Seth Godin - The Practice Of Shipping Creative Work | Modern Wisdom Podcast 241

Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, marketer and an author. “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions” - Elizabeth King. Seth is a king, and fully delivers on this episode as we discuss how to ship creative work. Expect to learn what learning to juggle can teach us about achieving goals, how to deal with criticism, what we can do to get past imposter syndrome, how we can avoid becoming a hack and why intentional action helps you to be accountable... Sponsor: Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Practice - https://amzn.to/3kJTOuc Read Seth's Blog - https://seths.blog/ Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #sethgodin #marketing #creativity - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

• 0:00Speaker 0

  Imposter syndrome is the feeling of being a fraud, of being unprepared. Why did they pick me? Who am I to show up and do this? More and more people would come up to me and say, How do I get rid of this? And they're surprised at my answer, which is not only can't you get rid of it, you shouldn't want to. Because it's the sign that you're healthy. It's a sign that you're doing good work. Because if you're trying to invent the future, of course you're an imposter. Because you haven't seen the future yet. It's not here. You are acting as if you're putting something into the world that you cannot be as qualified to be as someone who's a street sweeper, because the street sweeper swept that street yesterday. They know they can do it. There's no imposter going on at all. But if you're imagining that people are going to be moved or changed or influenced by what you're about to do, but you've never done it, you're an imposter. So when it shows up, the answer is thank you.

• 0:46Speaker 0

  Thanks for letting me know I'm on to something. Here I am doing this work and feeling it. The same way you run a marathon, you better get tired. Because if you don't get tired, you're not trying hard enough.

• 0:59Speaker 1

  What is the practice?

• 1:01Speaker 0

  Well, there are only two kinds of successful people in the world. Um what they have in common is that they've solved interesting problems, that they've shown up and made something better, that they did something original, something important. Maybe they did it by waiting for the muse to touch them by getting picked by somehow getting permission. But more likely, in my experience of talking to lots of people from every line of work, is that they have a practice, that they show up on the regular, that they have a way to see forward to produce this work, even when they don't feel like it, especially when they don't. And so I wrote a book about this process of shipping creative work, and it counters so many of the myths that people have about what does it mean to even be creative?

• 1:47Speaker 0

  What does it mean to do this work you're proud of?

• 1:50Speaker 1

  What are the biggest misconceptions or the things that most people get wrong about creativity?

• 1:57Speaker 0

  Well, they think that you need to be in the mood that it happens when you find flow, that uh all criticism is the same, that writer's block is real, that the muse uh can be summoned. A whole bunch of things that put it outside of you that turn it into some sort of gift or talent. No one talks that way about plumbing. No one talks that way about most of the things in our life. Why do we talk that way about this important thing? And it's because we're afraid.

• 2:28Speaker 1

  Yeah, I recently had your friend Stephen Pressfield on the show, and I see a lot of parallels between the practice and the war of art and turning pro. Is that were you influenced by him when writing this book?

• 2:40Speaker 0

  I don't think it's fair to call them parallels. I think it's fair to say I'm stealing from him. Um I was trying to be so diplomatic, Seth. Steve is Steve is a dear friend. Um, and he and I differ about a couple things. He um actually uh is more spiritual about where does this stuff come from? But what I tried to do was share my personal experience. You know, I discovered the War of Art 10 years ago when I was writing linchpin. I can't believe no one told me about it beforehand. Um what I believe is that we are not involved in an epic battle against resistance. I believe we are dancing with feelings that exist to protect us.

• 3:27Speaker 0

  And you can't win the battle, but you can learn to dance with them.

• 3:32Speaker 1

  It's a really lovely way to frame it. I I have to say of the stuff that Stephen puts forward, the more esoteric kind of um metaphysical stuff that's there is for me as someone who's quite salt of the earth is a little bit more challenging, but by hook or by crook, I think the outcome is correct. And I definitely see the similarities. I love the way that there's certain aphorisms and maxims in the practice that are really they sort of spearhead a big big chunk of work and they they kind of drive it home. So let's define our terms before we can do anything. We have to define our terms. How do you define creativity? What is it to you?

• 4:14Speaker 0

  So creativity is not painting or writing an opera. It's simply solving an interesting problem in a generous way that might not work in a way that only a human can do it. So there are elephants who can paint oil paintings, but they're not they're not being creative. And there's that famous uh selfie that a macaque uh monkey took in Indonesia. It's not a selfie. It's not a selfie because the monkey didn't know to be nervous when it pointed the camera at itself. And so you've got to have this human element for it to meet my definition of creative.

