711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www. LearningLeader.com https://www. LearningLeader.com Connect on socials: Twitter/X - https://x.com/RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 https://www.instagram.com/ryanhawk12/?hl=en LinkedIn - @RyanHawk https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhawk12/?isSelfProfile=true My new book, The Price of Becoming https://amzn.to/4cNwKso, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global https://insightglobal.com/learningleader/. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Seth Godin is the author of more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. He has written a blog post every day for more than two decades, and it remains one of the most widely read blogs in the world. Before the books, Seth founded Yoyodyne, one of the first internet marketing companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. He later created the altMBA. His new book is The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. Key Learnings Being early is a courtesy, not a personality trait. "I don't understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else's time." The knot is the point. You can't have a pretzel without the knot, and if you try to undo it you end up with crumbs. Real life isn't like that. Our knots can actually be untied. Teach so that people teach themselves. Seth builds everything around a metaphor that gives people scaffolding, because "the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning." Give someone the structure to figure it out and they'll never forget it. Name the baggage, drop the baggage, ship the work. The easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn't exist. A man with nine million dollars in the bank told Seth he has to keep doing the work he's known for, because he needs to make a living. No, you don't. Same with the student three years into a four-year degree he hates who says he has to finish. You can choose to finish. Nobody is making you. We stay stuck because it's comfortable. It keeps us safe, guarantees an excuse, takes us off the hook. No agency means no responsibility. It isn't friction, it's hidden entanglements. Friction sounds like a law of nature you can't argue with. Entanglements are long-told stories about how the world is, who we are, what we fear, where our status sits. They form an invisible web, and unlike physics, they're ours to cut. The tell is when a problem gets treated like a situation. In Canadian Inuit territory, people are 500 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than someone in Toronto. We know how to cure it, for a tiny fraction of the healthcare budget. Calling it a situation is what lets everyone off the hook. The blue sweater. As a high school sophomore, Jacqueline Novogratz https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacqueline-novogratz/?isSelfProfile=false wore her favorite sweater, a gift from her uncle, blue and white wool with the Alps on it. Cheerleaders teased her for it. She went home and dropped it in a Goodwill box. Fifteen years later, running through the streets of Rwanda at 7:00 in the morning, she saw a seven-year-old boy wearing it. She chased him down, looked in the collar, and found her own name on the tag. That was the moment she let go of being the Stanford grad on the fast track at a New York bank. She has spent the decades since building Acumen and its patient capital model, and by Seth's last count, 600 million of the poorest people on earth live better because of it. What makes someone a leader: they decide to. It has nothing to do with your title. You can lead from anywhere in an organization. Seth gets stuck every single day, and most of the time he stays stuck. That's fine. What matters first is clarity: who is this for, and what is it for? Getting unstuck always means leaving something else behind. The woman with more figure skating gold medals than anyone in history didn't get them by having a life. She got them by having no life for fifteen years. Completely unstuck on gold medals. Deeply stuck on everything else. It's the word "but" that traps you. We only feel stuck when we want one thing and another, and won't be happy without both. Swap the but for an and, or admit which one you're trading away. Six to nine ideas a day, one gets published. Most never get past three words. If you need the perfect idea before you begin, you will never begin. Find the room inside the system, then leave when the system is the obstacle. Jesse Cole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHjSjzDIiA inherited minor league baseball's constraints and worked inside them: ridiculous name, puns, a cheering section of seventy-year-old women called the Nana Bananas, players recruited for charisma over hitting. Years of sellouts, home and away. Then the league itself became the thing in the way, so he left it. Multiple things fail at every Bananas show, every single night. That's the price. The question worth sitting with is what it actually costs you to not be perfect. If Seth's book The Practice were one page long, it would say give up your commitment to being perfect and be useful instead. The reason most people don't try isn't cost or risk. Before an event with 185 people, Seth turned the 80-page PDF of bios into a 7,000-word article about everyone there, then had it read back to him in a clone of his own voice, and listened on the drive over. Thirteen minutes, twenty dollars. Nobody else at the event had tried anything like it. "So what's keeping you from doing something like that?" It's not a failure muscle, it's a generous failure muscle. The internet version has become a failure Olympics, asking a donut shop for a dozen free donuts just to get rejected. Seth calls that selfish. The real question is "Who might I be able to help with the next thing that might fail?" Stress and tension are not the same thing. Stress is wanting two things you can't both have. Reduce it. Tension is the engine, and you can't shoot a rubber band across the room without pulling it backward first. Taylor Swift announcing 8,000 seats is inflicting tension on her fans, and that tension is what releases into joy. No concert, no tension, no joy. Great teachers create the conditions for people to see the gap. There's always a moment where you know you could learn something and haven't yet, and that moment feels like incompetence. Some people meet it and opt out because nobody convinced them the tension was worth it. Effective leadership is voluntary. Force people to follow you and you're a manager. Teaching canoeing at summer camp in 1977, Seth was competing with windsurfing and horseback riding for twelve-year-olds who could choose anything. He couldn't require anyone to come to his dock, so he built the conditions instead. And when a kid said he'd rather go sailing: "It's not my job to persuade everyone. It's my job to persuade someone." Jackson Pollock wanted two things and got neither. Three years as the most celebrated American painter of the century, then he told Lee Krasner he didn't want to spend his life painting cover versions of Jackson Pollock. He changed his method, format, even his canvas sizes. His momentum guaranteed a big first show. Everyone hated it and nothing sold, and what followed was a spiral that ended in a fatal crash. Coming up, he had accepted rejection as the cost of the work. Later he wanted that and acclaim and wealth. Needing both, he got neither. Rules in one area free up energy for another. No alcohol, no drugs, no meat in forty years, no dairy. The point isn't the rules, it's that Seth never renegotiates with himself about any of it. Seth's answer to the champagne question: he doesn't celebrate. The day he sold his company to Yahoo he wasn't happy, because it was the end of something. Hitting the New York Times list a second time, he cried, not from joy but because he felt nothing. "I had done the work. I didn't need to make the list." His prize is noticing that someone he talked to yesterday is closer today to where they want to go. Action Name one thing you tell yourself you have to do. Say it out loud as a choice instead. Do you still choose it? What's the thing you'd try this week if the only cost of failing was that it didn't help anyone? Who would it help if it worked? If you enjoyed this episode with Seth Godin, check out my in-person conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHjSjzDIiA with Jesse Cole, owner of The Savannah Bananas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahHjSjzDIiA! Podcast Chapters 00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle 00:59 Meet Seth Godin 03:06 Why There's a Knot in the Pretzel 06:10 Name It, Drop It, Ship It 09:30 Not Friction, Hidden Entanglements 10:59 The Blue Sweater in Rwanda 14:42 Seth Gets Stuck Every Day 16:25 How He Blogs Every Single Day 17:10 The Bananas Found Room in the System 21:42 The Book That Weighs 18 Pounds 25:11 Thirteen Minutes, Twenty Dollars 27:05 The Generous Failure Muscle 28:05 Tension Is the Engine, Stress Is the Trap 30:17 You Can't Make Anyone Follow You 33:05 Pollock Wanted Two Things 35:22 Designing the Default 39:35 What Canoeing Taught Him About Leadership 41:26 The Champagne Question 45:17 EOPC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Hawk?

