The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 120 - Seth Godin

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jen Waldman.

Jen: Hello, Peter Shepherd.

Pete: I'm excited. I'm fired up. I am very thrilled for today's episode, because you and I recently just read Seth Godin's latest book, The Practice.

Jen: Yes, so good.

Pete: And we thought, "Let's do an episode where we unpack some of our learnings." And then we thought, "Why don't we get the author himself to come on and unpack the learnings with us?"

Seth: The author himself is here.

Pete: This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: So, I was trying to work out the best place to start. There are, you know, two hundred and nineteen places to start, given the number of chapters being two hundred and nineteen. And then I...it's funny, I was reflecting on a story from October 2019. And, in hindsight, I now see that it's feels like it encapsulates a lot of The Practice, so I just want to share the story with you and maybe get your reaction. So I was actually up at the office visiting you and the team, and I think I was...you'd asked a very generous question like, "Pete, what have you been working on? What are you up to?" And I was kind of proudly sharing with you, "Seth, I did my TEDx talk. I think it went pretty well. And you know, got a good reception." And I remember this so clearly. Without missing a beat, you just said straight off the cuff, "Oh, you've got to do ten more." Could you just share your response to that?

Seth: Okay, so either it's a journey or it's a destination. And if it's a journey, then what we're signing up for is the practice of seeing what works. Of going through the cycle, of connecting, of leading, of being there for people. If it's a destination, you say, "Ah, I did it. I checked that box." And the problem with destination thinking is it's a finite game, as Simon or Carse would say. And the infinite game is, "Well, how can I do that again?" And once we have the lightness that comes from, "How can I do that again," our work gets dramatically better because we don't have to have it be exactly what it's supposed to be. It can simply be a step toward the impact we're trying to make.

Pete: Yeah. And I think my follow up question was, "Seth, do I need to do the same talk again? Do I need to come up with ten new topics?" And you said, "It doesn't matter. Either one. Just get back." Just get back to the practice, basically. So...

Seth: Yeah. And you know, when I was starting out as a book packager, everything was fraught because I was so close to bankruptcy for so long. So, there were good external reasons to have my fingernails tight around everything. But soon after I had enough of a cushion to last six weeks, my work got dramatically better. And it got better because every rejection wasn't, "No." It was, "No, for now." And every proposal that was imperfect was simply a step toward making the next proposal better. And by getting out of my head and not having every single thing be fraught, it made it so much easier for me to find my voice.

Jen: Seth, back in February you invited about a dozen Akimbo alums up to your office. I'm literally holding the book that you gave us, which was a notebook. And I frantically tried to scribble down every single thing you said during that meeting. And at the at the time, you said, "I'm sharing some ideas from what's going to become my new book." And I'll share some of the things that you said a little bit later. But it occurs to me, February 3rd was a totally different world...

Seth: It was.

Jen: ...than the world we're living in now. And so I'm curious, how did you think about taking the work that you were doing in such a specific time, and rethinking it...did you have to rethink it? Did you have to consider revising some of it in order for it to feel relevant during a global pandemic? Can you just share some of your thought process around that?

Seth: I'm a little choked up because the time you came up is the last time. And I don't own a Akimbo anymore, and it's this independent B Corp that's doing really important stuff. And there hasn't been a human in my office since March 4th. And so, thank you for coming that day.

Jen: Mmm.

Seth: If I had to have a last one, I'm glad you were part of it. The thing...you got to make a choice. You can either be Wolf Blitzer and make breaking news. And Pete, for those from outside the beltway, he's a blowhard television guy who always has breaking news. The thing is, no one wants to see what Wolf Blitzer said two years ago. There's just no interest in that whatsoever. Because the lie of breaking news is revealed every morning, because what was breaking news three days ago is, you know, leftover fish today. And so you got to make a choice when you show up in the world. Which is, are you in the breaking news business, or you're trying to describe something about the human condition. And so when I write about things that are happening in the world, I try really hard not to write something that only makes sense today. And the blog was really good training for that, because more than half the people who read any of my blog posts read it more than a week after I wrote it. And so I can't comment on the news of the day unless I want my blog to be Wolf Blitzer's blog. So with the book, I finished it before the depths of the pandemic and George Floyd and racial injustice and everything were really felt to the marrow. But I got to read it one more time before my editor took it away. And I could have canceled the book. I could have rewritten the book. I could have added things in the book about the world I was in in that moment. And Nikki said, "Well, what sounds like you?" And as I read it, I realized there isn't anything in the book I want to take back. And so, I smiled to myself for writing something that might stand up.