• 4:49Speaker 1

  Yeah, you say that creativity is an action, not feeling, and that you put a lot of emphasis on to people showing up and doing the work. You use as a good example yourself that you don't blog because you have to blog, you blog because it's tomorrow. And each day, another piece of article, another article comes out. One question I have there is how do you not kill your love for a topic or a creative output by brute forcing your work rate.

• 5:20Speaker 0

  Well, I am in favor of hobbies, totally in favor of hobbies, but don't try to sell them to people. Do your hobby because you love it. Do your work because it's your work. Now, it is possible to learn to love your work. You can learn to love being a plumber, you can learn to love being someone who paves roads in a steamroller, right? That I don't think that we should try to find our passion. I think we should be passionate about what we do, because it's way easier to end up happy if you can make that decision. So at the beginning, writing a blog post every day felt like a lot. And if someone had said, now you need to do it 7,000 times in a row, I probably would have pushed back. But like everything that humans deal with, we get used to it.

• 6:07Speaker 0

  If your job had been 15 years ago to sit in front of a tiny screen and spend two to three hours doom scrolling your way through the state of the world for money, people would have had a nervous breakdown. They would have killed themselves. Now people do it voluntarily. And so the thing is you can seek to do the work for good reasons, and then you can fall in love with the work. You don't have to worry about killing your joy if you choose to find joy.

• 6:37Speaker 1

  I really like that. I think that's a a lovely distinction. One of the examples that I loved, one of my most favorite examples is about you teaching people to juggle. Can you explain what learning to juggle has to do with our process and a desire for an outcome?

• 6:52Speaker 0

  So I've uh taught thousands of people how to juggle. I'm not a great juggler, but I know how to teach it. And because they're not related, being a good juggler and being a uh juggling teacher. When I ask people if they want to learn how to juggle, they say, oh, sure. And they grab three balls and they start throwing them. And inevitably, what happens is people have seen jugglers before, and what they pay attention to when they see a juggler is the catching. Juggling is mostly about catching. That we root for the person if we're on their side to not drop a ball. And if they do, we go, oh. And so as soon as you start learning how to juggle, within two or three throws, not you, because you're an extraordinary athlete. But in general, you lunge for a ball.

• 7:39Speaker 0

  It's out of place. You lunge to catch it, because catching is what you're supposed to do. Well, once you've lunged to one side, now you're way out of position for the next one. And then the balls are gonna drop and you're gonna fail. And then you're gonna say, I hate juggling, and you're done. And that's why almost nobody knows how to juggle. So what I do is I say, this is gonna take about an hour, uh, and it will not take less than that. So here we go. We're gonna spend 20 minutes throwing one ball and not trying to catch it. Throw, throw, throw, throw. It drops on the ground, we pick it up. And then we're gonna do it with the other ball. Throw, throw, drop, drop. So half an hour into it, we've done throw, throw, drop, drop over and over and over again, which means that you are now really good at throwing.

• 8:30Speaker 0

  And if you're good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. And we live in a culture that rewards people who lunge, that rewards the emergency save. But that's a mistake. What we need to do is reward the throwing and not worry about catching. Get the throwing under control. If you learn the practice, you'll be amazed at how easy it is to catch.

• 8:52Speaker 1

  I love that. It's one of my two favorite quotes. First one, our work is about throwing, the catching takes care of itself. The second one, process saves us from the poverty of our intentions from Elizabeth King. Like that unfulfilled life, you know, they say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person who you could have been. And that process saves us from the poverty of our intentions. Wow, that is I love that. Um the the hack trap, take us through the the trap of becoming a hack, the race to the bottom. Tell us about that.

• 9:28Speaker 0

  Well, I want to do Elizabeth King for just one more minute because I wouldn't have been able to do the book without having uh stumbled upon her and her work, watched her documentary, and now proud to call her my friend. Um, what does it mean the poverty of our intentions? Well, let's go back to this whole idea of a workout. If you negotiate with yourself at mile one of a run, you will never run nine miles. That is the worst time to decide how far you're gonna run. You should have the discussion at the best part of your Day. Tomorrow I'm going to run nine miles. Now you've made the decision. When your intentions show up later, and you are negotiating for it to be less, that's not the moment when you're going to make art. And so what the practice says, what the process is about is I'm not going to decide that I'm not going to have a blog post tomorrow.