  You should join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. That's what James Clear said to me a few years ago at our Learning Leader Growth Summit. Our Learning Leader Growth Summit is the three-day leadership retreat we have for members of our Learning Leader Circle. And applications are now open to be part of our next Learning Leader Circle. If you want to be surrounded by a group of eights and nines and tens who are striving to be better, this group might be for you. If you want to be surrounded by a group of get after it doers, people who are achieving

• 0:41Ryan Hawk?

  big things, making a positive dent in the world, then the Learning Leader Circle might be for you. If that's you, go to learningleaderscircle.com to apply. That's learningleaderscircle.com.

• 0:59Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader, one of the greats Seth Godin has written more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow and The Dip. He has posted on his blog every single day for more than 20 years. Talk about consistency. Before the blog, before his books, he founded Yoyodyne, one of the first internet marketing

• 1:42Ryan Hawk?

  companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. His new book is called The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. During our conversation, we discussed why Seth is always early to every single meeting. Then what Jackson Pollock's collapse teaches all of us about wanting two things at once. Then he shares how to build a quote generous failure muscle. And Seth closes with an amazing story about what he learned about leadership from being a canoe instructor at summer camp. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Seth Godin. Seth, man, it's so good to see you again.

• 2:27Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome back to the Learning Leader Show.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  What a treat, the one and only. How are you, Ryan?

• 2:33Ryan Hawk?

  So I've had you on a handful of times over the past 11 years, and every single time you show up early. You are remarkably consistent when it comes to being early. Why is that?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Well, I guess if I'm consistent, I'm not early anymore because if I then start showing up on time, it'll look like I'm late.

• 2:51Ryan Hawk?

  No, but I mean, it's a real thing. A lot of people in your position, they show up maybe right at time or a little bit after, and you never do.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  It's a courtesy. I don't understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else's time.

• 3:03Ryan Hawk?

  Well, I really, really appreciate that. I love the new book, and I want to open with a story. So about 2,000 years ago, a monk in northern Italy twisted some dough into a shape, boiled it, baked it, and offered it to his students as a reward for paying attention to their studies. You write that the genius, it wasn't in the dough, it was in the way the monk baked a story into it. What's that story?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Well, there's a knot in the middle of a pretzel. And unlike real life, you can't have a pretzel without a knot. And if you try to undo the knot, you just end up with crumbs. So there's irony in the symbol. What actually happened is that, I love designing book covers, and the cover of this book was going to have some rope on it because when you think of knots, you think of rope. And I played with more than 100 variations of rope knots, and all of them looked banal. They were too on the nose. They were too obvious. And so the notion of the pretzel came to me as this visual indicator of what it's like to feel stuck. So I created what I think is the perfect pretzel.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  It's hard to actually get a photograph of a perfect pretzel because pretzels don't usually photograph as well as you'd like. But then I needed to make up a story about why I picked the pretzel that wasn't what I just told you. So in the back of the book, I added a story about the monk in Italy and the three circles. How does this help somebody? What's getting in the way? And whatever the third circle stands for. But that came after I figured out I wanted a pretzel.

• 4:36Ryan Hawk?