Jen: I'll tell you that during this time, your book has been a real beacon of hope for the artists and creatives that we work with. Because for so many of them (you know, I work mostly with theatre artists), their stages are dark. And so, you know, there's a real existential crisis. Like, "What am I doing with myself, with my work, with my time?" But remembering that there is a practice, and that it's the practice that matters has really been meaningful to them. So, thank you for writing it.

Seth: Well, you're welcome. And what I would say to some of your clients (not all of them) is, the best way to be a working actor is to be a writer. If you write the material, you get to cast yourself. And you have everything you need to write the material. There is nothing keeping you from writing the material. And just as you know how to use your body and your voice as an instrument, you can learn to use your words as an instrument. And this is a gift. I know it's a dislocation, and that it's a tragedy, and that people are hurting financially and health-wise, but it also means you have no more excuses. You have to write.

Jen: Wow, thank you for that.

Pete: Seth, The Practice...even in that story you shared there, I think of so often in the context of writing and a writing practice. But I also, since reading the book, I feel like I've seen the concept of the idea of a practice everywhere. And I was saying to Jen the other day, "Well, I guess I have a meditation practice. And we have a podcasting practice. And I have a swimming practice." And so on, and so on. And so I was curious, like for you outside of the writing practice, what are some of the other ways that you've incorporated a practice into your work or your life?

Seth: Yeah. Um, first an aside (not about me), if you've seen the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi?

Jen: [laughter]

Seth: Uh, the first...have you seen it, Jen?

Jen: No.

Seth: It won a ton of awards, and actually gave me the incentive to go to Tokyo to meet (I failed to meet) Jiro. But it was a great trip, anyway. Two-thirds of the movie is this extraordinary profile of what it means to have a practice. In his case, it's almost the same dishes every night. There's only eighteen seats in the restaurant. It was the first Michelin-starred sushi restaurant in all of Japan. And then toward the end (I'm not spoiling anything), but the emptiness of his practice begins to be revealed, because I think he focused too much on some things and not enough on others. He was a little too rigid. But I have many, many practices. The things that I try to do every day, or on a regular basis. You know, I have a dal practice. And I eat the same thing for lunch almost every day. And it has evolved dramatically over the last five years. The first time you make dal, it's not going to be very good. And over time, you start to taste things, and feel things, and understand things that couldn't possibly have been there when you started, right? I've just started adopting a dovetailing practice, which involves cutting pieces of pine in a special way so they fit into each other with like a wooden joint. And there's a shortcut, which is you can buy some expensive tools and it just does it for you. This is the opposite of that. This is like all by hand. And I'm terrible at it, terrible. And that's part of the joy of doing it. Because I'm not saying, "I'm a bad person because my first dovetails were terrible." I'm saying, "I get to experience again, in a very low-risk setting (wasting, you know, $4 worth of pine), what it is to be a beginner on my way to being better." And so, we have high-stakes practices in our lives. You know, I don't want to screw up a blog post. But I can screw up a dovetail. That's fine. And I don't have to beat myself up about it. I just say, "What did I learn from that? And how am I going to do it tomorrow?" Without that edge, with the burr of, "This has to be perfect." Because that tightens us up, and then we come up with excuses.

Pete: Yeah. I think the thing that stands out in that story too, Seth, is the practice or the process, if you like, of then reflecting on your practice. It's not just, "Do the same thing every single day." It's, "Learn from what you've done, so that you can make it better the next day, and the next day, and the next day." Is that fair?

