The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 121 - Post-Seth Mind Melt

Transcript:

Jen: Hi, Peter.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: I haven't seen you since my brain exploded, since Seth Godin was here.

Pete: Pleasingly, I can see that you've put your brain and head back together, which is great.

Jen: Yeah. But I kind of want to take it apart again, so that we can unpack our learnings from what Seth so generously shared with us. Are you up for it?

Pete: I am totally up for a meta episode where we unpack one of our own episodes. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Okay, first of all, Seth Godin was on the podcast.

Pete: He was, he was.

Jen: That was crazy.

Pete: Surprise!

Jen: Woo-hoo! That was so fun. Okay, I actually have notes here, Peter.

Pete: Oh woah, woah, woah. Woah, we're in uncharted territory here, Jen Waldman.

Jen: Because some of the things I needed to like really write down what he said so that I could quote him appropriately. Okay, here's the first mind-melter: "Boundaries are not a practice. Boundaries enable the practice?

Pete: Mmm. Yeah. And that was the perfect example that he gave, was, "I don't use social media. And I don't go to meetings." And we were both like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, there's ten hours of your day back. It all makes sense."

Jen: Well, I do a lot of ranting in my Shift workshops about how boundaries and expectations are inextricably linked, which I really do believe. And I think when I've talked about that, it's always been in the context of establishing boundaries so that you set realistic expectations for other people. But hearing Seth, I realize that setting boundaries also sets expectations for yourself. If you set the boundary and you live by it, the expectation for yourself is that you will adhere to the practices that those boundaries were meant to make possible.

Pete: Mm-hmm. Yes. That's good. So have you thought about what are the boundaries that we may already set for ourselves, that we haven't quite realized that we're setting for ourselves? Or what are the boundaries that you're now going to set for yourself? And I guess the other thing in my head is how closely related this feels to constraints, too, just to share that. Like boundaries, constraints, I feel like there's a relationship there too.

Jen: Ooh, yes. Yes. Well, ironically or maybe on ironically, we (the collective we) all agree that constraints actually empower creativity. And how appropriate then that Seth Godin talking about a creative practice, uses boundaries (i.e. constraints) in order to unleash his creativity.

Pete: Mmm. Yeah, I feel like...I wonder if a boundary is a constraint?

Jen: Yeah, I think so. I think it's a behavioral constraint.

Pete: Yeah. Or is it the other way around? A constraint is a boundary? No, I think it's a boundary is a constraint.

Jen: Ooh, that is juicy. Well, I have high aspirations for boundary setting. And then I've got some things where it's like, "Oh, I could be more realistic and set a boundary like this and execute on it today." The high aspiration is to set some sort of boundary around my relationship with responding to email. I know Seth said, do not follow his lead. So, I don't want to go that far. But I've got to do something better than what I'm doing now, which is utter chaos and a nightmare. And then something that feels more realistic like to set a boundary is like, I do not bring my phone into my bedroom. Period.

Pete: Hmm. Nice. Yeah, I have that boundary. Huh, I hadn't actually thought of that as a boundary until just now. I have that rule. I was going to say I have that rule.

Jen: Have you thought about any you might decide to play around with?

Pete: Well, I think it's interesting to think about them as boundaries. Like I mentioned, I've had these little rules or quirks, if you like, that I've tried to stick to, like no phone in the bedroom. And I haven't actually thought of it as necessarily being a boundary that creates space for me to do the thing that I need to do, like sleep. Another one that comes to mind is I've started to create this little rule for myself to not do as many or any Zoom calls at 6 AM or 5:30 AM, which definitely last year and the year before and probably the year before that was becoming the norm for me. As someone working across time zones, it became pretty normal for me to be like, "Yeah, I can be on a call at 5:30." And the cumulative effect of that became pretty detrimental. I've shared with you in one of the episodes, the old face down on the rug situation. So, I've got this boundary now. It's usually 7:30ish AM, I'm like, "I'm not going to be on a Zoom call before then." Which has created this space in my morning for not only my morning routine, but my morning routine now doesn't have to be rushed. And less and less, I'm having toast and coffee when I'm on a Zoom call with someone. Although that did happen this morning with you and I.

Jen: Liar!

Pete: I'm getting better. I'm a work in progress. I'm a work in progress.