  Oh, how do you find these stories?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  So once you have a pretzel and you're trying to teach somebody, this is what I do with everything, is you say, I have a metaphor, I have a simile, I have an example. How do I make it so that when it sticks, someone will teach themselves? Because the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning. And if you can give them scaffolding to figure it out, they will never forget it. So in the case of the pretzel, I wanted it the same way a heart is the symbol for love, even though the thing in our chest does not look like a Valentine's Day card.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Once you have the heart, then you can talk about how it feels in your chest when you end a relationship and heartbreak and all these other things. So it all is anchored somewhere. So to tell the story of the pretzel is to begin by understanding where did the pretzel come from? Because we didn't have pretzels 2,000 years ago. And we know, not the name of the person, but we know it was probably northern Italy, maybe southern Switzerland, somewhere in that little region, a monk started baking pretzels. Well, how can I use that narrative to start a discussion about the empathy of getting unstuck? That when we see that we can make something better for other people, it's much easier

• 6:05Speaker 01

  to go forward than if we are constantly looking in the mirror and feeling stuck.

• 6:10Ryan Hawk?

  As we started the back of the book, I want to shift to the beginning of it. The easiest thing to do, this is what you write, "The easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn't exist." So name the baggage, drop the baggage, and ship the work. That's like the most Seth Godin thing ever, especially the end. Where does this come from with this acting like we're pretending freedom doesn't exist? So let's name it, drop it, and then ship it. Again, that feels like your ethos.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so I have 100 examples of people who are pretending their freedom doesn't exist. I was with someone last weekend who probably has $9 million in the bank, and he was complaining about the fact that he had to keep showing up to do the task he's known for, even though it's no longer fueling him. I said, well, why do you need to do that? And he said, well, because I need to make a living. I said, no, you don't. Most of the people who are listening to this, if they dramatically reduced the costs in their life, wouldn't need to live where they live or do what they do. We have the freedom to change that, but we want to deny that freedom so we don't have to consider that freedom. That when we look at somebody who is three years into a four-year education and they

• 7:25Speaker 01

  hate every moment of it, they say, well, I have to finish. No, you don't. You can choose to finish and do it with a song in your heart and make a difference doing it and get to where you want to go. Or you can leave, but no one's forcing you to do this. It's just the other thing you want, the one you refuse to say out loud, is the baggage. You don't want to drop the baggage. You like being stuck. And many of us, I mean, sure, there are way too many people who are stuck in servitude, who are stuck in poverty, who are stuck because they were born in the wrong end of a system. I'm not talking about those people. But for most of us, we're only stuck because it's comfortable.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  And exposing the baggage that is keeping us stuck is uncomfortable.

• 8:14Ryan Hawk?

  Why would you choose to remain stuck?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Because it's safe, because it guarantees us an excuse, because it takes us off the hook, because it alleviates us from responsibility, because it means if we don't have any agency that we're not responsible. So, you know, I tell the story of tuberculosis in Canada. If you live in Vancouver or Toronto, there's a chance you could get tuberculosis. If you live north of there in Inuit Territory, where the indigenous people of Canada live, you are not five times more likely to have tuberculosis or 20 times more likely to have tuberculosis. You are 500 times more likely to get tuberculosis. And yet, we know how to cure tuberculosis.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And yet, we know how to make the problem completely go away for a tiny fraction of Canada's healthcare budget. But it's easier to treat it like a situation, to treat it like something that cannot be fixed, than to say, I am personally responsible for a 12-year-old who is never going to live to adulthood because I don't want to acknowledge that I can help solve this problem.

• 9:26Ryan Hawk?

  I mean, the friction is what holds people back is what I sense. I noticed in more than one of your books, you've dedicated and/or mentioned the acknowledgements, a woman named Jaclyn Novogratz, I may be mispronouncing that. Why is she so important to you?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Well, before I get to Jaclyn, I just, I don't disagree with you often, but no, this isn't about friction.

• 9:47Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Friction is a really cool physical concept, and that's why ice skates are so fast compared to walking down the street. It's really hard to live in a world without friction. What I'm talking about is hidden entanglements. Hidden entanglements are long-told stories about how the world is, how the world is supposed to be, who we are, what we're afraid of, where our status is, what affiliations we seek. All of these things add up to an invisible web that keeps us stuck. And to just call it friction makes it sound like it's a law of nature and we have no choice. It's not that at all.

• 10:29Ryan Hawk?

  Well, we have choice if there's friction. I mean, in fact, that's where a lot of the greatest things happen is when you have friction in your life and you choose to work through it. You choose, I mean, I think about all the greatest accomplishments, usually they were preceded by friction, by something really hard that I had to keep going through.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm not disagreeing with that part. I'm just saying the friction is probably internal.

• 10:52Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  That if a lock is stuck, you're not going to be able to fix it with mental gymnastics. You're going to need some WD-40, right? And here, so the story of Jaclyn Novogratz, one of my dearest friends, my hero, the woman who changed my life when I met her in 2001. Jaclyn went to Stanford Business School just after I did and got a job on the executive track at one of the biggest banks in New York. She was doing exactly what you were supposed to do after you go to Stanford Business School. And she went to her boss, who wasn't the president of the bank but was close, and said, "I want to try doing this kind of work somewhere far away because I have a calling to make a difference." And

• 11:37Speaker 01

  she ended up co-founding the Women's Bank of Rwanda, working with women who, never mind having a bank account, didn't have a job, helping them figure out how to, for example, make a living baking and selling donuts in the street. And from this experience, she started to see how interconnected the world was and how challenging it was for so many people. And the story she tells in the book I helped her with called The Blue Sweater. So try to imagine, she's, I don't know, 5'8", 5'10", striking blond hair, and she's running in Rwanda at 7 o'clock in the morning, because that's what Stanford

• 12:22Speaker 01

  graduates do, they run every day. Now flashback just 15 years before, when she was in high school, 12 years. In high school, she'd had a crush on the quarterback of the football team, and she was a sophomore, he was a senior, and she was wearing her favorite sweater to school one day. The sweater her uncle had given her, he had bought it in Switzerland, and it was of the Alps with blue and white wool, and you can visualize this. She walks over to the quarterback, and there are a few cheerleaders hanging around, and they mercilessly, cruelly tease her, talking about how the fact that she was wearing the sweater, but there were no mountains. Ashamed, she went home and she and her mom drove to the

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Goodwill box and ceremoniously dropped the sweater in the Goodwill box. Okay, back to Rwanda. She's running through the streets of Rwanda at 7 o'clock in the morning, and she sees a seven-year-old boy wearing her sweater.