Seth: Yeah. And that's why I devoted...the part of the book that repeats itself the most is the one about who's it for and what's it for. Because it's the one people give me the hardest time about. All the other ones, either you get the joke or you don't, and repeating myself wouldn't make a difference. But here, if you announce who the work is for and the change you seek to make, now you're on the hook. And it's so tempting to put ourselves not on the hook, either by boxing ourselves into the corner and measuring the wrong metric and making ourselves unhappy forever because the metric will never be what we want, or refusing to acknowledge who it's for so that no matter what we do, it's safe. And being really clear...you know, Danny Meyer, one of the most successful restaurantaurs in New York City history is really clear about who it's for. He is not in business to make the chef happy. Right? And lots of restaurants are. He is not even in business to make a profit. Lots of restaurants are. When he decided to open Shake Shack, the what's it for was, "Let's see if we can make a billion dollars." But when you're running a different kind of restaurant, the who's it for is, "The kind of person that wants to eat here". And the what's it for is, "To give a transformative experience and performance that people will talk about tomorrow, or remember a year from now." And once you announce that that's what you do, then you've got to be held to a different standard than if you say, "I'm making the food my grandmother made, take it or leave it." Because that is for you, it's not for the person who's eating.

Jen: Ooh, my mind is still sort of swirling around this idea of a high-stakes practice and a low-stakes practice. And one of the things we noticed (and Pete and I have talked about you behind your back, but now we'll do it in front of your face)...I don't know if you would identify them as practices, but two things that we have identified as your practices that are kind of remarkable. One is, you always answer an email within moments. It's like you live at inbox zero. And I just, I want to know how you do that. And the other is, when we went to schedule this meeting with you, your calendar was wide open. There was nothing in the way of us booking a time. And there have to be practices that allow you to have that mindset where you don't need to be busy every second, but practices that you've put in place to create the space. And I'm just curious if you have any immediate reactions to that?

Seth: Well, so in the altMBA, one of the prompts talks about boundaries. And I don't think boundaries are a practice, I think they enable practices. So I don't use Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I don't use Instagram. And I don't go to meetings. So, those are boundaries. I just got seven hours free every day that most people don't have, at least. And then the question is, what are you going to do with those seven hours to make it worth the fact that you gave up other things that you could have been good at, or could have enjoyed? And I don't recommend my email practice to anybody. It is largely based on sunk costs, a decision I made twenty years ago that if a human being cares enough to non-anonymously show up with a generous connection to me, I at least owe them a one-sentence response. And I've done that 175,000 times. That's a real number. That is not an exaggeration. So, I'm encouraging people not to send me emails. Every time you do, a little part of me dies. And, but I've decided that spending a couple hours a day engaging with people in that way that lets me feel like I have at least this much control over the back and forth is fuel for me. But I also know it has cost me writing a dozen books. Because if I wasn't spending two hours a day doing that, I could be doing something else. And then, the open calendar...my calendar didn't used to be open. And that's part of the reason that I looked in the mirror and said, "Akimbo deserves to be bigger than me. I am day trading in Slack all day long with people who need things to get to the next level. They can handle this without me. You go do that. I'm not going to do that anymore."

Jen: Okay. Well, you've just opened up the conversation to a place I was really hoping it would go. I'm so curious, Seth, about this cycle we observe in you where you move between freelancer and entrepreneur, and it sort of like cycles back on itself. Your "Freelancer" Akimbo episode is probably the most impactful twenty minutes of audio I've ever listened to in my life. The day it came out, I pinged Pete and I said, "You have to listen to this, because I've already listened to it twenty times. So you're going to have to listen to it." I'd love to just hear you talk about the cycle. Because I think for so long, I had lived under the assumption that it was an "either/or", as opposed to a "yes, and".