• 10:20Speaker 0

  I made that decision 20 years ago. There's going to be a blog post tomorrow. So now that decision is made, doesn't matter what my intentions are, there's going to be a blog post tomorrow. And that feels fairly draconian. But what it does for me is it lightens my cognitive load enormously. I don't have to have a meeting with myself about this. I also don't have to have a meeting about being a vegetarian or watching television. I made these decisions a really long time ago. And so then I can go back to work.

• 10:51Speaker 1

  That's that ties in really nicely with a few things that I've been thinking about recently. I'm a big advocate of sobriety for productivity use. I think it gives you more time, more money and more calories to spend on things that you care about. But my background is a club promoter. So I've run nightclubs for 14 years. So there's a little bit of a juxtaposition there. But I made a commitment to myself. And anyone who asks, and anyone who is listening to this, go back and just search modern wisdom sobriety, it'll pop up wherever you're listening. What I tell everyone who wants to go sober who says I want some of those gains, is pick an amount of time you're going to do it for.

• 11:57Speaker 0

  Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Just an aside, we have a friend who wrote an important book about the history of drunk driving. Because if you think about it, it has to have a history, because first you had to have driving, right? And uh we did a book party for him. And we decided we couldn't have a bar because it was a book about drunk driving. And I gotta tell you, as someone who has never consumed alcohol just by choice, it was a terrible party. People just did not know what to do. And we had one friend who showed up and she had uh severely sprained her ankle, and her husband's a doctor, and she had a note from her doctor that she was allowed to drink for medical reasons,

• 12:40Speaker 1

  but

• 12:40Speaker 0

  everybody else like

• 12:42Speaker 1

  so

• 12:43Speaker 0

  as a club promoter, I'm just telling you, you might want to not make this a widespread thing, but I totally agree with you about it. My

• 12:50Speaker 1

  parties are gonna suck. I start getting everyone to be to be sober. Oh man. Yeah, I can ema- I can imagine that. Look, right, hack trap.

• 12:58Speaker 0

  Take us

• 12:58Speaker 1

  through the trap of becoming a hack.

• 13:00Speaker 0

  So um, you're not from around here. Are you in London or near London right now?

• 13:04Speaker 1

  Newcastle, Winterfell of uh of the UK.

• 13:08Speaker 0

  Okay, so there's coal there, but there's no hack. Uh there is a borough of London called Hackney. And it used to be on the outskirts when London was smaller, and they raised horses there, but they didn't raise racehorses or show horses or jumpers. They raised ordinary, cheap horses. If you need it, if you need a horse, here's a horse. Well, what kind of person buys a horse that's just a horse, a reliable, cheap horse that you want? The answer is a cab driver. And that's why London cab drivers are called hacks, because they got their horses from hackney. And that word then evolved to mean eh, whatever. It's it's what you asked for. We're done. Even Stephen, we don't know each other anything, there's no excellence involved here. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a hack unless you also want to be an artist at the same time.

• 13:59Speaker 0

  So, what it means to be a hack is give people exactly what they want. If you look at television, television is filled by TV shows made by hacks, right? There's a uh a network that says, I want a show like this, play to the lowest common denominator, here's the budget, it gets done. Doesn't matter. That most of the fast food is made by a hack. That back there was a day when fish and chips in England was special, and now it's just a hack food made for people who are just trying to get some calories. But there's a different kind of work, and it is the work of leadership of saying to the people who think they want something that's pretty good to say, actually, consider what would happen if something extraordinary was on offer. It's not for everyone, and it might cost more in time and money, but for some people, this matters.

• 14:50Speaker 0

  And that work is not the work of a hack, it's the work either of an amateur who's doing it for love, or a professional who's engaging in a contract with someone saying, Yeah, you're hiring me because I'm a professional. I'm gonna change the game for you, we're gonna take it to a new level, but don't ask me to do hack work because hack work's easy for me to get, but I don't want to do that. I want to do work that will challenge me to solve interesting problems. And so in the book, I try to outline for people you can need to do either, but don't be confused. Don't be a hack and pretend you're an artist, and don't be an artist and act like a hack.

• 15:30Speaker 1

  I read last night, The Toxoplasma of Rage by Scott Alexander. Have you read this?

• 15:38Speaker 0

  I haven't. I know about Toxoplasma, and I know about Scott Alexander, but I missed the connection. So go ahead, tell me.

