10 and then make another course
or another thing.
So when you set out to write this,
was this a project that you said,
all right, I need to write the definitive thing,
Again I've opened with this,
it seems different to me than your other books
because it puts its arms around more big ideas,
there's not a lot of tactic, as you said,
and I'm gonna try and get you to get tactical.
I knew you're gonna resist--
- It's all good.
- But did you set out to write that book
where you put your arms around,
I mean the title was like "This Is Marketing",
it sets a very bold like, yeah, it's right here.
- So I'm not good at making up stories that aren't true
so my true story is this.
I did that with Linchpin.
Linchpin is the best book I've ever written.
I can't write a better book than Linchpin.
I spent a year of my life trying to craft
a testament on paper that I could not deliver
in any other form.
And I experienced what that felt like
and I don't know if I could do it again.
Maybe I could find a reason to care enough
to go through that pain.
But in this case, what I'm trying to do,
as I'm often trying to do is deliver a value
in a format that's appropriate for the value
I'm trying to deliver.
So in the Marketing Seminar, I said,
if I can get 6,000 people to come on this journey with me
every day for months I can change them
using new teaching technologies we built
and it works.
But it's arrogant for me to say,
that's the only way to learn marketing,
'cause a lot of people will say,
I don't have that kind of time,
I'm not willing to put myself into that position.
- Yup.
- Well there's this 500-year-old medium
that has magical powers and its biggest magical power
is that you can hand it to your friends really cheap
and that you can all go on the journey at the same time.
Your colleagues can all read it at the same time.
So I haven't written a full-length book
in more than five years because the publishing industry
has its own issues.
And I said to myself, wait a minute,
I have this nail, I have this hammer,
why am I, I'll be a hypocrite,
I'll go back into the book publishing world
because I care to serve people
who want to read it in this format.
And I am fully aware that most people on earth 99.9
will not read this book 'cause they don't wanna read a book
or 'cause they don't wanna read a book about this.
Fine.
But for the people who wanna go on this journey
and bring people around them with them,
this was my best effort to do that.
And so when I read it as a book and write as a book
I'm not under the illusion that this is Tequila Mockingbird.
I wish I could write Tequila Mockingbird.
What I've tried to do instead is share the way
I care about people who are doing this work that matters.
And I'm really hoping that people who do
the other kind of work won't read this book
'cause I don't want them to use some of these approaches
to manipulate people.
We have to own the work we do
and so I'm giving people a toolkit
and I'm saying, please, do a work you're proud of.
- Is this an attempt to capture
people who wouldn't otherwise take the course?
- Well, I don't think capture is the right word.
- Yeah, serve. - serve, exactly.
So I'm trying to teach people--
- I'm learning, I'm slow, but I'm learning.
- 'cause you will soon discover that writing a book
is a not very smart financial endeavor, right?
I'm never gonna stand on the corner
and try to sell my books, it's not worth my time.
What I am happy to say to people is
if you're doing work that matters,
and I've tried really hard to signal
everywhere in this book, that's who it's for,
then I'll tell you everything I know for $20.
- Trust is as scarce as attention.
- Yeah.
- For those who are listening and watching,
I just read the name of, this is the name of a chapter,
Chapter 18.
Explain that.
- So attention used to be strip mined by the big marketers.
So if you're over 30 years old you remember network TV.
And network TV was a bargain for 40 years.
You always made money on the TV ads you ran, always.
And then cable came and then the internet came
and suddenly attention is not longer a bargain
'cause there are more people trying to buy it
but they're not making any new attention.
There are more choices but they're not making
any new attention.
So the race for attention is characterized
for the last 20 years, that's what Purple Cow is about.
Okay, so now we've got that understood.
But then trust has been strip mined
where someone says, oh, I'm in your email box,
you sorta know my brand name or you're in the store,
buyer beware 'cause I can rip you off once,
but I can't rip you off twice.
And so what we've done is taught
a billion people not to trust,
we've taught a billion people to think everyone's lying,
a billion people to be hesitant.