Seth: Yeah. I think...for those listening at home, Jen is the daytime shift, Pete is the night shift, they alternate. That's how they get so muc done. But the other part of it is that...I don't know anyone else who's ranted about this, so I'll claim it. Freelancers get paid when we work. We use our own fingers. We do our own work. Entrepreneurs should never do that. Entrepreneurs should get paid when other people work. They should build something bigger than themselves, probably using somebody else's money. That, somebody who is a producer of Broadway shows is an entrepreneur. That, Hamilton is going to go on whether or not he shows up onstage. And our media has celebrated entrepreneurs at the same time it has sort of dismissed freelancers. Unless you're an entertainment, in which case it lionizes freelancers. And the problem is, we are tempted to do both. And why is that a problem? It's a problem because entrepreneurs often run out of money. And when they start running out of money, they want to hire a really talented person but they can't afford it. So, you know who they hire? Themselves. And so, they put themselves to work for the enterprise. But now, they don't have any time to be an entrepreneur anymore. And the next thing you know, they're bad at both jobs. And so, I don't think most people should alternate between being a freelancer and an entrepreneur. It's actually a hygiene problem. Because switching is...you know, I'm pretty confident there are people in the entertainment business who have done this, right? Like, I don't think George Clooney was actually making the tequila. That, he made more money as an entrepreneur making tequila than he made in all of his years of being an actor. But I think he enjoyed being an actor more, probably. Switching back and forth, that mode-shift is very challenging. Because you're always tempted (as I have discovered over and over again, because I'm not good at the hygiene of it ) to hire yourself. And, you know, if I hadn't insisted on inventing almost every single thing we did at Yoyodyne, Yoyodyne would be a much bigger enterprise than it was when we sold to Yahoo. At the same time, Mark Cuban sold Broadcast to Yahoo for one hundred times as much money. But that's because he didn't do anything at Broadcast.com, except make it. Whereas I was the key person, because I like that. I like being on the hook. And so what happens is for me, personally...if I have an idea that will not let me go, then it becomes a book, because it would be easier to get rid of it as a blog post. Or it becomes a company, because no one else will build it. And so, the three times that I built internet companies...first, sort of pioneering internet email marketing, the second being one of the pioneers of social media was Squidoo, and the third time was Akimbo, pioneering online learning not education. I'm really proud of all three, but I'm also well aware that I'm a terrible entrepreneur.

Jen: Mmm. Wow.

Pete: Yeah. That episode, Seth, I just have to share, as someone who...I now identify as a freelancer. In the moment, when I heard that episode, I wasn't sure. I was, "Am I an entrepreneur? Am I a freelancer? Who am I? What am I doing?" And having that distinction and reducing the, I think to your point, I guess the baggage that, or the story that we often tell with freelancers...in my head, I heard, "A freelancer is someone who works on Fiverr for designing logos for, you know, $5. That's a freelancer." And so, once I heard that distinction and got clear on, "As a coach, you are selling your services, your time. And so, yeah, you're a freelancer. The same as if you're doing a speech, or giving a talk to a company. " It was almost like you gave me permission. So, thank you for that episode.

Jen: Yeah.

Seth: And the punch line...you're welcome. The bonus line is, "How do you move up as a freelancer?" Because unfortunately, for people who are keeping track, moving up is important. And they think the way to move up is to work more hours. And that's not true. Because you can't work more than one hundred and sixty eight hours. It's impossible. And you can only work one hundred and sixty eight hours once, and then you're dead. And so the answer is, "You got to get better clients. The end. Get better clients." And that's what you have to use as your compass, to fill in all the dead space. Which is, "How am I going to get the people I currently serve to someone who can serve them better? Because I want to become the kind of freelancer that serves a different kind of client who wants a different kind of thing."

Pete: Hmm. Yeah. And the amount of times I had the conversation with our friend Marie, Marie Schacht, about, "We can't work more hours. We can't work more hours. So, how do we work smarter? How do we work better?" Yeah, we had that conversation at least a dozen times.

