The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 259 - Seth Godin: The Song of Significance

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Have you read Seth Godin's latest book, The Song of Significance?

Pete: I mean, obviously, I've read it and listened to it on Audible.

Jen: Me too.

Pete: I did both. And I loved it. Because in particular, for me, this was one of the books that Seth wrote that's like very specifically for an audience that I serve, in leaders, executives, corporations, so I was excited by it. I loved it, naturally, and have written all sorts of notes throughout.

Jen: Yeah, I read the hard-copy twice and listened to the audiobook. And just, as usual, so many thoughts, so many ideas, so many questions to unpack and noodle on. And I was hoping we could talk about it today.

Pete: We should. We should talk about it, you and I. And I think it would be even funner if we also talked to the author himself, Mr. Seth Godin.

Jen: Let's do it. The Song of Significance. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Seth, welcome back to The Long and The Short Of It.

Seth: It's always a pleasure. Sometimes you don't think you're going to make the cut. But when you get invited back, it's a thrill.

Pete: Well, particularly, this is now, I think we've done two-hundred-and-fifty-six-ish episodes at this point. And we've only ever had one guest. And that one guest is you. And I think it's relevant to the book that you wrote because, because of significant projects that you created in the altMBA and then the podcast fellowship, that is the reason that Jen and I got to meet. That is the reason this podcast exists. And so, it always feels like a pleasure and a treat and an opportunity to get you on the podcast as our first and only guest.

Seth: I am thrilled. Speaking of podcasts with no guests, you have just (by one episode) beat Akimbo, which, I stopped making new ones at two-hundred-and-fifty-five. And I've been the only guest on that one, too.

Jen: Wow, we are very happy to be in that good company.

Pete: That's good company. So Seth, okay, so the survey that started it all. This is what I was thinking about. In December...I went back and looked at my emails, because I remember completing a survey for you in December of 2022. And the title of the email was something like "The best job you've ever had". And as someone that noodles and nerds out a lot on leadership and workplace culture and work and freelancing and all those things, I was particularly taken by the subject of the email. So I remember filling out this survey and thinking to myself, knowing you, "What is Seth cooking up?" So, a couple of questions that I was thinking about on reflection of that is, 1., how the hell did you turn the book around from December 9th until July 2023? That's like six months. And also, what inspired the survey in the first place? What were you thinking about at that moment in time?

Seth: It's easy to look back at the things that worked and think that there was an intentional plan and just try to draw dots from each one to the next one. What actually happened is I had a very eventful fall, as did many people on this planet. And I got to thinking about billionaires firing the disabled online for fun. I got to think about how much dissatisfaction people had about work. I got to think about mortality...a new friend's kid passed away. And I had no book in mind. I really didn't. Writing a book is too much work. Publishing is way too much work. And then, the book just happened. And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. And a week and a half into it, I thought, "I'm going to need something else." And I tried to give myself space to think about what that might be. And the beauty of blogging every day is I didn't have to go to a lot of trouble to ask a lot of people this question. And I had really no expectations. I thought people in other countries would have different perspectives. And what stunned me about the results is how uniform they were, like way off the charts statistically significant. And that is what gave the book its beginning and its structure. And then, when I sent it to Nicky at Penguin, she said, "We're going to move this book up by nine months, because it needs to come out right away." And that's how it can happen so fast.

Pete: Wow. And the results of the survey in particular, what were the things that stood out for you?

Seth: Well, so I listed what I thought bosses would list. And bosses...if you go to your boss and say, "I'm looking for a new job," or you go to look for a job, they will offer you three things. They will say, "You won't get fired. You'll get paid a lot. And you'll get to tell other people what to do." So, I listed those three things. And then, I made up a whole bunch of other things that were true for me and other people I knew, about their best job they ever had. Like, you did something that mattered. You were treated with respect. You did something difficult and achieved your own expectations. And what happened was the three things that bosses picked came in last and last and last. Out of the fourteen, right at the bottom. And the top four were listed by almost everybody. And that's universal. And I think it's universal because work has changed from, "How little can I do, so that I can get back home and stop doing physical labor," to, "I'm going to be here for most of my life, how can I be alive?" And yet, we keep trying to mechanize and routinize and indoctrinate everyone to do the opposite. And so, you know, you walk in and the person at the front desk reads you a script. Or you're the, you know, the CMO, and you say, "Well, what are the best practices I can copy? And where's the playbook?" And so, we're stripping the humanity from the thing that should have humanity. And I wanted to highlight that difference.