Jen: Oh my gosh. No, you're right. I don't see you with toast on every call now. Just maybe every other. Okay. Here is something that completely blew my mind, and I didn't clock it until I listened back to the episode. So, you asked Seth about feeling like an imposter. And he went on to agree that, yes, he feels like an imposter all the time. And if he doesn't feel like an imposter, he knows he's not working hard enough. But when I listened back to the episode, he talks about being a pioneer of online learning. He talks about being a pioneer of permission marketing. He talks about being a pioneer of...I can't remember what the third thing is. And the thing that my brain exploded around was, "Oh my gosh, the imposter of today is the pioneer of yesterday's ideas." Like, if he hadn't been an imposter stepping into the world of permission marketing, for example, there would have been no pioneer of permission marketing. So, it feels like there's a relationship between imposter syndrome and pioneering. But in the moment, because the thing hasn't worked yet, you would never call yourself the pioneer of something that you don't know is going to work. But, just having that in the back of your mind. Like, "If this works, if I move forward in this fear, if I run towards my imposter, this could be the start of something new." And that is just really exciting to me.

Pete: Yeah. And I think the inverse is quite exciting, too. Which is, you know, we know a lot of our listeners are the kinds of people that would say, "I seek to be a pioneer. I want to create change. I want to be the spark that, you know, creates another change or shift to the left or shift to the right," or whatever direction you're going in my metaphor. But it's almost like, knowing you want to be a pioneer, you have to feel like an imposter. You can't be a pioneer without feeling like an imposter, so you now have to. You have to. Which I think is what Seth has talked about, you have to sort of chase that feeling every day.

Jen: Yeah. I am so jazzed by connecting that dot, because I feel like there's a new internal script I can write and read back to myself when I'm feeling that like, "Oh gosh, do I have to do this? Nobody's going to believe this. Everyone's going to think this is crazy." "Oh, right. Remember, Seth Godin said he was a pioneer of...Okay, I'm going to try."

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine the imposter he must have felt talking about permission marketing? And I think it was like the late 80's, early 90's.

Jen: Right.

Pete: Like, what?

Jen: Unbelievable. Okay, what were some of the things that blew your mind?

Pete: Okay. The one that blew my mind the most, I think...which I'm not sure I reacted to it in the moment, as if like it blew my mind. But on listening back and reflecting on it, the high stakes and low stakes practices that he talked about. So you know, I'd asked him, "Have you other practices outside of writing? Because now I'm seeing that pattern everywhere." And he was like, "Of course. I've got high stakes. I've got low stakes. I've got, you know, this hobby that I'm doing over here, and I'm playing around with like things in the backyard." And I just thought that was such a interesting way of breaking down your practices and thinking about them. Like, is this a high stakes one? Is this a low stakes one? Which then, to me, is, which one should I experiment with? Which one should I be more careful of, or more consistent in, if you like? And yeah, I just found that whole concept of different stakes practices to be truly fascinating.

Jen: I completely agree. It blew my mind, in the moment. And I haven't stopped thinking about it. Because, Pete, I don't know if I have any low stakes practices. And I think I need some.

Pete: Interesting.

Jen: Like, you have a low stakes practice of pour over coffee.

Pete: I do. Yeah. It's pretty low stakes, although high stakes if it goes wrong.

Jen: But I mean, it's actually a practice. It's not like just something you do because you pay attention to it while you're doing it.

Pete: Mm-hmm. True. True, true, true.

Jen: I make coffee in the morning, but I don't really pay that much attention to it. I don't think of it as a practice. I just think of it as a routine. And when I think about some of the things I do all the time, I'm not that mindful about how I'm doing them. So, I do want to be more mindful of routines that could become practices for me. But I also realized, I don't really have any hobbies. I feel like I've turned all of my hobbies into my work.

Pete: What about cooking? Because I've heard a number of people (Seth actually might have even been one of them, at some point) talk about how for them experimenting with cooking is a way that they have, essentially what we're describing, a low stakes practice. It's like experimenting in the kitchen then almost feeds learnings of, how could you experiment in your work?

Jen: Okay. First of all, I'm laughing because (sidebar) I love to cook. About three years ago, I tried to make Pad Thai at home. And I got some of the proportions wrong, specifically of the fish sauce. And what was a low stakes experiment turned so high stakes that my family had to evacuate the apartment because the smell was so bad. And I'm actually not exaggerating...we live on the fifth floor, we opened all of our windows. And when we got downstairs to leave the building to go out to dinner, we could smell it outside. Okay, so, it went from low stakes to high stakes. But you're right, I do love cooking. It's never been a practice for me, because my pre-pandemic life didn't have me home for dinner every night. But the mid-pandemic life does have me home for dinner every night. And I have been cooking pretty much every single day. I haven't thought about it as a practice, maybe because it hasn't been in my life for a very long time. But you are right, I could turn my cooking into something that I treat as a practice and try to get better at.

