My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! I think you’ll find it useful.

Seth Godin is the author of more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. He has written a blog post every day for more than two decades, and it remains one of the most widely read blogs in the world. Before the books, Seth founded Yoyodyne, one of the first internet marketing companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. He later created the altMBA. His new book is The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved.

You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

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Key Learnings

Being early is a courtesy, not a personality trait. “I don’t understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else’s time.”

The knot is the point. You can’t have a pretzel without the knot, and if you try to undo it you end up with crumbs. Real life isn’t like that. Our knots can actually be untied.

Teach so that people teach themselves. Seth builds everything around a metaphor that gives people scaffolding, because “the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning.” Give someone the structure to figure it out and they’ll never forget it.

Name the baggage, drop the baggage, ship the work.

The easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn’t exist. A man with nine million dollars in the bank told Seth he has to keep doing the work he’s known for, because he needs to make a living. No, you don’t. Same with the student three years into a four-year degree he hates who says he has to finish. You can choose to finish. Nobody is making you.

We stay stuck because it’s comfortable. It keeps us safe, guarantees an excuse, takes us off the hook. No agency means no responsibility. 

It isn’t friction, it’s hidden entanglements. Friction sounds like a law of nature you can’t argue with. Entanglements are long-told stories about how the world is, who we are, what we fear, where our status sits. They form an invisible web, and unlike physics, they’re ours to cut.

The tell is when a problem gets treated like a situation. In Canadian Inuit territory, people are 500 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than someone in Toronto. We know how to cure it, for a tiny fraction of the healthcare budget. Calling it a situation is what lets everyone off the hook.

The blue sweater. As a high school sophomore, Jacqueline Novogratz wore her favorite sweater, a gift from her uncle, blue and white wool with the Alps on it. Cheerleaders teased her for it. She went home and dropped it in a Goodwill box. Fifteen years later, running through the streets of Rwanda at 7:00 in the morning, she saw a seven-year-old boy wearing it. She chased him down, looked in the collar, and found her own name on the tag. That was the moment she let go of being the Stanford grad on the fast track at a New York bank. She has spent the decades since building Acumen and its patient capital model, and by Seth’s last count, 600 million of the poorest people on earth live better because of it.

What makes someone a leader: they decide to. It has nothing to do with your title. You can lead from anywhere in an organization.

Seth gets stuck every single day, and most of the time he stays stuck. That’s fine. What matters first is clarity: who is this for, and what is it for?

Getting unstuck always means leaving something else behind. The woman with more figure skating gold medals than anyone in history didn’t get them by having a life. She got them by having no life for fifteen years. Completely unstuck on gold medals. Deeply stuck on everything else.

It’s the word “but” that traps you. We only feel stuck when we want one thing and another, and won’t be happy without both. Swap the but for an and, or admit which one you’re trading away.

Six to nine ideas a day, one gets published. Most never get past three words. If you need the perfect idea before you begin, you will never begin.

Find the room inside the system, then leave when the system is the obstacle. Jesse Cole inherited minor league baseball’s constraints and worked inside them: ridiculous name, puns, a cheering section of seventy-year-old women called the Nana Bananas, players recruited for charisma over hitting. Years of sellouts, home and away. Then the league itself became the thing in the way, so he left it.

Multiple things fail at every Bananas show, every single night. That’s the price. The question worth sitting with is what it actually costs you to not be perfect. If Seth’s book The Practice were one page long, it would say give up your commitment to being perfect and be useful instead.

The reason most people don’t try isn’t cost or risk. Before an event with 185 people, Seth turned the 80-page PDF of bios into a 7,000-word article about everyone there, then had it read back to him in a clone of his own voice, and listened on the drive over. Thirteen minutes, twenty dollars. Nobody else at the event had tried anything like it. “So what’s keeping you from doing something like that?”

It’s not a failure muscle, it’s a generous failure muscle. The internet version has become a failure Olympics, asking a donut shop for a dozen free donuts just to get rejected. Seth calls that selfish. The real question is “Who might I be able to help with the next thing that might fail?”

Stress and tension are not the same thing. Stress is wanting two things you can’t both have. Reduce it. Tension is the engine, and you can’t shoot a rubber band across the room without pulling it backward first. Taylor Swift announcing 8,000 seats is inflicting tension on her fans, and that tension is what releases into joy. No concert, no tension, no joy.

Great teachers create the conditions for people to see the gap. There’s always a moment where you know you could learn something and haven’t yet, and that moment feels like incompetence. Some people meet it and opt out because nobody convinced them the tension was worth it. 

Effective leadership is voluntary. Force people to follow you and you’re a manager. Teaching canoeing at summer camp in 1977, Seth was competing with windsurfing and horseback riding for twelve-year-olds who could choose anything. He couldn’t require anyone to come to his dock, so he built the conditions instead. And when a kid said he’d rather go sailing: “It’s not my job to persuade everyone. It’s my job to persuade someone.”

Jackson Pollock wanted two things and got neither. Three years as the most celebrated American painter of the century, then he told Lee Krasner he didn’t want to spend his life painting cover versions of Jackson Pollock. He changed his method, format, even his canvas sizes. His momentum guaranteed a big first show. Everyone hated it and nothing sold, and what followed was a spiral that ended in a fatal crash. Coming up, he had accepted rejection as the cost of the work. Later he wanted that and acclaim and wealth. Needing both, he got neither.

Rules in one area free up energy for another. No alcohol, no drugs, no meat in forty years, no dairy. The point isn’t the rules, it’s that Seth never renegotiates with himself about any of it.

Seth’s answer to the champagne question: he doesn’t celebrate. The day he sold his company to Yahoo he wasn’t happy, because it was the end of something. Hitting the New York Times list a second time, he cried, not from joy but because he felt nothing. “I had done the work. I didn’t need to make the list.” His prize is noticing that someone he talked to yesterday is closer today to where they want to go.

Action

  • Name one thing you tell yourself you have to do. Say it out loud as a choice instead. Do you still choose it?
  • What’s the thing you’d try this week if the only cost of failing was that it didn’t help anyone? Who would it help if it worked?

If you enjoyed this episode with Seth Godin, check out my in-person conversation with Jesse Cole, owner of The Savannah Bananas! 


Podcast Chapters

00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 

00:59 Meet Seth Godin 

03:06 Why There’s a Knot in the Pretzel 

06:10 Name It, Drop It, Ship It 

09:30 Not Friction, Hidden Entanglements 

10:59 The Blue Sweater in Rwanda 

14:42 Seth Gets Stuck Every Day 

16:25 How He Blogs Every Single Day 

17:10 The Bananas Found Room in the System 

21:42 The Book That Weighs 18 Pounds 

25:11 Thirteen Minutes, Twenty Dollars 

27:05 The Generous Failure Muscle 

28:05 Tension Is the Engine, Stress Is the Trap 

30:17 You Can’t Make Anyone Follow You 

33:05 Pollock Wanted Two Things 

35:22 Designing the Default 

39:35 What Canoeing Taught Him About Leadership 

41:26 The Champagne Question 

45:17 EOPC