Pete: I love it. One of the things that did for me, as a person who completed the survey too though, was this beautiful moment of pause to reflect on the projects I was lucky enough to be part of and perhaps some projects that I was not so lucky to be part of, and then almost put a stake in the ground in answering the questions to look at and like do an audit of the projects I'm working on now and go, "Oh, there's a couple of these that don't actually fit the criteria that I'm saying I value." So that was like an interesting pause for thought, so thank you for the survey.

Seth: Thank you to the nine thousand people who filled it out. I felt bad that I didn't actively engage with everybody. But Google makes it almost impossible to write back to nine thousand people without being seen as a spammer, and every time I try to make it work with MailChimp, I get frustrated. So, I just hoped that people would understand

Jen: Seth, I want to ask you about the title of the book, and the significance (pun intended) of bees. But first, I just want to share that one of my best friends and favorite collaborators, her name is Stephanie Card, she has used the bee as this symbol in her life of reminding herself how to live a great life. So when I saw the cover of the book, I immediately thought of her. And then, when I read the book, I was like, "Oh my goodness. This is someone with whom I have had such a significant, collaborative, wonderful experience." So, I just felt very personally connected to the book before I even read it. But then to read it and to learn about the significance of bees, can you talk to us about that a bit?

Seth: So, what do bees create? They create sweetness and light, the light that comes from beeswax and the sweetness that comes from honey. So, they have this mythical place in our minds. But when we look closely at a bee colony, it's actually a human brain turned inside out. That, a bee as an individual entity doesn't matter. The community of bees is what the species is. And bees are mostly run by matriarchy. And they, in the wild, will regularly, once a year if things are working well, sing the song of increase. And the song of increase is this mystical, magical moment when ten thousand bees leap from where they've lived for the last year, leaving behind all the babies, all the honey, and a brand new queen, leap into the void to establish a new beachhead, evolving as they go. And when I heard the phrase "the song of increase", it just sat with me. And I realized that we expect the word "increase" in our culture to mean more for me. And I then shifted it to "the song of significance". Because what we learn from that survey, what we learn from looking in the mirror, is what we actually seek, if we have a roof over our head and our family is healthy enough to eat, what we actually seek isn't more. What we seek is significance. I went deep, deep into the honeybees. I can talk about honeybees all day. And the more you learn, the more amazing the whole thing is, like a different model for how to be in the world. Honeybees figure out where they are needed. And they do something that they weren't necessarily trained to do. And they do it in this way that is both selfless but also satisfying to them. And they do it really well, and they do it generously. And when we think about our lives, what happened a hundred years ago is, we said...instead of saying, "The purpose of work is to sustain us," we said, "The purpose of work is to enrich the boss. And the boss keeps turning the dials and surveilling us and extracting value, leaving behind a husk of what we were." And now that we have walked away (because of tech and other things) from the giant industrial entity, we're being seduced into just doing it again. When what we could do is use this moment, the way the two of you have, to show up and say, "There is no gatekeeper. There is no gate. Here we go, follow us." It's really hard to do that. And I wanted to help people see that it was possible

Jen: Beautiful, love that.

Pete: This idea that it's hard to do, that I think is particularly interesting, Seth, of...there's a line in your book, and it's that, "Significance is inconvenient." And I think that like those three words really hit me. Like, yes. It's one thing to understand it and to catch what you're throwing. But I think this reality that makes it hard for a lot of people to get their head around is it's actually really inconvenient. And I was thinking about how that relates to, you know, leadership, and how leadership can be really hard and inconvenient because it's a skill. You write about how it's a skill and an art. Could you talk about like, you know, significance and why it's inconvenient?