Jen: Okay. I'm going to change gears for a second and bring us back to The Practice. So back in February when you spoke to this small group of Akimbo alums, you blew my mind with the conversation about genre. And I...well, I drove, I didn't run home. But it felt like running home to talk to my team at the studio about this idea of genre. And you said a bunch of things, which made their way in different forms into the book. But I really would love to hear you refine this a bit. One of the things you said was that, "If you get feedback about having bad taste, it might mean that you don't understand genre. It might not actually be your taste." That blew my mind. Second, you said, "Understanding the genre means respecting the person you made it for." So, I was thinking about that for months. And when The Practice came out, you better believe I went scrambling for the genre chapter. So, I'd love to just read a short passage from Chapter 175, and ask you to expand on it a bit. This chapter is called "Genre, Not Generic". "The world is too busy to consider your completely original conception. The people you bring your work to want to know what it rhymes with, what category it fits in, what they're supposed to compare it to. "Please put it in a container for us," they say. We call that container "genre". That's not a cheap shortcut. It's a service to the person you're seeking to change. Generic work is replaceable. A generic kind of beans can come from any company because they're all the same. But genre permits us to be original. It gives us a framework to push against." This is so important, and I had never heard anyone explain it like this. Can you dig in a little bit more?

Seth: I would be happy to. And in the Creative Workshop (which we're running again, Akimbo's running again in a couple weeks), this one throws people for such a loop. They do not like the fact that they need a genre, because they don't want to be on the hook and because they get confused about "generic". So, almost all the stuff we create as creators needs to be chosen and possibly paid for before it is experienced. You decide to watch the YouTube video before you watch the YouTube video. You decide to buy the book before you read the book. You decide to go to the play before you see the play. Or even if it's, you know, a massage therapist, you decide to go as a massage therapist before you have the therapy. So how do we decide? Because we clearly are not deciding based on, "We experienced it already." Because we haven't. And we decide because we make a choice about the container, the genre, the thing we are looking for. That, "I like bean to bar craft chocolate. Here's a new kind." So those two words, "new" and "chocolate". It's in a box now. Now inside that box, you can do lots of things. But what you can't do is put a piece of cheese, because cheese does not go in the new chocolate box. And if you put a piece of cheese in there, I'm going to be very disappointed in you. Push the edge of what it means for a piece of chocolate to be extraordinary. So, Samuel Beckett wrote the greatest play that I've ever seen. And Waiting for Godot is right at the edge of genre. It is hated by many of the people who go see it. Why do they hate it? Because it doesn't feel like a play they decided to go see. And that is precisely why it works, because he went right to the edge. Marcel Duchamp (before I found out about him stealing from Alfa von Freitag Lauren Hoeven)...Marcel Duchamp, one of my favorite artists, had a huge impact on me. And I used to go hang out at the Museum of Modern Art. I would go to the Museum of Modern Art and watch people get annoyed at Marcel Duchamp. Because even though he's dead, they didn't get the joke. Because he went right to the edge of genre. And if we look at anybody who is putting something into the world that changes things, it begins by rhyming with the thing that came before. And so we don't need you to be the next George Clooney or the next Spike Lee, we already have one of them. But we also need...if you want us to pick you for any reason, you should decide what your Dewey Decimal number is. Right? Dewey (another bad guy, but still)...do your Dewey Decimal number. Which section of the library do you belong in? And once you pick, now, all of a sudden, you understand why authenticity is a crock. Because we don't want you to be authentically who you woke up to be this morning. We want you to inhabit the genre you announced you're in, right to the edge that you have chosen. Put it on the table and say, "In this world where you have a lot of choices, I am offering you this. This is what you will get." And it's something that I have wrestled and danced on the edge of my entire career. Because, you know, when I was at Prodigy as a consultant building one of the first popular online games...Prodigy (which was formed by Sears, IBM, and CBS, three of the biggest companies in the world) couldn't get anyone to sign up. Because they didn't know what the internet was. So, you know what their slogan was? When they launched this multi-billion dollar company, the best slogan they could come up with was, "You got to get this thing." I don't, actually. I don't have to get this thing. And I came home from one of my first meetings at Prodigy super juiced because I'd seen the future. And I start describing the, "You got to get this thing." And my wife says, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. You should go get a real job." Because they didn't understand how to pick what they were going to stand for.