• 15:44Speaker 1

  It's an unbelievable blog post, widely cited as the most important blog post on Slate Star Codex. Um, so anyone who is interested, that's a big that's a very big shout. I know he's a prolific him and Elieta Yudkowski and uh two people that probably would compete with you for volume of of blog posts written over the last couple of decades. Uh and basically he talks about precisely this that the stories which are the ones which are most newsworthy are the ones that cause the most vitriol and um debate from either side, which inevitably reduces their effectiveness. So Peter, as an animal change organization, garners more support from the press because it does stuff that is outrageous, but by its very nature, it polarizes people as opposed to, and he gives some examples that I can't remember of a more conservative, sedate, chilled animal change organizations who don't get the easy wins in terms of exposure, but do get higher conversions of those people that they reach.

• 16:46Speaker 1

  And I think like read it last night, like just stumbled upon it, decided to read it last night. It appears completely in line with what we're talking about here.

• 16:56Speaker 0

  Yeah, I know Scott's extraordinary. And uh I highlight one of his posts in the book. Uh we've met just once, but he fell out of my blog reader because of the whole fight he had with the New York Times. So I got to put him back in because otherwise I would have read that already. So Toxoplasma, we need to talk about that even though it's off topic. Toxoplasma is a real thing. It is a disease/slash organism that afflicts rats. And what it does is it makes rats attracted to the smell of cat urine. Because this microorganism that lives in the brain of a rat cannot procreate unless it gets eaten by a cat. So it takes over the rat, causes it to die so that it can reproduce.

• 17:42Speaker 0

  And I've been working on something about the media, so now I gotta go read this because it's totally related, which is we believe that we see the world as it is, but we live in culture and culture changes what we see. And culture is driven by media and media is driven by a business model. What's happened in the last 20 years is the business model of media has dramatically shifted. And it has decided that it profits the most when we are on edge, insecure, and feeling insufficient. So even though, as um we see from Steve Pinker's great book, the world is safer and healthier than it has ever been before, even counting COVID. No one thinks that's true. And the reason people don't think that's true is because the media doesn't want us to think it's true because it sells papers in quotation marks.

• 18:37Speaker 0

  So yeah, it's interesting to make the analogy to toxoplasma is just so fun to talk about toxoplasma, but he is correct that the way we change the culture is not by getting a trending headline in social media. We change the culture by establishing that people like us do things like this and persistently and consistently chipping away at the edges.

• 19:01Speaker 1

  I gotta give you a

• 19:03Speaker 0

  rant about that.

• 19:03Speaker 1

  Oh, absolutely. Toxoplasma Gondi has appeared in two newsletters as well, and I only started it halfway through this year. So we're all we this is the Toxoplasma fanboy podcast right now, me and Seth are here, party of two. Um I gotta give you another another thing uh that I've recently come across from Stuart Russell's human compatible, which is about the control problem for artificial general intelligence, very similar to superintelligence by Nick Bostrom or the precipice by Toby Odd if you're into our existential risk. And one of the things that he brings up there is that the optimization algorithms on social media feeds like YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, not only are they trying to uh produce content that you are most likely to click on, it wants you to click on the things there.

• 19:49Speaker 1

  The easiest way for the social media algorithm to do that is to make your preferences more predictable and people who are out at the extremes and are polarized, are much easier to predict what they're going to. To click on someone who's centrist and has a nuanced view will tip one way, then on the next thing they'll tip the other way. And again, with that, like I know we can tumble down the uh uh malicious techno sort of cratic world that we're in at the moment as as hard as we want. But the point is that there are a number of different forces at play here, both conscious and unconscious, both automated and creative, that are all kind of racing to the bottom. And I think that I think that what you talk about there, I know it's not necessarily the single important outcome, but all of this highlights that if you go towards something which is a creativity, which is virtuous and you speaking your sort of highest form of art forward, that's a competitive advantage because it's a game that very few people are playing.

• 20:49Speaker 0

  Correct. It's a game that most people don't even think they should or are allowed to be playing. And you know, Kevin Kelly's book, What Technology Wants is a must read. It will change the way you see so many of these issues. Kevin's the founding editor of Wired magazine, he is uh a sage. Uh, this is his best book, and basically he argues that technology is a species and it is evolving and forcing us to change as it does. And if we figure out what technology wants, we start to understand things. And I was talking to uh an executive who had worked both at Facebook and Twitter, and watching how facile he was at justifying all of the bad decisions that they make. Because nobody there, in my experience, is particularly evil, but everyone there is doing in the short run what they feel like they're supposed to do, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, yeah, that might work, but what would I be proud of?