• 13:18Ryan Hawk?

  No.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And she starts chasing him down the street, which would have been a fun thing to see. And she finally catches this petrified kid, and grabs him and looks in the collar, and her name is written on the tag. And in that moment, Jaclyn decides that she is going to drop the expectation, the baggage, the momentum of being a fancy Stanford grad who is on the fast track at a bank, and instead spends the next 25 years building something called Patient Capital. And the last time I checked, 600 million of the poorest people on earth, people who make $2, $3, $4 a day, have a better life because of the investments

• 14:00Speaker 01

  that Acumen has made. And so there's one person with a bunch of advantages, but one person who decides to let certain kinds of comfort go away so she could build something she was proud of. And those sorts of stories are the ones that get me to show up and do my work.

• 14:22Ryan Hawk?

  One person who decides. I remember asking you in a previous conversation, like, what makes up a leader? And you say, "They decide to." And I've never forgotten that. I use that a lot with people, because leadership has nothing to do with your title or any of that. You make a decision and you can lead from anywhere, any part of an organization. I think you've been one of the best at that. We're talking about also getting unstuck, which is what the recent work is about. I look at your blog every day for 11,000 days and all of your books. You know, I've been a big fan for a long time. It's hard to imagine you ever personally get stuck. I'm curious, do you get stuck? And if so, what do you do?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 15:04Ryan Hawk?

  Every day?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Every single day.

• 15:06Ryan Hawk?

  How do you personally, Seth Godin, get unstuck?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, most of the time, we don't get unstuck, and that's fine. It's fine because we need clarity about who it's for and what's it for. What are we designing for here? Because getting unstuck always means leaving something else behind. And if you are monomaniacal about it, you know, I was just talking with the woman who won more gold medals in figure skating than anyone in history. And you don't do that by having a life. You do that by having no life for 15 years. So you're, in one respect, completely unstuck when it comes to winning gold medals. But in another respect, because you've chosen

• 15:52Speaker 01

  a certain kind of commitment, you're really stuck in terms of, I don't know, deep friendships, in terms of understanding what else is possible in your life. Because the only way to do those things is to not get gold medals. So we only feel stuck if we've told ourself a story that there's something we really want, but there's something else we also really want, and we're not going to be happy until we get both of them. And it's the "but" that gets in the way of forward motion.

• 16:24Ryan Hawk?

  Let's look at your blog for a second. You write it every day. I've read, is this true, that you have six, or seven, or eight, or nine ideas every day for the blog, and you only pick one of them? Is that right?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. How else could you do it?

• 16:37Ryan Hawk?

  So how do you do it?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Well, some of the blog posts are just three words, and they never get past three words. Some of them are a paragraph or two. And then when I find one that I want to completely pursue, that's often the one I do. But sometimes there's a bonus one, and it goes in the queue for later in the world, in life. But if you need to have the perfect idea in whatever creative endeavor you're going for before you begin, you're never going to begin.

• 17:10Ryan Hawk?

  Have you worked or talked with Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas at all?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  I have, indeed.

• 17:15Ryan Hawk?

  Have you really?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:17Ryan Hawk?

  I feel like you guys would be good buddies, because Jesse's doing his 10 ideas a day thing, and he has for so many years, and he's built this thing from nothing to now entertaining fans, would soon to be all over the world, but currently all over our country. It's pretty inspiring. And when you, when you see a story like his, and he's also just, I went down to Savannah and spent a bunch of time with him, he's like such a genuine, humble, great person, too.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:39Ryan Hawk?

  What do you think when you see a story like that?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Well, first, he's a better dresser than you or me. He sent me a note about being inspired by the book Purple Cow.

• 17:48Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  And we've done, I think, a couple Zoom calls. I don't know if we've spent time in person, because until very recently, there were no banana action up here in New York. I think when we understand the story of Savannah Bananas, it really helps us understand what we're talking about today. So for those of you at home who are just catching up, there are Major League Baseball teams, there are Minor League Baseball teams. Minor League Baseball teams are filled with people who statistically will never play in the Major Leagues, and they're not paid very well. And if you like the actual game of baseball without celebrities, it's a fine thing to go watch. But it's not easy to sell tickets to a Minor League Baseball game, because there's no celebrity, there's no TV. And

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Jesse took over a baseball team and decided that there was a system, a system of players coming out of college, a system of Major League teams that will draft your best players, a system of media, a system of what we expect when we go to the stadium, all of those things. And he would find room within the system to do what he wanted to do, which is produce something that made a decent living, that created joy, community, and connection. So first, change the name to the Bananas, which is a ridiculous name for a baseball team. Then, pun your way forward. So for example, their cheering section is a bunch of 70-year-old

• 19:15Speaker 01

  women called the Nana Bananas. And then recruit players who might not be the best at hitting the ball, but are really charismatic and like to have fun. And then, within the rules of baseball, basically be the Harlem Globetrotters. He did this for years and years, sold out every single game. When they would go to another team to play on the road, those games would sell out as well. And a couple of years ago, he saw that what was getting in the way of the next level of what he wanted to do was the fact that he was part of the league. So he quit. And the Savannah Bananas now are no longer part of the Minor League system, as far as I know. They're a traveling team like the Globetrotters. And so he's on television,

• 19:59Speaker 01

  and he can play with new rules. But at every step along the way, yes, it's a purple cow, it's worth talking about, it's remarkable. And within the boundaries, he has established, he's not stuck. He knows exactly what he's trading for, he knows exactly what he wants to make.