Seth: So, what do we mean when we talk about convenience? And Tim Wu has written beautifully about how convenience is the most powerful narrative force of the last thirty or forty years. People will trade almost anything for convenience. I was at a big coffee shop chain earlier today. There were nineteen cars lined up for the drive-through. And when I went inside to sit and have a cup of tea in a ceramic mug, they said, "Well, we don't have ceramic mugs anymore. They were just too much trouble to wash. And we're mostly a drive-through place." And the thing is, what convenience does is it plugs into the industrialist desire for control and for profit. And leadership and management are different things. Management is convenient. We get a time clock. We get scorecards. We get an easy way to judge people. We can show our power. We can fire them. There's a cut and dried way to do it. Leadership is inconvenient, because it's about judgment, and connection, and shining a light, and it's voluntary, and hard to figure out. And go down so many things in our world...you know, the wedding industrial complex is super expensive. But for $100,000 or $200,000, you can have a convenient wedding, the usual kind in a regular place with all the usual stuff. It's much more difficult and inconvenient to just get eight friends, go to Central Park, find a violinist, and have a lovely afternoon. But it doesn't happen because it's inconvenient. It exposes us to emotional risk, and significance is the biggest one of these. Significance is: Would you be missed if you were gone? If you're doing something convenient, the answer is no, because I can just get someone else to do it.

Pete: I remember sharing with you this time last year, Seth, that I did not (I was very proud) buy in to the wedding industrial complex, and that Tracey and I had gotten married and eloped when we were on our holiday in Italy, just the two of us.

Seth: Yeah, and it pays dividends.

Pete: It certainly does. Sorry, Jen.

Jen: No. No apologies necessary. Those photos were pretty magical. Okay, so I work mostly with people who are in the theatre industry, people who would label themselves as artists and creatives and (maybe most importantly to this context) freelancers. So, they're bouncing around from gig to gig. And while they're at the gig, they're an employee working within the structure of an organization. But sometimes they're there six weeks, sometimes they're there six years. And I'm curious to know how someone who bounces around so much might take the lessons from this book and bring them into these organizations, even if they're only there for a short while.

Seth: Yeah. So, I know a lot of people in the industry too. The first thing I would say is it pretends to be an industry, often to its detriment. It is much less than an industry than just about any other. And yet, the people in it keep trying to make it one, which is the first mistake. The second thing that we learn, talking to people who try to make a living in the theatre, is while the writer does not get enough respect, the writer is the most secure one. And if you want to make it in the theatre, you should learn to write. Because if you can write, you can cast yourself. And all good things start to happen once you figure out how to not only act it, but decide what gets said. And the people I know who I've helped persuade to do this have all figured it out. And that doesn't mean you're going to be Neil Simon or Lin Manuel, but you can figure it out. Even if you never get your thing produced, it changes your perspective. But the biggest thing is, you know, the thing about auditioning is it's a bimodal distribution. On one hand, most auditions are about, "Do you fit in enough that I have deniability by casting you? That you are indistinct enough to match what the committee needs to fit into this spot." And there's a huge amount of pressure to do that. Right? That's what A Chorus Line is all about. The other end of the distribution is, "Get me Marissa Tomei."

Jen: Right.

Seth: Right? Marisa Tomei should never audition for anything because she's Marisa Tomei. Right? And that's where you want to be. Because that is a significant thing, where there's something you are bringing to the role that no one else can. And it's very scary to learn to do that, to choose to go down that path. It doesn't have anything to do with experience. Bruce Willis started there on the first day. He chose to do that. In music, Bruce Springsteen chose to do that. He didn't say, "I'm going to be a New Jersey version of Mitch Ryder." He said, "If you want Bruce Springsteen, that's me. If you want a wedding singer, you're going to have to call somebody else." And then when we show up, if you've already been cast as the deniable, fungible one, it's very hard for you to change what happens on stage because that's what they picked you to do, read the lines as written. But backstage, there's an enormous number of things you can do. And they call it a company, but they should call it a cohort, a cadre, a tribe, a group of people. Who's leading them? Who's deciding what it's like around here, backstage? Who is saying, "This cast is just, after the first two weeks, is phoning it in. It's a job." Who else is setting the standards and says, "No. This is the chance of a lifetime." And even if what we do on stage is the same every night, what happens backstage is about mutual growth. You have more freedom to do that in the theatre than just about any job you can imagine. ...I just made that whole rant up just now.