• 21:47Speaker 0

  And that is inherent in art. Art, when you're not being a hack has to be something you can point to and saying, I made that. And the number of people who work at Facebook who are saying, Yeah, I invented it so it would end up like that, not very many people are saying it because they don't want to own it. They're hacks.

• 22:08Speaker 1

  I think uh the guy who co-created the infinite scroll says that it was the single worst invention he's ever made in his life, his single biggest regret of his life. Oh my god. It's terrifying. Uh okay, so how do we deal with criticism? You talk about criticism in the book as someone whose platform is growing now. This is something that personally for me is a really important thing. I'm starting to garner sufficient traffic that criticism comes thick and fast. How can I deal with it?

• 22:37Speaker 0

  Yeah, so old dad joke guy goes to the doctor and uh sa the doctor says uh you got trouble, your heart's gonna give out in a few weeks. He says, I want a second opinion. And the doctor says, Okay, you're ugly too. And the thing is, I would value the doctor's opinion on the first thing, but on the second, none of his business, none of his business, because you're in a relationship with someone who doesn't think you're ugly. The fact that the doctor thinks you're ugly is irrelevant. So the key here is that all criticism is not the same. Just because someone found two earbuds and listened to your podcast, doesn't mean you care about their opinion. It may very well be that they should listen to somebody else's podcast. You're not trying to be Joe Rogan, so if they want to listen to Joe Rogan, they should go over there.

• 23:27Speaker 0

  If they start saying you need to do these things to be more like Joe Rogan, so I'll like you, you need to say Joe Rogan's over there. And that was a huge lesson for me to figure out who are we seeking to serve? Where's the smallest viable audience, and how do I ignore everyone else? So 15 years ago I took comments off my blog and there was an outcry. This is not a real blog, there's no comments, don't you care? Blah, blah, blah. I realized if I left the comments on, I was going to write every blog post a little bit longer, explaining myself a little bit more, trying to get rid of any place for someone to criticize me, and eventually I'd have no blog. So I had a choice blog with no comments or no blog. And I got rid of the comments.

• 24:13Speaker 0

  And 10 years ago, I stopped reading the reviews on Amazon. Haven't read one ever since. And my writing has gotten better, not worse. Because a one-star review doesn't tell me I did a bad job, it tells me the wrong person read my book.

• 24:28Speaker 1

  I love that. I also think that it ties in a lot with enacting whatever you feel is true to yourself in creativity, because if it's something that is genuinely unmolested from what you want to do to its creation, you don't second guess it. I think criticism probably strikes at people who are playing this metagame or perhaps being a hack or 20% hack, 50% hack, whatever, particularly harshly.

• 24:57Speaker 0

  Yes. Now, there's something that goes with this that's super important, which is just because it's what you wanted to do, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work. Those are two separate things, right? So if you want to compose a symphony that's played entirely on raw pieces of fish, please do, but do not expect the commission from the London Symphony Orchestra. They're different things. And so part of what we do as a creator is we we've got to figure out who do we seek to change? What change do we seek to make? And then we have to make it for those people. Those people are the ones who are seeking to change, not necessarily ourselves. If it's a hobby, that's different. But if it's professional work, you're not allowed to hate your customer.

• 25:43Speaker 0

  You're not allowed to hate your fan because you're there for them just as much as you need them to be there for you.

• 25:51Speaker 1

  Do you advocate a formalized process before people explore before you exploit, sit down, work out your core values, trying to think about what the project means to you and avatars of perfect audience members and stuff like that. Is there a way that people can kind of synthesize this into something more real?

• 26:09Speaker 0

  Yeah, we talk about this. Uh I talk about this in this is marketing, and we covered in the marketing workshop. So I believe that intentional action, sometimes called design thinking saves a lot of time and energy. Who's it for? What's it for? What do I seek to accomplish? These three questions. How will I know if it's working? You don't have to answer those questions, but then you're stumbling around in the blind in the dark trying to knock a pinata out. This is different. This is saying I'm here on purpose with an intent with a reason. That's hard because it puts you on the hook. And people don't want to be on the hook. Because if you announce it and it doesn't happen, then you gotta say, I failed. I could do better. It didn't work. Whereas if you don't announce it, there's a lot more wiggle room.