- Yeah.
- So if you can earn attention through permission,
through the privilege of having a newsletter
or a broadcast like this--
- Or subscribing to someone's YouTube channel
in the case, that example you gave.
- Exactly.
And you can be trusted, everything else
takes care of itself, done, done.
- So let's go then grab a little of attention
a little bit more because that's,
I think that's what we feel like we're always competing for
in this day and age.
How do you think about attention
'cause I'm trying to think about a small audience,
like what's the smallest viable audience?
- Right.
- And then attention, the attention seems like
this big thing that you need to get a lot of people
pointing at you, you need to get people,
you need to get people, right, (mumbles).
- It's a great, yes.
No, you're setting it up beautifully.
If you have a funnel view of the world
you need a million people to get 10,000 people
to get 20 people, right?
But if you have the smallest viable audience
view of the world your classroom has 26 people in it,
they are eager to be there.
If you didn't show up, they'd be angry.
26 people, that's not a funnel, that's a classroom.
That's magical.
So Banksy doesn't have to go do a media tour, right?
Banksy doesn't need a funnel.
Banksy is Banksy.
And the people who care about Banksy follow Banksy.
He doesn't even want them to follow him sometimes.
And that is where you wanna go as an artist,
is that your work matters enough
that people will choose to pay attention, right?
Jerry Garcia didn't have to do a sponsorship deal
with Dove or Axe deodorant, right?
He was Jerry Garcia.
People lived in a bus to follow him around.
- Yeah.
- Now please don't say, but I'm not Banksy,
and I'm not Jerry, because their genes
are the same as yours.
This is not about God-given talent,
this is about caring enough to change a small
group of people and it doesn't have to be very many.
The initial years when The Dead was really becoming The Dead
they grossed a couple hundred thousand bucks on the road,
it wasn't huge amounts of money,
wasn't huge numbers of people.
But the song lives on because in that moment
an exchange was made between people
who wanted to be in the room
and musicians who wanted to be in the room.
And what's worth noting is they had only one top 40 record
their entire career even though they were one
of the top 10 grossing live bands for decades.
And the one record they had almost ruined them
because it brought the wrong people to the show.
- That's fascinating to think of it like that.
Brought the wrong people to the show.
- Yup, that's when the violence started showing up,
the drugs got out of hand because the people who came
for Touch of Grey were outsiders
and they didn't get the joke.
- I'm reminded by that story of
a friend of mine, I don't know,
he's a New Yorker, maybe a mutual friend of Brandon Stanton,
who created the Humans of New York.
- Yeah.
I don't know him but everyone says he's--
- He's incredible.
And what I love about his sort of origin story
without going into details, he was a bond trader who failed,
lost his job in Chicago, moved here like with the goal of
being in control of how he spent his time,
not how much money he made.
- Beautiful.
- And so, it's a beautiful set up.
And then he tells this great story about how
his first sort of like and his second like.
And it's hard to think now of someone who
the second that they put out a book.
It goes to literally the very top of the list,
stays there for several weeks
because he's in an audience of 25 or 30 million people
who'd buy anything that he puts out.
And it's very hard to think of,
and that's why he tells the story of here's a photograph
of the first photo I ever posted.
Actually, it had one comment and no likes.
- Yeah, it's horrible.
The first ever comment he did,
could you even bother to like it?
- Exactly.
It's an extra click and I'm tired.
But I think it's hard for people to believe or to,
I think intellectually, you can understand it,
but emotionally, it's very hard to believe
that going from zero to one is a win.
And then from one to two and two to three
and that's where actually
if your focus is really on that group
because you just don't see how that,
it's sort of like compounding interesting.
You just, what is it if you gave someone--
- Double the pennies. - Yeah, double the pennies.
- Takes a month to make a million dollars.
- Yeah, takes a month to make a million dollars
or would you rather have some other big number.
So, is your book,
we're trying to just put an end to that
and you feel like that's the stake
that you're trying to put in the ground.