Pete: That was good.

Jen: I am tingling through my entire body, really feeling everything that you just said. And I'm so fascinated, you are the first person I have ever come across who has challenged the word "industry" in relationship to the theatre. And not to put you on the spot or anything, but I'm curious to know what word you might replace that with (or phrase, or different idea) because I'm kind of obsessed with doing away with the word "industry".

Seth: I just think it should be called the theatre. It's earned the word "the". The theater. The theater is so idiosyncratic, so commercially unviable, so beset by creative destruction that it's not an industry. It's nothing that the industry wants. Star Wars is an industry. You can keep making new Star Wars shows and make a profit for a long time. Right? But a three week run of slightly off-Broadway play about a Buddhist retreat? That's not an industry. That's the theatre, for god's sake.

Jen: Wow, thank you for that. I can't wait for people to listen to this.

Pete: Jen's giddy. I love this. This is great. So one of the other things I was thinking about, Seth, I mentioned before...twelve months ago, I was in New York, and you and I got to hang out. And I told you about my wedding that wasn't a wedding industrial complex, and I was all excited. And you very graciously and generously took me for a paddle on the Hudson in your beautifully handcrafted wooden canoe. And I'll never forget getting into the canoe. And we set off from the jetty. And the first thing you said to me was, "Alright, Pete, so when you paddle in a canoe, where does the water go?" And I almost froze and was like scanning my brain for like Year 10 Science, "What did I learn about, you know, the mass of water, and all this?" And I was thinking about my dad, who was a science teacher, and I was trying and I was trying. And I managed to get the question right. And I was very thrilled to see this came up in the book. So can you talk to, where does the water go in a canoe? And why is it relevant to significance?

Seth: So I've taught thousands of people how to paddle, mostly up in Canada. And this innocuous question shifts the way you are in the boat. So I wanted to bring the question to people, about life. Water weighs eight pounds a gallon. (I'll let you translate that to metric, for people at home.) But eight pounds a gallon times the million gallons that are in the body of water you're in, meaning if you're going to move the water, you have to move eight million pounds of water. That's very unlikely, because water cannot be compressed. It's got to keep moving the next water. Actually, the water goes nowhere. It's a very thick jelly, and you are leaning against the still water and propelling yourself forward. The same way a gondolier does that with the pole on the bottom of the canal, you're doing it against the water. So when you think about that, and the purpose of the paddle is for the paddle to move your arms and your arms to move your chest and your chest to move your belly and your belly to move your butt and your butt to move the boat, you can realize that we have leverage. And we probably cannot change the world, the world is eight million pounds of water. But what we can do is change ourselves. We can lean against the status quo to move forward, making a difference to the few people we actually engage with. And that's different than being passive and waiting for the system to just line up and be what you need it to be.

Pete: Beautifully said. I wish my answer was that eloquent. I think I just said, "I think we push against it. I think it's not moving anywhere, Seth."

Seth: Most people don't get it right, so you were ahead of the game.

Pete: It felt like passing a gate, in terms of, "Now I can have a conversation with Seth Godin, because I got my answer to that question right."

Jen: Seth, every time I read one of your books, I take lots of notes. I underline things, circle things, write notes to myself like, "Whoa, read that again," or, you know, triple exclamation points in the margin. And then, when I go back and I re-read the book, I'm always fascinated at the things that I didn't underline the first time, and I'm like, "How did I miss that?" But then, the things that I go back in and triple circle on the third read, I'm like, "Yes, that is it." So when I was re-reading The Song of Significance, I was struck by how many times I underlined and then had the same reaction each time I re-read it, this phrase, "Let's get real, or let's not play." I was saying to Pete earlier, I want to tattoo that on my forehead so that people coming toward me know that I believe this to be true. "Let's get real, or let's not play." Can you explain what that means?