Pete: Mmm. So Seth, it's almost like you preempted some of the things we wanted to ask about. Because authenticity versus integrity is an episode that Jen and I recorded after This is Marketing was released, your previous book. And I was thrilled to see you touch on it again in The Practice. I think it was Chapter 125. And the chapter was called "Authenticity is a Trap". And Jen and I kind of, I guess casually recorded this episode like we do, where we unpacked your book and this concept, and, "Oh, this is interesting. And what is he trying to say? And how about this? And how about that?" And then we released our episode to our listeners, as we do. And unexpectedly, it became the most, you know, "controversial" episode that we've ever released. Where we got more emails, and messages, and outrage, but also praise, like both ends of the spectrum than any episode we've ever recorded. And so it like clearly touched a nerve, this idea of authenticity versus integrity. And then I noticed consistency is linked to that. Could you just maybe unpack that a little more?

Seth: Yeah. So, integrity means to be in and of yourself. That no matter which way you cut it, it's going to be exactly what it's supposed to be. That there isn't a fake person behind the curtain. That the Wizard of Oz at the beginning of the movie has no integrity, because it's just a farce. And because it's a farce, he can't be consistent. He tells Dorothy to bring him the broom not because he needs a broom, but because he wants her to go away and never come back. That's inconsistent, and without integrity. Authenticity is just an excuse we use when we say something that offends other people. It's an excuse we use when people don't get our joke..."Oh, I was just being authentic." Well, I don't value your authenticity. Toddlers are allowed to be authentic. After you're toddler, if you're showing up as a professional, then be a professional. If you go to the doctor and she says, "Oh my god, you're going die!" "That's not...what? No, that's not allowed. I don't care that you're feeling that inside. I went to see you because I went to the doctor. That's your genre." Not, "Because I was hanging out with my catastrophizing friend." And the same thing is true with this podcast. If you guys decide nine episodes in that you really feel like talking about cricket, well, go ahead. But you're going to lose all your listeners because you've just walked away from having integrity.

Jen: Mmm. Wow. Wow.

Pete: Also, Jen wouldn't understand much about cricket.

Jen: I know that it's a sport. Okay. Seth, I would love to ask you about one sentence in this book that I think is so important. And I also want to look at it from the flip side. So, this is Chapter 131. And the chapter is called, "But What a Great Excuse". "Credentialing wouldn't have the power it does if we didn't eagerly embrace our lack of credential as the perfect place to hide." I experience this particular excuse so frequently with my clients, with myself, with Pete. Like, this is something that is very universal. And on the flip side of this, I've heard you rant about gatekeepers. And it seems to me that credentials also really help to keep gatekeepers in place. And so, I would love to look at other ways we can move ourselves forward without needing someone else to anoint us as qualified.

Seth: So first, let's begin with the dichotomy. Don't do surgery without going to medical school. Right? That there's a whole bunch of things I really want you to have a credential for. I like the fact that people in public health understand epidemiology. You don't just get to make up how you think viruses spread, you need a credential. But I also don't think most people, almost anyone should get an MFA. I don't think almost anyone should get an MBA. Because those are simply super expensive lifelong debt services that show you knew how to get picked. And that puts you to the front of an artificial line that you would have been much better served by doing the work instead. And I haven't checked with the registry, but I think neither of you has a podcasting license. And that's fantastic. Because the time and money it would have cost you to get a license to have a podcast would have been wasted. The way you get good at podcasting is you make a podcast. And what I am encouraging people to do is to say, "If you're locked down, do some writing because you don't need a permit. And you don't need a casting director. And you don't need somebody to pick you." And when it comes to gatekeepers, you know, I know what it's like, for example, for book publishers to reject me. I got eight hundred rejection letters in a row the first year that was in the book business. And sometimes they rejected me because I had a really stupid idea, like a book on how to hypnotize your friends and get them to act like chickens. But other times, it's because I didn't have the credential to show that I deserved to be published by a New York book publisher. And so, it creates moats. And it also furthers racial inequity, because a whole bunch of people who weren't born with privilege don't get the credential and then they're locked out. And I think the way around it is to figure out safe low-risk ways to do the work, to build the body of work, to be able to point to the work you do. My friend Brian Koppelman says, "The number one question people ask him is, 'How do I get an agent?'" He's the guy who makes Billions. And his answer is, "If you go try to get an agent, you're not going to get the agent you want. The way you get an agent is for agents to call you." So the question you should ask him is, "How do I get agents to call me?" And the answer is, "Do the work. Put it on YouTube." Right? Sooner or later, if you put something good enough on YouTube, someone's going to call you. Sooner or later, if you blog enough, podcast enough, put something in the world, right? It's going to lead to your work being seen.