It is like stop trying to think big,
you have to start small.
And is that the core of this book?
- I think that it sits in sort of a trio
or quartet of ideas.
The idea of big is challenging.
So if you talk to someone who admires art
and you mention Amanda Palmer, they'll say
that the music she's created, the footprint she's made,
she had the most successful music Kickstarter in history,
what they don't realize is
when she was in the Dresden Dolls,
she got kicked off her label because
there were only 20,000 people
who are following her work and buying her record.
And when she did her Kickstarter,
the most successful Kickstarter in history,
she had 20,000 people.
So it's not millions,
it's 20,000 makes you Amanda Palmer, that's all, right?
So, don't sacrifice your work for a big number
'cause guess what, you probably won't get the big number,
you'll just have sacrificed your work.
And number two is the big number isn't gonna fuel your work,
your work is gonna fuel your work
and the people you're teaching.
But next to that idea, which we haven't talked about yet
is two ideas that sit next to each other.
The first is status roles, which is super important
when we try to understand the story
someone is telling themselves.
The short version comes from Keith Johnstone and,
who works in theatre, but works everywhere,
who eats lunch first?
When two animals meet in the jungle,
who's gonna eat lunch first?
Who's up, who's down?
Where two characters meet in the Godfather,
who's gonna move up, who's gonna move down?
Status roles, they're everywhere.
When you get on the bus, who's gonna sit, who's gonna stand?
At the Art Gallery, why did someone just pay
a million dollars for this painting at this,
at Mary Boone,
but the same painting on the street corner
couldn't have sold for 100, what did they buy?
Looking for status roles.
Once you see them, you can't unsee them.
And you can play with are you trying to sell to people
who are moving up?
Are you trying to sell people who are eager to move down?
Surprisingly, there's a market for that.
Are you trying to sell the people who are just
working hard to stay where they are, right?
So when the fall fashion stuff comes out,
why do people run to buy fall fashion,
they don't have any clothes?
Obviously, they have clothes,
but they are trying to maintain their status.
And if they don't have the new clothes,
their status will go down.
Next to that is this issue of are we measuring affiliation?
Who are we with?
Who is like us?
Where do we stand with them?
Or are we trying to measure dominance?
Who are we above?
So professional wrestling is a competition of dominance
and that's all they do is manipulate
who's up and who's down status wise.
And if you're a fan of Hulk or whoever it is on top,
that makes you feel good.
Affiliation is at the parade
who's marching side by side, arm in arm.
So one of the challenges we have as creators
is temperamentally, we're affiliators.
Temperamentally, we wanna be in sync.
Oh, everyone is wearing a black turban like--
- What do you mean temperamentally?
- Before we get to our craft, we think about--
- Before we even start, we haven't even started yet.
Now, we're just looking around, right?
- We're not a pro-wrestler kind who did I beat today?
I'm part of a crew kind of person.
But then when we do our work,
when we do our work, we have to be willing to break
from the system.
We have to do something that hasn't been done yet.
It's not people like us do things like this yet.
First is just I do things like this.
And if you wanna affiliate with me,
you're gonna do things like this too, and that's super hard.
That's why if you look at 10,000 TEDx talks,
9,500 of them are the same
because it's scary to get up and do one.
But 500 of them, well, I never heard that before
and they say that person is an idiot and you delete it,
we say, now I believe.
You taught me something new, I wanna be people like that.
And that pioneering spirit, the assertion-making,
that's all artists do.
It's not a craft, it's the art of making an assertion
that I didn't know before
and now that I know it, you've changed me.
- You said earlier, but I'm not Banksy,
but I'm not fill in the blank, fill in the blank,
what about the people who are at home saying, yeah,
but like, what do I have that's original to say?
Like what's my corner of the world?
- Yeah, and I don't think you've tried hard enough.
That if you say I have writer's block,
I say show me your bad writing.
Once you show me 50,000 words of bad writing,
then you can tell me you have writer's block.