Pete: And I'm thinking about...from my perspective, we've talked about cold showers in the past. But what I see now is in terms of a low stakes practice, that is a great way to practice being comfortable in discomfort, or practice calm in discomfort. And these like really small micro low stakes practices, I think can't help but feed the higher stakes practices, if we have enough of them that are well supported. And I think Seth is a perfect example that. Like, he just listed off like four or five random practices that I've never heard of.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: Which would feed his macro practice.

Jen: Yes. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. Yeah. Your cold showers are low stakes for you, but they feel high stakes for me. What else blew your mind?

Pete: I think the other thing that I really appreciated was the Waiting for Godot example that he shared. Which is funny, I was sharing with you before, I'm reading this truly remarkable book by Derek Severs. It's his new book. It's called Your Music and People. It's really this like short, punchy book, basically about who's it for. And it's targeted at musicians. And he talks about...he just has countless examples of really good musicians basically alienate a large percentage of the population, because they're so specific about who they're for. And that example that Seth shared of Waiting for Godot was one of those, where so many people who have seen the show were outraged, were disgusted, hated it, couldn't stand it. And yet, there was this small percentage of people (Seth included) who were like, "That was a masterpiece. Like, truly the best piece of theatre I've seen." And so, I just think that that example was a powerful one for everything that we've spoken about, and he's spoken about. Which is, putting yourself on the hook by being so, so, so specific about who you're trying to serve. And I guess it wasn't necessarily like a, "Well, I haven't thought of that before," mind blowing aha moment. But I just thought that particular example was such a good one, because I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with the play and will be like, "Oh...", like they probably have a reaction either way.

Jen: Yes. Oh, okay. So that came right around a mind melting moment for me, too. Because he told that story after I'd asked him about genre. And I had, listening back, an aha moment about how genre corresponds...so, Seth's ideas correspond to Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. Okay. So here, just...I hope this makes sense.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: "Who's it for? What's it for?" That is the Why. The way Seth describes genre, genre is the What. The How is your creativity, the way you're going to get from the Why to the What. And I had never thought about genre (I said this on the episode) in the way that Seth has described it. But I found it, just even in the short time since we recorded that, to be so helpful and permission giving. Because as a person who lives by the concept of Start With Why, it sometimes feels like I'm violating my own idea to follow that practice of Starting With Why by naming the What. But it's really important to name the What, otherwise the Why doesn't feel relevant to the people you made the What for.

Pete: Huh. Yeah. Ooh, I like that. The What is the rhyme, as well. It's where it rhymes. Hmm. I mean, I feel like we could keep picking apart all of the things that were shared. And so maybe one final one for me, and you can throw in a final one. I feel like I really appreciated the honesty with which he talks about freelancers versus entrepreneurs in particular, but throughout the whole episode. And he kind of called himself out for being like, "I've managed to get three particular organizations, or projects to a point where they've become organizations. And I recognize I'm not a good entrepreneur. And so I've sort of stepped back and gone back to what I'm good at, which is freelancing." Like, I just thought that was...because like you said, we've observed that pattern a few times. What happens when you are such a good freelancer that you get to a point where something becomes bigger than you? Do you go into entrepreneur territory? Or do you let go? And I just, I think that the three examples that he gave were like...oh yeah, what integrity it must require and, I guess, bravery and vulnerability to be able to step away from something and go back to freelancing.

Jen: Yes. I loved that, too. He called it a hygiene problem.

Pete: That's right. Yeah.

Jen: Which I realize I need to work on my own hygiene as well. So thanks for that, Seth. It's a little stinky over here.

Pete: Still smells like fish sauce.

Jen: Okay. My final one is actually about the freelancer section as well. I had to quote him exactly, because he talked about the ultimate problem for a freelancer is how to answer the question, "How do I move up?" And I've always heard him say, "Get better clients." But then he unpacked it from the client perspective, which I don't remember him ever doing. He said, I'm quoting, "How am I going to get the people I currently serve to someone who can serve them better?"

Pete: Mmm.

Jen: So it's not, "Abandon your clients to get better clients." It's, "Serve your clients and get better clients."

Pete: Yeah, that's good. It's a sort of, "Make yourself redundant and find someone else for them."

Jen: Yes. And that was...I think that was the piece of "Get better clients," that's been missing for me.

Pete: Mmm. Yeah. Wow. That's good. I actually didn't pick up on that. That's great.

Jen: So good.

Pete: Well, Jen, our first interview with one of the changemakers who we've probably mentioned on almost every episode, except for Cold Showers.

Jen: Well, he brought us together so he deserves mention.

Pete: It's true. And who knows, maybe throughout this year we might do another surprise or two for our listeners, and have a chat with some of the brilliant thinkers, and changemakers, and authors, and entrepreneurs, freelancers that we've mentioned on this podcast.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.