Pete: It feels closely related, Seth, with one of my favorite topics, and I think one of your favorite topics. It was the topic of the TED talk that I mentioned at the top of this episode, which is Imposter Syndrome. And I have you to thank for opening my eyes to the fact that it's so much more universal than I certainly gave it credit for. And I hope you don't mind, but I've shared with a few clients of mine before, like, "Even Seth Godin talks about feeling like an imposter." And they often don't believe me.

Seth: Well, for the record...

Pete: So I want to point them to Chapters 22 and 23, which is, one of them is called "I Feel Like an Imposter", and the other one is "Imposter Syndrome Is Real." And just like give you the floor to announce to the world that you are indeed an imposter.

Seth: Yeah. If I don't feel like an imposter, then I'm not trying hard enough. Because what it means to feel like an imposter is (if you are not a sociopath) you are telling yourself the truth. Which is that you are leading. You are doing something you can't possibly prove that it's going to work because it's never been done before. And so if you're willing to do creative work (which is work that's never been done before), then by definition, you are an imposter. And that's your job. So if you're not feeling it, I think you need to try harder.

Jen: Wow. Okay, Seth. There's a...I was saying to Pete yesterday, I feel like the people I'm always jealous of at the end of an Akimbo episode, where I'm like, "Ah, if only I could muster up the courage to click the appropriate button and send him my question." So, here's my question for you. And this one is actually quite painful to ask. One of the things I've taken from you is the concept of smallest viable audience. This concept has been so meaningful to me, to my clients, to the way we show up, and how we can really commit to our who's it for and what's it for. This current moment has really shifted many people's audiences. Just...I'll use myself as an example. You know, at the beginning of 2020, my smallest viable audience was small and pretty exclusive. And we had a waitlist that would have gotten maybe a couple people off every couple months, and probably would have taken us twelve years to get through. When the pandemic hit, the smallest viable audience changed. And my question for you is (and I've been wrapping my brain around this in several different ways), "Should I be thinking about changing what number I associate with smallest? Do I need to rethink what viable means? Or do I need a new audience?"

Seth: Let me explain why I'm writing about it, because it's not exactly what you're concerned with. But it leads to a second thing, which is super important.

Jen: Great.