But first, do some bad writing
'cause over time, your bad writing will get less bad.
If the magic of the DSLR is for 300 bucks,
everyone has a state of the art object.
But you're a lousy photographer.
Do you know why you're a lousy photographer?
'Cause you didn't take enough pictures yet.
Show me 10,000 pictures.
Put the pictures in the world one at a time.
Listen to how they're resonating
with the people you're seeking to serve.
Take more pictures, take more pictures.
It doesn't cost anything, then come back to me
and tell me you have no photographic talent.
But first, do the work.
- That is gold.
If you are listening to this,
you need to hit that 30 second backward button.
If you're on the podcast right now, you need to play that.
I wanted a photography book.
It is called The Best Cameras.
The one that's with you.
It was the first book on mobile photography
and it's said in there that's the dirty secret
in photography is that you have to take a lot of pictures
to get your work and to find your work.
And that is the thing, I just did a great,
co-created something with Apple called Photo Lab,
where this program is in all 500 Apple Stores
worldwide every day.
And one of the things that we're trying to cement in there
is that the difference between a pro and an amateur is that
pros see something and they'll take 10 pictures of it
versus you just see the Grand Canyon,
you walk up to the edge of Grand Canyon, you take a picture
and you wonder why the pro,
I mean, sure there's other distinctions, but you wonder why
the pro got a better photograph than you did
and it's because the pro hiked down,
took 10 pictures from down below, took 15 from above,
took pictures of their friends, themselves
and I just love the concept of the work.
I think it resonates with people
who are actually committed to it.
Is there a way that that separates the people who are
allowed into the club?
Is this like people like us do things like this?
Is doing work a reasonable divider
'cause the people who've done it, the people who haven't?
- Yeah, well, there's a bunch of dividers.
One of them is slowly fading, which is the divider
of what you look like, where you came from.
It's totally unreasonable, but it's true in a lot of places
particularly in photography with gender
and things like that.
Fortunately, I think that we're gonna see that fade.
But there is a tiny group of lucky people.
A tiny group of people who their first video went viral.
I tell you people who from the day their blog went up,
they just kept going and going.
I wasn't in that group when it came to my writing.
I did 120 books as a book packager
before I became an author.
I wasn't in that group with my blog.
20 people read my blog every day for months or years
before it was 200, blah, blah, blah.
But then I got lucky 'cause Fast Company
let me be a columnist.
But that luck happened because I had already written
50,000 words, 100,000 words before that occurred.
So, yeah, I think you can look at people.
I look at you and say, this guy has been working generously
for decades at this.
And people don't notice until you had the last zero.
And they're, whoa, look at that.
Shake Shack, right?
We'll talk to Danny Meyer how long Shake Shack took.
- Right, the 10-year overnight success.
- Maybe 20, yeah.
- Probably 20.
All right, I wanna read another chapter title
and that's around price.
- Okay.
- I think this is an area--
- Yeah, I like this one a lot.
- This is an area that I think screws up a lot of
even startups like how we price our product.
And certainly, if you're an individual,
I have told the story about realizing, oh, my gosh,
if I charge this much, I literally only need
like 30 clients a year to make a great living.
Oh, my gosh.
So then it became about pricing.
I think people are two things.
One, afraid of talking about price and experimented with it
and two, they're just they're ignorant about it.
They don't know.
So, to me, there's a bunch of wisdom here on pricing
and if you could like put your arms around that force
about how you talk about the book.
- Okay, so I'll start in a surprising place.
If you're selling to businesses, begin by understanding
it's not the person's money,
it's their boss' boss' boss' money.
So their engagement with money isn't the same as yours.
If you're imagining how you would feel
paying $5,000 five for a photoshoot,
that's the wrong question.
This person is going to go to their boss with a story
and that story might be all photographers are the same.
I got this one for $500 less.
If that's a story you wanna give them,
be prepared to be the cheapest.
But there's a different story you can give them,
which is this trade show is super important to us.