• 20:15Ryan Hawk?

  And trying new stuff, Seth, every single show. That's what he calls them, not games shows. They try new stuff, lots of new stuff. I said, "How much of that doesn't work?" He goes, "Oh, multiple times, every single night, literally every single night." But that's the price, right? That's the price of doing these crazy things, is the willingness, "Hey, we did it, we learned from it, didn't work, we'll go on to the next one." That's a portable skill for leaders in all areas. It could be if you got to have some guts, though.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Well, okay, what does that mean to have guts? What does it mean to write a blog post that doesn't go viral? What does it mean to do an episode of your podcast that doesn't work? Guts? Why is it guts? What did it actually cost you to not be perfect? Well, internally, it damages our entanglement with the idea that we are perfect, which is what we were trained from first grade. Will this be on the test? How do I get an A? How do I get rid of defects? How do I sand off the edges? Six sigma? All of those things are, don't make any mistakes. So I was thinking about my book, The Practice, the other day. The Practice, if it was just one page long, would be, give up your commitment to be perfect

• 21:28Speaker 01

  and be useful instead. Most people can't do that. They say, "I want to be innovative, but this is really important, and I can't screw up." So by putting that "but" in the middle of it, there's your pretzel, there's your baggage.

• 21:41Ryan Hawk?

  I want to show you something that I got as a gift. That's one of the coolest and heaviest things I've ever gotten. You want to check this out? Hold on.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 21:49Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, I'm holding up this book for audio called This Might Work by Seth Godin. I don't know, how heavy is this, Seth? Like...

• 21:57Speaker 01

  It weighs 18 pounds. That's actually not the title. Turn it over.

• 22:00Ryan Hawk?

  Wait.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  That's the title. This Might Not Work.

• 22:06Ryan Hawk?

  So it's on both sides.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:09Ryan Hawk?

  Wow. Eighteen pounds. It feels heavier than that. I think I'm a strong person. Wow. What made you make the book like this, make it this big, right? With the rubber duckies, all of it.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  The only reason it's that big is because you couldn't make it any bigger. I began by reaching out to every book printing facility I could in the United States and overseas and say, what's the biggest book that I can print with the budget that I have and the timeframe I have? And that's the biggest book, the most pages, the largest one. Why would I do that? There's only 3,000 of those books in the world. Bernadette Jiwa edited it. Alex Miles Younger Peck designed it. I wrote it. The whole thing is based on years and years of my blog posts, and we did it from start to finish in 90 days.

• 22:55Ryan Hawk?

  Wow.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And it was only on a Kickstarter, and it worked so well, but was so exhausting that five years later, we did one other edition. That's The Behemoth. The other one was called The Titan. And again, three or 4,000 copies, that's it. And now I'm, I can't do it anymore because it broke me. But the reason to do it this way is because a blog is invisible. It weighs zero, that you can fit 11,000 blog posts on a micro SD card. And one day, when electricity stopped running through our pipes, I would like my blog to exist somewhere. And so I thought, I might not be the only person who wants the substantial souvenir edition.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  But a souvenir, by its nature, is ridiculous. A $30 t-shirt from Disney World. Every person who goes to the gift store at Disney World to buy a t-shirt is already wearing clothes. They're not buying a t-shirt because they need a t-shirt. They're buying a t-shirt because they want a t-shirt. Well, this is the souvenir edition. This says, there's substance here. Every page I open in this will cause me to think about something. It led to this. I don't know if you have this yet. This is something I came out with a few weeks ago called This is Swag.

• 24:12Ryan Hawk?

  I need to get it.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  It's a self-published collector's item of 30 years of me making ridiculous things. On this page, I'm sorry to bother the audio people, but if you look very carefully, there's a picture in the corner of a baby placed on top of your, the book you just showed everybody. There it is.

• 24:33Ryan Hawk?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And then I got a note from this young woman when she was 12, saying, here I am 12 years later on top of the same book, which I still.

• 24:43Ryan Hawk?