Seth: Okay, so I stole it from a great business to business book. So, I don't want people to be confused or to think that I came up with the phrase. The author means it slightly differently in that book. If you're selling million dollar systems to big companies, you don't do sales to people, you only do sales with them. And the idea is, early in the process, you say, "If you can't tell me what problem you're trying to solve and who else has to say yes, I'm not coming back."

Pete: Yeah.

Seth: "Let's get real that we are here to sell each other on solving a problem, or let's not play." And that has stuck with me for years. So if we think back to the theatre thing, right? The musical Hair had some great songs in it, but most people remember its debut because it was the first big naked scene in New York.

Jen: Right.

Seth: And it was gratuitous. It wasn't needed. But it was a way of saying to the audience and to the cast, "Let's get real, we are suspending disbelief. We are moving away from the standard of what you expect in a theatrical production, in the same way a generation is shifting." And to take it out of the theater realm, what I'm trying to say is this: If we can't agree about why we're here together, if we can't agree about the change we seek to make, please don't waste my time and I won't waste yours. If you're saying, "I am here for $25 an hour," and I'm saying, "I'm here to change the lives of our customers," we are not going to be able to do well together. If everybody's here for $25 an hour, it's going to be fine. Because we got real. We know exactly what we're doing. This is a bureaucracy. We stamp the papers. And at closing time, we go home. No one's going to be frustrated. And when I have built organizations, this is the single pothole I fall in to the most. That you need somebody, you want somebody, you believe in somebody, but they don't want to get real and you live with it. And high-functioning organizations don't have that problem. High-functioning organizations are very clear. Goldman Sachs, "Let's get real. We're here to become multi-millionaires. Don't talk to me about meaning or anything else. That's why we're here." And they lose their way when they stop being real about why they're there. And the same thing is true in the other direction, about an effective nonprofit, "Why exactly are we here today? Let's get real about that. And if we can't tell each other the truth, we probably shouldn't keep going."

Pete: I feel like that dovetails into the thing that I wrote down and scribbled and underlined four times, like Jen with, "Let's get real, or let's not play." And in my experience with your books, there's always this slightly counterintuitive mic drop that I read, and I go, "It's so obvious now that I've read it. I can't unsee that thing that Seth just pointed out for me." And this time, it was, "Turnover is okay." Chapter 82. I was so obsessed with this notion because I work with so many leaders and executives, and they work within corporate Australia, corporate America, organizations around the world. And so often, there's this tension with a new leader or an executive who is trying to keep the peace or maintain their team. And that sometimes, to your point (you will expand on it far better than I can), like some people need to get off the boat. Some people need to get off the bus. Can you expand on that?

Seth: Yeah, well, you can't have, "Let's get real, or let's not play," and also not have turnover. It all goes together. And so, I mean, think about a ship captain from the 1400s. You've got your eighteen sailors on board, and it's been a long journey. And now, you get to port and you say to everybody on the boat, "Don't come back on the boat unless you want to come back on the boat." You've got to believe the next four weeks of the voyage are going to go way better, because people have re-enrolled. You didn't throw them overboard at sea. You left them in Lisbon. It's okay. And this idea of re-enrollment is critical if we're going to do significant work. And it is generous to be able to say to somebody, "I understand why you were here. It is not what we need you to be here for. You need to go now." That is much better than pretending all around that everything is fine. This is different than saying, "I have a personal beef with some irrelevant personal attribute of your personality." That's on you. You need to deal with that. But the enrollment, the journey, why we are here together, I think turnover is really useful.

Pete: So good. I can't wait to share this episode with all of my leader friends. The other thing that I'm excited to ask you about (which I'm also going to share with them, I'll share with them the whole episode) is that a significant portion of the last part of the book, much to my delight, was spent...I'm not going to say ranting, but-

Seth: You can say ranting.

Pete: Ranting about meetings, Seth, which is something I just...I love when you start ranting about meetings, because I agree with everything that you say about meetings, the modern meeting and how broken it is. And ironically, when, you know, we set this podcast up and you sent us that calendar, I was just, you know, surprised (but also delighted and not surprised) to see your calendar, when you say, "Come and book a meeting with me," is essentially blank, because I'm imagining you don't waste time in meetings. So, can you tell us what's wrong with the modern meeting? And what do we do about it?