And I managed to pay double
so we will never have to worry about
whether the photography comes out all right or not
'cause I got the best person.
Well, that story is actually more appealing to them
because that story shows their boss they put the effort in.
So if you are the one and only,
if you are the specialist at shooting trade show booths
in Tucson, Arizona, this can be a waiting list for you.
If it's true, right?
Because it's worth paying extra for that.
The low price is the hiding place of the average creator
that you say, well, I can't afford to be better
'cause I'm the cheapest.
Well, the opposite of that is I'm the best
so I can afford to charge extra
for people who want the best, and that is the key.
The story they are telling themselves is
if I am paying extra, it must be better.
I'm the kind of person who wants better,
so therefore, I insist on paying extra.
And I don't think it's immoral to bring this emotional labor
and this effort to somebody who wants to tell themselves
the story they like paying extra.
In fact, if you get a choice of your minimum viable market,
why would you pick people who like paying less?
Just pick people who like paying more.
- It sounds so simple, but it's literally like it's,
the way I talk about it is that it's like
it is almost exactly the same amount of effort
to sell something for $100 as it is for 1,000.
It's just a different buyer.
- Yeah.
- So put that lens on the people
who are listening right now.
Put that lens on it.
- Well, if you are going to do the hundred
versus the thousand, perfect!
- Reframe it as your market. - No, perfect.
Please understand, you're not a greedy megalomaniac.
If you sell one-fifth as many,
you're still gonna make twice as much money, right?
You can do the math.
Hit positive on that.
Which means you're gonna get turned down
80% of the time, right?
One-fifth.
Fine.
So when you get turned down, what you just heard
was not that you're inferior that you're a bad person,
what you just heard is I'm not the kind of person
that likes to spend $1,000 on this.
Great, congratulations.
Here is the phone number of several
who likes to sell for 100.
Great.
I don't hate you and you don't hate me,
you just want to me, I don't sell, right?
So if you wander into a fancy boutique and say,
hi, I'd like to buy a $9 pair of sneakers,
they shouldn't hate on you,
they should just say, the Payless is six doors down.
We don't sell $9 sneakers, we sell $900 sneakers.
And when you're ready by $900 sneakers, we'll be here.
And if you can accept that, then selling $900 sneakers
and making them worth 1,000 is a fine way to spend your day.
- That's I think a brilliant,
that's another thing you have to rewind to listen to again
and I think that that creators get that wrong
over and over and over again.
And that's the sort of trying make some for everyone,
making it for no one, the same is true with price.
I have found that in small, and again,
what you ultimately I think realize
this took me a while is that the sea of people
that you're gonna encounter is not that huge
and there's a lot of crossover.
And for every person that you are wildly polite
and engaged and positive around,
but you steer them to somebody else,
if they say, oh, it's 10 grand, oh, I've got five
and you say no problem.
I can introduce you to a lot of $5,000 fill in the blank.
And they're like, but I really want you
and I'm like, oh, no sorry, I'm at 10,
and let me introduce you to a five.
And what people get hung up on,
I'd like to hear your comment about this
as soon as I finish my little narrative here, which is,
but when I get 10, I'll come hire you.
Just do it for five now.
And when I have a spouse is,
that if you become that person,
when they get 10 grand, they're going to the person
who risk 25 and then they're gonna offer 10--
- 'Cause that's the kind of person that they are.
- They've categorized you as that person.
- And they've categorized themselves
as the bargain seeker, right?
So the challenge in that setting as you've pointed out
is that once you lower your price to that person,
you have signaled to them I'm the kind of supplier
that likes to work with people who negotiate
and hassle about the price,
and if that gives you pleasure, call me, right?
And it also makes them at some level disappointed
because they are thinking, I could've gotten them for four.
And if you pick your customers right,
if the pricing is a signaling strategy for them,
they want you to charge more.
And there are plenty of fields where this is true.
Contemporary art, photography, public speaking
that's what the way it works
is, boss, you're gonna be so excited.