  So cool, man. I just don't even know how you think of that idea, this monstrosity of a, of a book. It's so cool.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  The same way the Savannah Bananas do, right? Like, you don't see all the ideas that don't ship. And as somebody who's committed to this practice,

• 25:02Speaker 01

  and watching how well it has worked for me and so many other people, the thing that mystifies me is why it hasn't caught on. Right? So, you know, we've been talking for a while and we haven't mentioned AI once. We can talk about AI forever, but we're not gonna. The question I have for people is, it's obviously the biggest change in the world since electricity. It's obvious some people are going to use it as a tool to create an extraordinary advantage and make a big difference. And if you're wrong and it doesn't work, no one will know. So why haven't you done it? To give you an example, I went to this event last week, 185 people were there, and the organizer sent out an 80-page PDF of everyone who was going to be there

• 25:46Speaker 01

  with a two-paragraph bio about each one.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And I don't think many people spent the four hours it would take to read the whole thing, think it through, make lists. That's a big commitment. So I uploaded the PDF to Claude, and I asked it to write a 7,000-word, very positive magazine article about everybody who was there through the lens of what it knew about me and my work. I then took that 7,000-word article, this took me six minutes. I took that and I uploaded it to Eleven Labs, which is a different AI platform that I have trained in my voice. And I had it read the article. Then I downloaded it to my phone. And so as I drove to this event, I listened to myself

• 26:34Speaker 01

  reading an article that I had not read or written about the event I was about to go to, filled with enthusiasm about all the people I was going to meet and why I was going to be happy to meet them. So the whole project took me 13 minutes. And I told a few people at the event, who are super cool about this, and not one of them had tried anything like it. But why? Even with full-paid subscriptions, the whole thing cost me $20. So what's keeping you from doing something like that?

• 27:05Ryan Hawk?

  It feels like you have to build this, is it idea muscle? Is that the right phrase? What would it be? You've built it over the course of decades of your life.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  It's two words. It's not a failure muscle. It's a generous failure muscle.

• 27:20Ryan Hawk?

  Generous failure.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  So this thing has gone on, on the internet for too long of the failure Olympics, trying to get yourself rejected as many times as possible.

• 27:28Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Walking into a donut shop and saying, please give me a dozen free donuts. Now, that's selfish. The generous failure muscle says, who might I be able to help with the next thing that might fail? Because at least for my ethos, I would never hesitate to jump in a lake to save a drowning person, even though I'm not the best lifeguard, even though I'm not certified to do it. There's someone drowning, jump in and save them. And if you think of creativity that way and empathic teaching that way, then suddenly you can let go of the baggage because you're a good person.

• 28:05Ryan Hawk?

  I think there's a lot in this most recent work about change, change and tension. Creating tension is generous. Change causes tension. Tension isn't the same as stress. Stress is a trap. Tension is the engine of forward motion. So we know that people hear change, or they feel change, or they see change, and they get nervous, so they don't like it. They want to keep sticking with the thing that they have, but really, it's the engine of forward progress. You're speaking with a leader, Seth, and you want to help them embrace and see change as an opportunity. What are some of the things that you're teaching them to do?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so stress is bad. Stress is wanting two things at the same time, when you can't have both of them. Stress is a boss who doesn't appreciate you. Stress is having to make the rent when you don't think you can make the rent. We're trying to reduce stress in our lives. Tension is good. You cannot shoot a rubber band across the room without pulling it backwards first. When Taylor Swift says, I'm going to play in Amsterdam in an 8,000-seat arena, she is inflicting tension on her fans. There's only 8,000 seats. You gotta go talk to your mom or dad and get the money to go buy a ticket. You better hurry because it might get sold out. You have to go to a place you've never been to. These are all filled with tension that you can release with forward motion.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  If you don't want to create the tension, don't have a concert. Or if you don't have a concert, you can't create any joy. So great teachers create the conditions for their students to witness a growing gap between where they are and where they could be, to confront their incompetence. Because anytime we learn anything, there's a moment before we learn it, when we know we could learn it, but we don't know it, and we feel incompetent. That creates tension. And so some kids who have been indoctrinated or bullied or whatever, face that and opt out. They don't enroll in that journey and they fall behind. They sit in the back of the classroom, they don't raise their hand, they get the minimum done.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Because no one's persuaded them that that tension is worth it. But effective leadership is voluntary. It's not mandatory. You can't force people to follow you because then you're a manager. Effective leadership is like effective teaching, which is creating the conditions for people to want to dance with the tension to get to a new place.

• 30:33Ryan Hawk?

  How do you do that?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Well, all of us have experienced it. So you already have a hunch as to what it feels like. And then the question is, could you practice it? And if you want to learn how to juggle, you know what it feels like? Throw a ball, you know, it feels like to drop a ball. If the cost of dropping a ball is too high, you will not juggle because you need to catch every ball, and you will never learn how to juggle. If on the other hand, you commit to a process of throwing balls until the catching gets easy.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  You'll learn how to juggle. And the same thing is true for leadership. How do you put yourself on the hook? How do you use your freedom to create tension for other people, to create the conditions for them to want to go to this new place, even though you can't give them a guarantee? I can't guarantee that if you take my calculus class, you will learn differentials. But I can guarantee that every day, we will find a small puzzle in front of us and find the joy of solving it.

• 31:39Ryan Hawk?

  When you think of leaders and/or leadership, is there like a person or two that immediately popped to mind and say, ah, that's a leader. I love that person. You mentioned one earlier who you've dedicated a few books to. I'm wondering though, because you do such a good job of bringing concepts to life through stories and people that I'm curious to hear about this very broad topic that I'm obsessed with, which is effective leadership.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  My life is filled with these people. I can't start listing them because of all the ones I would leave out and all the incompleteness of it. But I think we can all easily recognize the folks who their default is, will this be on the test? And their default is, how do I deny my freedom? And their default is, under the circumstances, I can't do X, Y, or Z. And then we know people who realize they are the circumstances, who are showing up to be in that liminal state between here and there. The lineman is the part of the doorway on the top and the threshold on the bottom. And the lineman and the threshold determine the difference between here and there.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And that liminal state is what it feels like to step over the threshold. And I've never met anyone who never does that. So the question is not, are you a leader? It's how much? Because you already know how to do it. The question is, do you care enough to do it more?