• 26:56Speaker 0

  And so Bob Dylan, who makes up stuff even in his own autobiography, tells the story of what happened after he went electric at Newport. And what he did was uh he had a very specific idea about the music he wanted to make, who he wanted to make it for, and what change it would make. And he had a problem, which is his fans didn't want him to do that. So in that moment, you decide, do I want to be a hack or do I want to make art? And so he said to his promoter, here's the deal. We're gonna go to all these cities three years in a row. Every year we're gonna go to the same town. And the promoter said, that doesn't make any sense. You gotta give the town time to cool out. He said, No, here's why I want to do it. The first year we're gonna show up in St. Louis or Denver, wherever, and we're gonna get booed.

• 27:44Speaker 0

  And the second year, those people mostly won't come back. And the third year, the people who like me will bring their friends. And it took three years to clean out the audience. But by doing that, he could get back to making the music you wanted to make for people who wanted to hear it. But first he had to be specific in mind, not I'm going to change the mind of people who want the old stuff, but to say I'm going to bring in a whole circle of people who want the new stuff.

• 28:13Speaker 1

  I did a lot of research before I started my newsletter this year, and one of the little maxims that I came across there, which I really loved was never fear the unsubscribe.

• 28:23Speaker 0

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 1

  And I think that that's precisely the same. You actually want as many unsubscribes as possible. You want to prune that audience down. Uh, and this leads us nicely into something that I get a lot of messages about uh imposter syndrome, which is a hell of a drug. Um how can we get past imposter syndrome?

• 28:42Speaker 0

  And that's the perfect way to ask the question. So for the 12 people who have not experienced it, I will explain that imposter syndrome is the feeling of being a fraud, of being unprepared. Why did they pick me? Who am I to show up and do this? And as soon as it started getting talked about, more and more people would come up to me now that they could talk about it and say, How do I get rid of this? And they're surprised at my answer, which is not only can't you get rid of it, you shouldn't want to. Because it's the sign that you're healthy. It's a sign you're doing good work. Because if you're trying to invent the future, of course you're an imposter. Because you haven't seen the future yet. It's not here. You are acting as if you're putting something into the world that you cannot be as qualified to be as someone who's a street sweeper, because the street sweepers sweeped swept that street yesterday.

• 29:34Speaker 0

  They know they can do it. There's no imposter going on at all. But if you're imagining that people are going to be moved or changed or influenced by what you're about to do, but you've never done it. You're an imposter. So when it shows up, the answer is thank you. Thanks for letting me know I'm on to something. Thanks for letting me know I'm not mentally ill. Here I am doing this work and feeling it. The same way if you run a marathon, you better. Get tired because if you don't get tired, you're not trying hard enough.

• 30:04Speaker 1

  I think that ties back to what we were saying before about this kind of I guess the compromising of how far you're pushing the boundaries, the competence, your domain of competence, right? That a lot of people perhaps might feel that imposter syndrome, which gives them a sense of a lack of confidence and then compromise by copying what someone else does. So their imposter syndrome gets downregulated because they know maybe I haven't made this work, but if I do precisely the same thing as Joe Rogan or Scott Alexander or whatever, whatever, like my hero within this industry, I don't need to worry because I I just followed the formula.

• 30:43Speaker 0

  Yep, I'm off the hook. And that's why people ask me for tactics all the time and why I don't give them tactics. Because we don't need the next Scott Alexander, we already have one.

• 30:55Speaker 1

  Two would be good though. It might keep it might keep the uh the human race going a little bit more. Um what does be paranoid about mediocrity mean?

• 31:06Speaker 0

  So perfectionism and mediocrity are both the same thing. And what they are are places to hide. Perfectionism means I will never be finished because how could it be perfect? And perfectionism feels like a worthwhile endeavor because we say, What, do you want me to just ship junk? And so we hide behind perfectionism. Mediocrity, the flip side of that is well, what the hell? I just put it out there, it can't hold me responsible. I didn't really work very hard at it. Again, I'm off the hook. So mediocre mediocre is another word for average. And most organizations make average stuff. Most creators make average stuff for average people. That's what makes it average, most. And if your average stuff doesn't happen, no one will miss it because there's plenty of average stuff to take its place.

• 31:58Speaker 0

  But if you can figure out how to do something that's beyond mediocre, not perfect, but simply changing the situation, solving the interesting problem, that we would miss if it weren't here. But there's all this pressure on you to make it average. And the easier way to deal with that pressure is to say, let's call it mediocre instead.

• 32:21Speaker 1

  I'm going to guess that again, this all of these threads tie together. If you are pushing the work rate of the work that you do, there also has to be a point at which you accept it is good enough. If you need to release a blog post every day and you work on it until tomorrow, it's tomorrow. Like you have to press the publish button at some point.