He said yes.
Not I got a bargain, but they said yes.
That's what you're bringing to the table.
The challenge is the acting as if
and the getting the momentum.
So one of the ways around it for people
for example for photography is have two kinds of clients.
Clients where you work for free
and clients where you work for a lot.
So if you do photography for zoos, nonprofits,
kids' schools, et cetera,
that filling your portfolio to the edges,
you can then look a corporation in the eye and say,
I'm $10,000 a day and they say,
yeah, 'cause those are charities.
When you started charity, please call me.
And so now, I've divided the world into different buckets
and that's totally appropriate.
Another way to do it.
Shepard Fairey, if you want to the original Shepard Fairey,
it's $80,000.
But every month,
he puts 100 lithos on his thing for $800
and you can sell them on eBay for profit.
He doesn't care.
That's all good because he's put this into the world
treating different people differently.
But if you're gonna treat different people differently,
you gotta have rules 'cause otherwise,
everyone's gonna feel
like you're not treating them fairly.
- It's a really interesting distinction.
I like to say work free or full price,
but stay out of the middle.
- Yeah.
- And when someone is asking you to sort of negotiate down,
that's when you wanna send them to somebody else.
I think it is the pricing psychology is fascinating
and I could talk about it forever,
but I wanna move on to something that is
I wanted to get to it, but you just gave me the perfect door
and that is it's not about sort of them hating you
because you cost 10 grand or you didn't negotiate
and you want to negotiate,
it's separate the creator from the work.
You did a beautiful job, sum that up at the end of the book.
So I think that's also a big hang up
for the people who are watching and listening
and give us a way to think about it that deliver us, please,
from this challenges that we have.
- If Jerry Seinfeld gives a standup performance
in a club in New York and no one laughs,
it could be 'cause he's having a bad night.
Or it could 'cause everyone in the audience
is from an Italian tour group
and doesn't speak a word in English.
He shouldn't beat himself up if it's the second one.
They just speak a different language.
So when you go to somebody and say this is what I make
and they get angry at you
or in your head, you think they're angry at you,
that's not really what's happening.
What's happening is they have their own noise in their head.
They know what they know, they want what they want,
they believe what they believe and you can dance with that.
And they maybe wanna be seen by you having those feelings.
Or maybe you just wanna disengage,
but has nothing to do with your work.
- You're the human. - Right?
They're not saying, how dare you even breathe the oxygen
on the same planet as me.
What they're saying is it's not for me
and they're just not polite enough to say it that way,
and you, your own worst boss, are busy beating yourself up
for being inferior as opposed to saying who does want this?
Who does want to dance with what I've made?
And then you have to be honest enough to say,
you know what, it's not that good.
I'm gonna make something better.
- That's huge.
I think a reframing, if you've had that self-doubt,
which is I can say I believe we all have at some point.
There is this reconciliation between
when you put something out there in the world
and it's crickets, what's your response?
Was it not good enough?
Was it about me or did I do something that was disingenuous?
Was it that I served table four's food to table six
and they got there like,
I did not order the chicken cacciatore.
Like all of those things are possibly true
and we have to fix them the internal self-talk,
which is the problem for this cross-section
of the people that I think we've decided to serve.
- Right, and the good news is you and I
will never run out of stuff to talk about
'cause it's not like we say, okay, done
because it's so deep.
It's there for a long time.
You just have to dance with it, you can't make it go away.
- I promised I would handcuff you to the chair if I could.
I'd promise to use-- - Tactics, bring it on.
- Okay.
So, I wanna get some tactics
and I know you don't love talking about them,
which is part of the reason I want you to go there,
but there are set of habits that have created
the books that you've put out there.
There are set of habits that whether their daily habits
or work habits or how you think about things help us,
I have never really heard you talk about like your routines
and I think it's, I don't know,
I'm not even gonna fill in the blank for you.
But can you give us something, like what does it look like?