• 33:04Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah. I get to work with people who are highly accomplished. They're leaving a positive dent in the world. And so sometimes that can actually be paralyzing. And in your book, you write about Jackson Pollock and one of the issues of when he tried to kind of try something new with this expectation that people are gonna be rabid fans like on day one. Can you tell the story of Jackson Pollock and what leaders can learn from that?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  So Pollock was the most famous American painter of the 20th century. He had three years in a row that were the envy of anyone who has ever done a creative work. If you want to understand that in dollar and cents terms, I found one of his pieces just sold at auction for $181 million. And he was in Life Magazine. He was the poster child. And after three years, he said to his wife, Lee Krasner, who's also an artist of some renown, I don't want to spend the rest of my life painting cover versions of Jackson Pollock paintings. Because he could have done that nonstop. There was always going to be a demand for those things. So he walked away from his format, from his method, even from the size of the canvases.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  He locked himself in his studio in Long Island and he did a totally different way of painting. And because of his momentum, his first show was a big show and everyone hated it and not one painting sold. And to this day, I've never seen one in person and I go to museums all the time. And this led Pollock to a self-destructive spiral that ended up with substance abuse and him dying in a drunken crash where he killed an innocent person. Why? Because he wanted two things, not one. He forgot that when he was coming up, he was rejected, he was ignored, he was living the life of the creative artist. What he wanted was two things.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  He wanted the feeling of the creative artist. But, and it's the word but, not the word and, but he also wanted to be acclaimed and embraced and rich. And needing both, he got neither. And that story encapsulates what we need to do. It's not the price we pay, it's the choice we make of which baggage are we going to let go of? Because when we add a but to the middle of the sentence, we're trapped.

• 35:23Ryan Hawk?

  Reading about organ donation and depending on the country, the rates go up 800% when the donor form is opt out instead of opt in. It's basically people just don't want to deal with the paperwork. You share that story and one, it just makes me believe, hey, just make them all opt out so that you're automatically opted in. That would be better for all of us. So hopefully that's what happens. But that story or that, that fact, how does that help others? How does the understanding that help others be more effective at whether it's being creative, being a better leader, showing up better for their families and their communities?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Well, so we were talking about creating the conditions.

• 36:02Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And so what we see here is, most people would rather not be responsible for their organ donation status. If you're not responsible, you accept the status quo. So the examples in Austria and Germany, in one country, if you don't do anything, you've opted in. And the other country, if you don't do anything, you're opted out. So what we seek to do is build things within our organization, within our family, within whatever setting we've got, where the momentum of the system pushes people to get to where we as a community hope to go. So I'll tell you an interesting side story about donation.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  I had someone in my family who needed a kidney, so I saw the whole thing up close. Then I knew somebody else who used to work for me who needed a bone marrow transplant, so I saw it again up close. And I spent a lot of time thinking about, why are we so hooked on this opt in thing? And where's the baggage here? Because there are some people who, based on the way they see the world, do not want to opt into this process. And they will speak up clearly to say, you can't just do this. And then there are people who want to switch the process, so they come up with ridiculous ideas like paying poor people to donate their organs on their death, which is just creepy and horrible. So this is a game. Everything I write about is games.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Games, systems, they're all the same. It's about scarcity. So working with a well-known cardiologist, I wrote an article for transplantation, which is the journal of the transplantation industry, about how we could solve the problem of organ donation in 12 weeks for no money. And first, why does it take someone like me who knows nothing about what I'm talking about to innovate this? And B, look how hard it was to make the change happen. So what's the solution? The solution is simple. If you're not willing to donate a kidney, it would seem that morally, you should be unwilling to accept a kidney. And so it would be super simple.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  We just add one field to the database where they keep the records, which is, on what date did you fill in the organ donation card? And so if there's a tie, the person who moves up the waiting list first is the person who's been on the list of donating the longest. So now there's this race to get on the list as fast as you can, because it doesn't pay to get on the list in three years, because there are going to be all these people ahead of you. And so every doctor would have a moral obligation to say to every patient, you better sign up right away, because I want you at the top of the list. And if we did that, we wouldn't need the list anymore, because we'd have so many kidneys lying around, we wouldn't have a scarcity. Right? Done. Problem solved.

• 38:55Ryan Hawk?

  I love it.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Except first, me just saying out loud doesn't do any good. So then I spent three months with Jonathan, writing it in medical ease, so it gets accepted by the journal. And it gets accepted by the journal, and that's still not enough. Because then what has to happen is I have to go to 50 medical meetings and I have to organize conferences and I have to create the conditions for people to feel safe that they will not get in trouble for this change. And I didn't do it, because I had other things I chose to spend six months of my life on.

• 39:26Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  But that was a tell of how the system is organized to reward the system. It likes doing what it's doing. That's why it's the system.

• 39:34Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, I got two quick questions before we run, because I want to make sure you can be early for your next thing. What did you learn about leadership from being a canoe instructor?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  I learned everything about leadership from being a canoe instructor. I started in 1977. And the conditions were this. It was at one of the oldest summer camps in North America and you could do anything you wanted all day, as long as you did something. And the thing is, there was really exciting things like windsurfing or horseback riding.

• 40:07Ryan Hawk?