Seth: Well, I get to rant on my blog every day. So I have ranted about meetings on my blog, I don't need to put it in a book. But I put it in a book, because it's directly related. It is the biggest symptom of the kind of thing I'm talking about. That, I have been given access to lots and lots of companies. I don't consult, but for whatever reason, they invite me over. And we're talking about a quarter, a third, a half of people's day spent in performance of something that has nothing to do with the change we seek to make, and nothing to do with, "Let's get real, or let's not play." It has to do with asserting status roles, maintaining the indoctrination of people into a system, and stalling. And it is really possible (I have seen it) to build an organization where you'd never use a meeting in place of a memo. That if you are just telling people something, record a five-minute video, send it to them, let them watch it at double speed at their own time. If you are announcing something, write it down, put it in the company discussion board and leave it there. The only purpose of us coming together is to look each other in the eye and work out a disagreement, to have a conversation, to come out at a different place than we came in. If we're not here to do that, then let's get real about why we're here. We're here because you couldn't be bothered to prepare for the meeting well enough that we wouldn't have to have it. We're here because you need to see the interns in the background, sitting there going like this, listening to you talk. We're here because you want deniability that we had the meeting. And a friend of mine, who has ten thousand employees, wrote a script. He's a programmer. And he went into their system and canceled every recurring meeting in the entire company, on a Sunday, and he sent an email to everyone in the company that said, "I just gave you all back six hours a week. You're welcome to put a meeting back on the agenda if you actually need it, but a whole bunch of these meetings keep going because no one's willing to cancel them. So, I just cancelled them." So for me, it's a symptom. It's a symptom of what sort of communication is actually happening, and how are you going to make it matter? And I thought Zoom was going to help solve this problem. Zoom actually made it worse, because a Zoom call has turned into, "How long can we wait before we fall asleep, while one person goes like this?" If we really want to have a conversation...this works because there's only three of us. But an asynchronous threaded conversation online is so much more powerful than a Zoom call where people listen and also judge false proxies.

Pete: Totally agree. My experience when I was part of the altMBA many, many years ago, many moons ago, and then asked to join the team, Seth, with Kelly Wood and Marie Sharpton and the rest of the team and yourself, was everything you just described, was we didn't meet unless we really had to. And I was on the other side of the world, and it worked. And we used to send long Slack messages and emails, and it just worked so beautifully. So, yes. Yes to all of that.

Jen: I don't know if you can both hear, but the leaf blower has really been cooking up a lot of...

Seth: You just ruined my day.

Pete: Don't say "leaf blower" in front of Seth Godin.

Jen: Yeah, sorry. So sorry. I've changed my Zoom settings to try to eliminate as much of it as possible.

Seth: We can't hear a thing.

Jen: Okay, that's great.

Seth: We just have...we now have a hole in our hearts. That's all.

Jen: Oh, the leaf blower. So, one of my favorite twists...and I will give no spoilers.

Seth: You can spoil.

Jen: Oh, no, because it's something that you made. So I don't want to spoil something you made, because I want people to listen to it. But the AI episode of Akimbo was one of the great twists, I just loved it so much. So anyone who's listening right now who hasn't listened to that, I'll drop a link in the Box O' Goodies. You can go take a listen. It's fantastic. But what I'm so interested in (and I think there is a relationship between that episode and The Song of Significance) is, I want to know, how do you actually use AI tools? Or do you use them? And when? And why? And how do you engage with AI?