• 32:41Speaker 0

  Correct. So you just used a two-word phrase that I really like, which is good enough. So let's be really honest about what good enough means. We defined good enough in advance to mean it's good enough. Anything better than good enough, either we've made a mistake in our definition or we've wasted time and money. So when they made the Lexus to compete with Mercedes, good enough meant it has to be higher quality than any Mercedes ever built. But it didn't have to be perfect. It didn't have to be a car that would go two million miles on a gallon of gas, right? It just had to be better than the best Mercedes. That was their definition of good enough. And then you ship it. And so if you're having trouble defining good enough, go work on that.

• 33:31Speaker 0

  But once you define what good enough is, that's spec. And the definition of quality is meeting spec. So instead of good enough, we just call it quality, but they're the same thing.

• 33:44Speaker 1

  That liberates you to increase this work rate as well, as we said before.

• 33:49Speaker 0

  Which makes you able to learn more. Because work that doesn't ship doesn't count. And one of the reasons it doesn't count is it can't fail. And if it can't fail, you don't learn anything.

• 34:02Speaker 1

  There's a Twitter account run by my good friend Jack Butcher from Visualize Value called Advice Inverted. And the top pinned post at the moment is intentions matter more than actions.

• 34:19Speaker 0

  There you go. I love that. That there's a lot of layers there. That's

• 34:25Speaker 1

  great. He's a smart, smart, smart fella. Uh talking of actions, one of the things upon reading James Clear's Atomic Habits last year was this kind of identity-based change that I've really realized. Um, and you say that we become what we do, um, which is an interesting uh, how would you say symbiotic relationship? Yep. Between we have an inclination, we feed it, it gives us something back, it becomes this kind of self-sustaining process, and before you know it, you've become the work, the work is you. You know what I mean? It kind of this it starts to roll downhill.

• 35:04Speaker 0

  It's not just the work. I mean, a lot of people are waiting to become an honest person and then they'll go tell the truth. Well, but if you want to be an honest person, start by telling the truth. If you want to be a runner, you don't need a permit. You just need to run 30 days in a row, then you're a runner. If you want to be a writer, just write 30 days in a row, then you're a writer. Do the work, and then you can get the mantle. Then you become the thing that the work represents.

• 35:29Speaker 1

  Is there something, is there a single thread that you see amongst creative people a unifying characteristic which is most prominent in them.

• 35:42Speaker 0

  It tends to um have two poles, and they might be related. I just haven't found it yet. One of them is the ego strength of the I in I made this. I and I alone solved this problem. I showed up, you know, this is the symphony conductor who cannot be replaced. Uh the other one is the restlessness of seeing defects in the world that interesting problems beg to be solved. No credit necessary. I just need this problem to be solved. Uh I can do both, not usually at the same time, but I've felt both inclinations. So, you know, if I'm at a uh back in the old days when I was at a restaurant, I'm sitting at a restaurant and the door keeps slamming because the spring was disconnected.

• 36:30Speaker 0

  And there's, you know, 30 people in the restaurant, and everyone's annoyed by this. So I just got up and put the spring back on. Because I just couldn't sit there knowing that all it needed was the spring to be hooked up, and I didn't wait for the manager to tell me it was okay. The manager wanted the spring to be off, they could take the spring off later. That instinct is something we see in creative people all the time. It often happens when we're seeing organizations do creative work. On the other hand, there's definitely, thanks to the media, the impresario, um, you know, Nicola Tesla, Henry Ford thing of I and I alone invented the future.

• 37:17Speaker 0

  And a lot of times we benefit from that. And sometimes megalomaniacs pay a big price. Or we all pay a big price for Megalomaniacs.

• 37:26Speaker 1

  Yeah. When we look at those people from the outside, I think everyone loves the idea of being Elon Musk, but no one really knows what it's like inside of his head when he goes to bed at night. This is a big insight from Naval Ravacant and Tim Ferris about I cannot take part of someone's life. I have to take the whole, like, do you want to pay the price, the wholesale, not piecemeal, ship it in bulk, one unit, do not assemble at home Elon Musk internal monologue price? Because that's the price that you would have to pay. Um, I have one one question that I really want to ask you, which I'm going to finish on, but before that, um, which company is doing some of your favorite marketing right now. Is there anything you've seen in 2020 that you've been particularly impressed or happy with?