And I understand that people,
like these are potentially very esoteric things,
but I hope that they help other people understand
what's possible.
You can actually craft your own thinking.
You're not beholden to what your phone says
the first thing in the morning when you pick it up,
but what are some of your personal habits for creating?
- Here are the ones that I think are universal.
- Well, don't tell me everything about everybody
'cause they need to *know nothing about me.
- No, habits of mind that I think are applicable
to other people, right?
The fact that I'm a vegetarian, probably irrelevant,
and I don't think becoming a vegetarian
will make you a better *man.
- Fair.
- Neil Gaiman's said that when he feels stuck,
what he needs to do is get bored
because if he gets bored enough, he invents something
to keep himself entertained.
That's how he gets unstuck.
So, I've tried very hard to eliminate
all the things that I can that make me feel like
I'm busy and productive when I'm not actually productive.
So I don't go to meetings
and I don't have a television.
So right there, I have seven or eight hours every day
that most people don't have.
I don't use Facebook and I don't use Twitter.
That's another hour and a half
not to mention the drama that goes with it.
So already, I start every day with an eight-hour head start
over almost everybody else.
And then what I've chosen to do is pick places
or digital spaces that are sacred
in the sense that I only enter them
with the intent of coming out with a trophy,
with a gift with something to share.
So, I'm not gonna open this word processor
unless I'm there to write a certain kind of writing.
And for me, with my blog, I was on Typepad for 15 years.
The Typepad user interface made me a better writer
because if it opened, I knew why it was there.
I knew why I was there.
I knew what this was for.
And so these practices,
every few years, I invent a uniform for myself
that I wear at work
'cause if I put on the smock, if I put on the lab coat,
I just got one the other day the new one.
If I put that on, there's a reason.
We're here to do stuff.
And surgeons are great at this.
They wear a mask, they wear gloves.
They're like bank robbers, except they don't just like say,
yeah, I'm having a coffee.
Okay, I'll do some surgery now.
There is this process that makes you a surgeon.
And salespeople, famously with some guy
who's bothering him finally sat down
and he said I'm not here to sell you anything.
And so he's like, then why are you wasting my time?
If you're here to sell me something, sell me something.
Well, say to yourself, I'm here to get better at my craft.
I'm here to get better photography.
I'm going to shoot 400 pictures of this tulip
and I'm not gonna stop until there is 400.
We do reps in the gym, we should do reps with the camera.
And so for me, if an editor comes back to me with a book
that I've handed to them with comments,
I don't get all defensive, I say thank you.
Can you believe that this person cared enough in this moment
to say something to you for you?
And as soon as I say thank you,
I'm wearing a different hat, right?
Whereas Amazon reviews, haven't read one in five years.
I don't think anyone should read their Amazon reviews
or their Yelp reviews.
I'm never gonna write that book again.
Why are you giving me feedback on the book, it's done.
I'm never gonna write it again.
I've never met an author who's better at writing
'cause they read their one-star reviews.
What those one-star reviews say is this book wasn't for me.
Thanks for letting us know.
We don't need to read anything else,
you just announced it's not for you.
Okay, get it.
Thank you.
And so, if I'm asking for advice from people,
which I like better a word than feedback,
I'm asking the right people
who are gonna give me advice in the right spirit.
I'm not walking up to a stranger on the corner
interrupting them and say, and what do you think of this?
Because it's not for them and they're not trained
in how to give me a good advice.
- It's so obvious when you think about it that way.
I'd love it.
Sorry, keep talking because--
- No, no, I mean, so all of these things are the practice
of someone who calls himself a professional
and we expect it from surgeons.
But somehow, we expect that writers will just drink a lot,
not dress very well and complain about writers block
That's not what Isaac Asimov taught me.
Isaac wrote 400 hundred books as a published author
and he wrote 400 books by getting up every morning
and typing until noon 'cause he was a professional.
So, generally, when I see people who,
the reason I don't share what I had for breakfast
is because that puts me in a different place.