Seth: I use them all the time. I made a rule for myself, that my writing will always be my writing. No one who works for me has ever written in my name. And anything someone reads that I put out in the world, I wrote. But there's so many things that AI is better at than writing like me. And we could talk for hours about AI, but a couple of short things. First of all, artificial intelligence is a parlor trick in our brain. We imagine the computer knows something. It doesn't. It is simply doing math. It has no understanding of anything. And we, as people trying to struggle to understand complex systems, imagine what it is doing. But we're wrong. The second thing is AI, like most things, is going to start by doing mediocre work. But it can do mediocre work for faster, better, and cheaper than people can. So if you're mediocre radiologist, you've got a problem, because an AI can read a mammogram or wrist fracture X-ray better, faster, and cheaper than you. And particularly if you're a copywriter, that job's already gone. So I got three hundred suggestions from something that we did, a little Google form. And if I had started reading them and trying to understand them, I would have been swayed by the order they came in and the vitriol or complimentary-ness of them. And I wouldn't have been able to give an accurate summary. I copied all three hundred, pasted it into ChatGPT, and said, "Please summarize." And it broke it down into the sixteen big topics, organized them, helped me understand them, and did it better than I could have ever done it on my own. So what we're going to see is this system that has a little bit of a memory, that is always on, that has situational awareness, that is really inexpensive. So, I think it's going to be useful for cognitive behavioral therapy. It is going to be useful for helping us see things we don't see. And I think it's the biggest change in our world since electricity. And people have no clue how big the changes are going to be, but they're going to be pretty significant.

Pete: Now, Seth, I'm mindful of your time. And you mentioned before, I think before we started recording, that one of the things you wanted to talk about (which obviously, I wanted to talk about) was the latest addition to my family, little baby Oliver. And I was thinking about parenting as it relates to your book. And I have been joking with Jen in the last ten episodes, "Pete somehow weaves in the fact that parenting is a metaphor for leadership, and life, and all of those things." So, here I go again. But I feel like there's no more significant project, at least in my life at the moment, than looking after this tiny little human and trying to set him up for success to be able to hopefully lead a significant life. So this is a slight left turn, but I'm just curious, what advice do you have for me as I embark on this significant project of being a dad?

Seth: I have relentlessly resisted giving parenting advice for a whole bunch of reasons, partly because I want to be respectful of my kids. But what I would say to a human I care about, like you, is two parts. 1. Toddlers toddle. And the reason they toddle is because they don't know how to walk. And the act of toddling is pre-walking, walking poorly so that you can walk well. And that's a huge thing that humans are able to do. What happens once kids pass three years old is that it's very easy to get impatient with any sort of toddling. But toddling is actually the point, even when you're forty or fifty or sixty years old, is becoming patient with your own toddling and celebrating it. And I am confident that you and Tracey are up for that. And the second half of it (which is the other side of the same coin) is, no parent has ever done this before the first time they've done it, and cut yourself some slack. Because you're much better at it than you think.

Pete: I appreciate that. "Toddling is the point," is one of my favorite lines that I've heard you say. I'm so obsessed with that. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Jen: And for those of us with teenagers, it's a good reminder.

Seth: I have another riff for teenagers, just briefly. How old are your kids?

Jen: Well, I have one, and she's thirteen and a half.

Seth: So, this saved my life. The job of a teenager in Western culture is to differentiate and distance themselves from their parents. And so, when they say things to you that you have never said to your parents, that are personal or hurtful or cutting or alienating, the only good answer is, "Thank you."

Jen: Wow. Thank you for that.

Seth: It drives them crazy, I've got to tell you.

Jen: I can't wait to try that tonight.

Pete: Good luck. Keep us posted on that, Jen. While we're on the topic of thank yous...I feel like I said this at the start, but I want to say it again. Because of the projects you created, the significant projects I think you created in the altMBA and the podcast fellowship, that's literally where Jen and I met, and then continued to build our relationship, which eventually led to a podcast. And we thought we'd do ten episodes, and we'll see what happens. Two-hundred-and-fifty-something weeks later, we're still going. And I put so much of it down to the fact that you created the conditions for us to meet, and to connect, and to hopefully create a little spark in other people's day by having a podcast. So thank you so much for being here, but also for creating the things that you've created over the last six, seven plus years.

Seth: Well, thank you. I have a really special place in my heart for the two of you. You're both extraordinary human beings. But the lesson here is someone doesn't have to be an extraordinary human being to show up. And your decision to show up with the generosity you bring to the table, it's available to everybody. But the two of you chose to do it. And it gets me all choked up. I'm so honored to know both of you.

Jen: Thank you, Seth, for being here today. We're so excited to share this with our listeners.

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