Seth: I'm writing about it because if I run into somebody who wants to be a life coach, or whatever...I'll just pick life coach as a thing. So, "Who are you coaching?" "Oh, I'm coaching business owners and executives who are struggling with managing their time." I say, "So, how many people are there like that?" "Fifty million." So every single time this person bumps into someone who doesn't want to hire a coach, they will give an excuse that isn't about them to say why the service isn't right. And through a thousand nibbles, this person will feel like a failure. Because they picked the largest possible audience. They're saying, "My work, everything I'm trying to do, if it displeases any one of these fifty million people, I'm wrong." And that's different than the company that I bought my dovetail saw from. Because they are only wanting to sell, you know, a thousand dovetail saws a year. So, it's not for anyone who does woodworking. It's not even for anyone who's looking for a dovetail saw. It's for a very specific emotional moment in your journey of making something out of wood. Being that specific means if someone doesn't get the joke, you're allowed to say, "It's not for you." And this is...they hired me to give a talk ten years ago to the Broadway producers, so all the people who put on shows on Broadway. And they'd sent me this one hundred and fifty page document that they had commissioned, studying the audience and everything else. Not one person had read it. I was the first person who'd ever read it. It had been sitting around for six months. And so I brought the truth to them, which they had sent me. And it turns out that if you look (before the pandemic) at who's in a Broadway theater paying $150 a ticket, the number of people who are tourists who are seeing their only Broadway show of the year or of the five-year period is a quarter of the room. Three quarters of the room are people who are seeing on average five shows a year. So, the smallest viable audience for Broadway is truly tiny. Don't hire TV celebrities to be in your plays. Don't put bus ads on the sides of buses. And don't try to make average theater for average people because they're not coming anyway. Figure out what the people you care about want. That's why I rant about the smallest viable audience. Okay. So in your case, you built a thriving practice by being very specific about who it's for, what's it for, what's the story someone tells themselves about their priorities with money and time. And when they all lined up, maybe there's only ten thousand of those people in the world. And you've found that eighty or two hundred or forty that you need to have a thriving practice. And then the world changes, and the change agent is an economic disruption and the fact that the primary source of income for most people who are on stage disappears. So in that moment, you are correctly saying, "Many of the people who might have allocated paying for what I do high, have now had to move it down because they need to buy food instead." That's totally legitimate. So then you say, "But I still need to do my work, because it pays my bills and it fuels me. So, I need to find a different circle of people..." (It doesn't have to be bigger, but it might be.) "...and plant a flag for them as well." So one method is to say, "The number of people who can pay $1,000 an hour is low. So, I'm going to start doing group work of ten at a time for $100 an hour." So suddenly, you need ten times as many people but you're selling one tenth as much, and so you've just reconfigured for that. Another thing you can say is, "Wait, I'm really good at this. I'm over here. And now, I'm going to build a flag so far over there for a different industry of people who are thriving in this moment. And I'm going to have a resilient, flexible structure now. Because half my time I'm spending with my first core audience, and the other half with my second core audience." It's distracting because you've got to be integral with each one. But it is smart as a freelancer to have multiple streams of support.

Jen: Thank you so much for unpacking that stuff. I really appreciate it.

Pete: So Seth, the recent podcast you did with...actually, my favorite interviewer of all time is Debbie Millman. And the recent episode you did on her podcast, Design Matters, was...I've listened to that just as many times as I listened to the Freelancers episode. It was, it was brilliant.

Seth: She's extraordinary. Extraordinary.

Jen: So good.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. And so, something that struck me in that conversation in particular was the story you shared about when you're giving a talk to a client, or you've been asked to give a talk to an audience. And you'll say to the client, "Do you want me to do my best stuff, or do you want me to do my new stuff?" And inevitably, they will always say, "Oh, we want you to do your best stuff." And so I was just like, Jen and I were thinking, if this is a platform for you to riff on or noodle on, "What are some of the new things you're thinking about, at the moment? Post The Practice book? What are some of the things that are tossing around in your mind?"

Seth: I think I need to enjoy the wake of a book that only came out ninety days ago before I start ranting and raving about what's next. Because it's only been ninety days. But I think that we need to give some thought to what's going to happen when the monopolies of our attention and our culture begin to either get their comeuppance or lock down their control. Because Google is evil. Because Facebook has made a lot of people really unhappy. Because we went from spending zero minutes a day on social media to four hours, six hours a day on social media. Where did that time come from? But the one that I find endlessly fascinating for now, because it's still such an unsolved problem...two. One is the intersection between education and learning. I know a lot of parents. And those parents are saying half of a sentence, but not the other half. Which is, "Wow, school really sucks for my kids right now." But they are forgetting to say, "And here's what I'm going to do about it." And so I keep trying to figure out, "Where do we inject student-centered project-based independent learning into the development of humans?" And then the second one, which is the elephant in the room, which is more important every day: If we don't figure out what to do about carbon, then none of this really matters.

Jen: Wow. Well, Seth, thank you so much for being here. Pete and I have done...I don't even know how many episodes. We've never had a guest before. We felt like new year, new opportunity to spice things up here on the podcast. And you were, of course, the only person we would want to ask to be our first guest. So, thank you.

Seth: Well, I will say (which I never say at the end of a podcast)...you should have me back as soon as possible.

Jen: [gasps] Ooh, careful what you wish for.

Seth: There you go.

Pete: It was a lot of fun. Thank you, Seth.

Seth: Go make a ruckus.

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