And what I'm trying to argue is I'm in the same place,
but I'm trying to do it as a professional
using these tools for a reason.
This book is not me.
I wrote a book,
if you don't like the book,
it doesn't mean you don't like me,
it means you didn't like the book.
And if I didn't do that, I could never write another word
'cause the thought that there are tens of thousands
of people who will now announce they don't like me,
I'm not up for that.
I can't handle that.
- So, you just gave me a thing that I haven't heard from you
on any other place, which is like this is a process.
I've been reading your blog for,
how many years you've been doing that now?
- Off and on, like 20.
- Ken and me are the first people on that platform
and certainly one of the last.
Didn't like WordPress environment.
- Yeah, it's a long story, but now it's at Sethst.blog.
- Okay.
What does it mean to write to write every day?
Like you sit down and--
- How can you not do that?
Why wouldn't everyone do that?
I don't understand, it's free.
You can put in someone else's name on it.
The fact that I know that tomorrow, a blog is going out
makes me a better thinker and a better human today
because I know I'm going to write something tomorrow
that has my name on it, that's going to stick around
about my view of the world.
Why wouldn't everyone want to be able to do that
even if no one read it?
I would definitely write my blog if no one read it
because this chronicling of what did I noticed today
helps me see the world for free.
And I get to feel like I'm producing something
even if I don't get paid for it,
even if I don't have to argue with a publisher, an editor,
it's just here.
I thought of this.
Use it if you want to.
I've never once had a blog post win the Internet.
I've never had one of my posts go viral and be a hit.
Some have more traffic than others, but it looks like this,
it's never like this and I think that's great.
'Cause if this happened to me, I would be tempted
to try to make it happen again.
Top 10 ways to increase your creative performance.
I share my secrets in this exclusive post, right?
But I don't wanna do that
'cause that's not what the blog is for.
- You just captured probably 10 million blog posts,
but like almost probably word per word.
I love it.
All right, so the book "This Is Marketing",
you talked about a couple of the other class,
let's talk about the longer class.
- So there's the altMBA, which is my flagship doing it.
altmba.com and that is a 30-day intensive.
People in 45 countries have taken it so far.
We're up to 2,600 alumni.
It changes people's lives.
It's really cool.
I'm not in it.
There's no video, there's no secret content.
That's not what it is.
It's got coaches and video conferences
and cohorts of people who become friends for life.
So that's our flagship in the sense that
if you're enrolled in that leveling up
and you wanna commit to it, we have a place for you.
And then the marketing seminar,
which starts in January 2019 again
is this community discussion board
that's only for the people who've signed up.
There's a video of me every two days,
seven minutes long or so,
and then I give you a challenge.
And then the whole group shares their work
and comments on their work.
So when it's up and running,
there's a new post every minute.
Every three minutes.
24 hours a day, seven days a week,
and you can't fall behind 'cause it's always happening
and it unfolds over 50 videos over 100 days,
but we keep it open for 200 days.
And what people come in and say, how can I find a tactic
to sell more fur coats?
And they leave with this whole student-teacher mindset
of service and maybe a different project,
but it's the connections between and among.
I'm just there to start a fire.
It's that that that's the future of education
as far as I'm concerned.
I think free video online is gonna stick around
'cause it's powerful.
If you're gonna pay for it, I think it's gonna involve
interactions with other people to get you to be
momentarily uncomfortable on your way to being better.
- Beautiful.
Congratulations on the book.
"This is Marketing".
Mr. Seth Godin, you're a legend.
Super honored to have you on this show.
You didn't realize that you're handcuffed
and we're gonna talk for another two hours.
We're gonna turn the cameras off and talk
for another two hours while I got him here in New York.
No, huge thank you.
Inspiration to so many.
I appreciate you being on the show, man.
- Thanks for everything.
- And for everybody home, you know where to get Seth.
Pick this up, it is a gem and thanks for tuning in.
See you tomorrow.
- Go make a run.
(relaxing music)
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