• 38:10Speaker 0

  My answer is any company that someone can name that they feel like they have a relationship with that they feel like is doing something that works for them is on my list. It's not necessarily the one I would pick, but the fact that someone feels that way is proof that they're on to something. So, you know, there were brands 20, 30, 40 years ago that had that relationship with people, and now they're just churning it out. And then there are other brands that didn't used to mean very much, but now they do. And that's the symptom that somebody there found the smallest viable audience and decided to do creative work. I have found that any time I write about a company, the owner gets into enormous amounts of trouble for bad behavior or something.

• 38:56Speaker 0

  And so I don't do that anymore.

• 38:58Speaker 1

  That's a fair that's a fair point. Yeah, I understand. Do you think it's possible for companies to scale up to the sort of hyperstructure, like the sphere in the in the upper ash ethlons of the of the atmosphere and retain that level of creativity?

• 39:18Speaker 0

  Well, okay, so there's different kinds of companies and different kinds of scale. Without a doubt, uh, there have been entire decades in which places like Hollywood, using a studio model, produced endless amounts of extraordinary creativity. That um, you know, 1939 in the movie business was just stunning. It was a lot of people working, but they were parallel. It wasn't a hierarchy. Then there's you know, Apple at its prime, which is pre Tim Cook. And there you had a really rigid hierarchy with a lot of leverage. And so they didn't. Come out with that many different products, but the products they came out with, you know, paved the earth. They just changed everything.

• 40:05Speaker 0

  And it's interesting to see that as soon as Tim came in, his goal was to make the stock price go up. And so his sole innovation at Apple has been making them the most valuable company in the world, as opposed to changing our culture in ways that you could point to and say, wow, that was creative.

• 40:27Speaker 1

  Is there a corner going to come at some point in future where we move away from these socialized metrics of success and embrace internal measures of success?

• 40:40Speaker 0

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'm still going to be around when AI has uh not just replaced all the assembly line workers and the travel agents, but people like you and me in terms of uh doing the work that people pay for. But as we create more and more value, we have to decide is it going to get into the hands of fewer or fewer people? Or are we going to treat so many of the things we pay for now as rights the way we think of uh roads or clean water or library cards? Because we can afford it. And if that happens, the question is where will our status roles come from? Where will our social hierarchies come from? Because they're not going to be who made more money.

• 41:27Speaker 0

  And sorry. It's going to be, I think the key is then to say, is the purpose of our culture to enable capitalism, or is the purpose of capitalism to enable culture? And I would like to believe it's the latter. And to get there, I think we end up with a world a lot more like the amateur blogger sphere, podcast sphere, and a lot less like how do I sell more whatever on the street corner by hustling out the other guy.

• 41:57Speaker 1

  Yeah, I hope so. So my final question: what insight about life do you wish more people knew?

• 42:06Speaker 0

  I think that uh we have more leverage than we thought. And you don't have to change everything, but you can change something. And if enough people make a change for the better and stop acting like victims, even though many of us are victims who got the short end of the stick, uh we can make things better. And that's not the right answer to every question. We need organized government, we need coordinated action to undo indoctrination and injustice and so many other things. But that doesn't mean we should wait till that happens. We got to start right this minute and make things better.

• 42:44Speaker 1

  I love it, Seth. Thank you so much for coming on. The practice shipping creative work will be linked in the show notes below, of course. If people want to check out anything else, where should they go?

• 42:53Speaker 0

  Uh, I started an organization I don't run anymore called Akimbo, where we run workshops, including the Alt MBA. It's at Akimbo.com. And my blog every day, as long as I have anything to do with it, is at Seth Stopblog.

• 43:05Speaker 1

  Amazing. Everything's linked in the show notes below. Uh, I've absolutely adored this. Thankfully, now that you're on my list, you are releasing was it 19 books, 18 books deep that you are now, something like that. This 20th

• 43:17Speaker 0

  bestseller, today's the day.

• 43:19Speaker 1

  Congratulations, man.

• 43:20Speaker 0

  Thank you.

• 43:21Speaker 1

  Congratulations. Uh, that means basically I have probably two episodes a year less that I need to schedule in because I can just continue to hassle your guys. But Seth brought a new book out. Thank you. Yeah, I'll take him 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Catch you later on. Um, everyone that's been listening, any questions, comments, you know what to do. Leave them in the comments below. But for now, Seth, thank you so much.

• 43:42Speaker 0

  Thanks, Chris. Keep making it ruckus. This was fun.

• 43:49Speaker 0

  Yeah, yeah.