  We got a screen share here. Wow.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  But canoeing is placid and canoeing is you and the water. And so if you're 12 years old, it's a hard sell. I couldn't demand anybody come to my dock. I couldn't require anybody to put in the effort. All I could do was create the conditions where you felt like your status, your group affiliation, your dreams were more likely to come true if you hung out with me and with the self-competition of, could I do a little bit better than I did yesterday? And to do that, I had to put on a show. I had to show up with a personality and a voice that wasn't mine. And it is mine now. But I picked it.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  I wasn't born with it. I experimented, like Jesse, with 100 different ways to find the heart and soul of a 12-year-old and get them to say, yeah, I'm in. And when someone didn't want to come, when someone said, nope, I like sailing better, you know what I said? I said, great, go sailing, have fun. Because it's not my job to persuade everyone. It's my job to persuade someone.

• 41:21Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah. It's not for you. I learned that from you many years ago. It's okay. Okay, last question, Seth. I don't think you're a champagne drinker, but I'll ask it in the same form, because I like the question. It's a champagne moment. It's exactly one year from today. And you're surrounded by the people that you love and you're popping bottles, spraying it all over each other, grape juice, champagne, whatever. I'm curious, Seth, what are you celebrating?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  What a fascinating question. My confession is, I don't celebrate.

• 41:50Ryan Hawk?

  No?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:52Ryan Hawk?

  No celebrations?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  I'm just thinking about this now.

• 41:55Ryan Hawk?

  Birthdays, kids?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  No, a birthday is not a celebration. A birthday is a chance to look someone in the eye and tell them you love them.

• 42:02Ryan Hawk?

  That's a celebration.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  No, the kind of celebration that you open champagne for is, we made it. We won. And the day I sold my company to Yahoo, I wasn't happy.

• 42:16Ryan Hawk?

  Why not?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Because it was the end of something. It wasn't...

• 42:20Ryan Hawk?

  Why'd you sell it then?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Because in 1998, under the conditions I was in, it was exactly the right thing to do.

• 42:27Ryan Hawk?

  Not about the money?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:29Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  And a couple of years later, when I made the New York Times bestseller list for the second time, and my agent came in, I was running a seminar in my office, there were 40 people there, and she handed me the facts, and I started to cry, not because I was happy, but because I felt nothing, nothing.

• 42:49Ryan Hawk?

  Really?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  I had done the work. I didn't need to make the list. I just needed to do the work.

• 42:53Ryan Hawk?

  But it created an emotion in you, though. That feels like something, like some sort of a celebration.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I guess. I'm just telling you, I like to do the work. I like to figure out, where can I create value? But once value is created, I just, it has never been part of my ethos to say, all right, let's pop a cork.

• 43:14Ryan Hawk?

  Onto the next?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:16Ryan Hawk?

  Huh. I think that's a commonality among the people who are putting a positive dent in the world. I don't know if that's a good thing, though. Do you think you should get better at celebrating?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Oh, you don't want to see what it's like inside my head. It's a mess.

• 43:28Ryan Hawk?

  What do you mean?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  No, I'm just, everyone's walking around, you know, I have very rigid, controlled ways of eating. I don't do drugs. I don't drink alcohol. I haven't had meat in 40 years, not once. I have no interest in eating dairy, not even a lick of your ice cream cone. There's this rules, because by making these structures, I can put my energy into something else. I'm not compromising. I am not constantly renegotiating with myself about whether this is something I do or don't do. And since I have these boundaries in so many areas, which is, I think, because I have undiagnosed limited attention span, when I need the flurry

• 44:12Speaker 01

  of magic, I gotta go invent something useful. And so, everyone's got their stuff. I wouldn't trade it in. If I thought it would be worthwhile to trade it in, I would. But the prizes that I get are not the prizes of someone applauding. They're the prizes of me seeing that I had a conversation with somebody yesterday, and today, they're closer to getting to where they want to go. That's my prize.

• 44:39Ryan Hawk?

  It feels like you are super disciplined.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:43Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah. I could go forever on all this stuff. I appreciate you, as always, man. I, like I said, I've looked up to you for a really long time and always read all yourself. This book's called The Not: Problems Can Be Solved. We touched on like 2% of it, so I highly recommend people get it, read it, and then ship it. Do the actual work. It'll make you better. Seth, thanks again, man. I told you before we started recording, I'd love to do the next one, maybe in person, because I think it'd be cool just to hang with you in a room and talk through all this stuff, man. I really appreciate it.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ryan. Keep making a ruckus. I appreciate you.

• 45:17Ryan Hawk?

  It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Seth Godin. A few takeaways from my notes. Let's build your generous failure muscle. This week, try a thing that might not work, but could help someone else, like a new tool, a new format, or a new way to serve a customer. If it fails, the cost really isn't that much. But if it works, someone is better off. This is low downside, but really high upside. Build your generous failure

• 45:57Ryan Hawk?

  muscle, like Seth Godin, like Jesse Cole. Next, name the freedom you're pretending you don't have. Pick one thing you tell yourself you have to do, and say it out loud as a choice instead. Then you can decide whether you still want to choose it. And then create tension. That's where growth happens. Think about one person you lead, and the gap between where they are and where they could be. And then set up the conditions that make them want to close that gap, much like Seth being a canoe instructor. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey,

• 46:40Ryan Hawk?

  you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Seth Godin. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader, because you continue to do that, and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you write a thoughtful review. You definitely subscribe to the show, and you rate it, hopefully five stars. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, and for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.