2026: Seth Godin on Strategy, Fear and Finding Your Path (Encore)

This episode aired originally on October 21, 2024. Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential thinkers in marketing and leadership, joins the show. He discusses his latest book, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans https://www.amazon.com/This-Strategy-Make-Better-Plans/dp/B0D47T8S7N, and how to create more meaningful and effective strategies in all areas of life, from career growth and personal development to financial success. How's midlife going? Fill out Farnoosh's survey https://www.jotform.com/build/262556781257063 and help shape the podcast in 2027. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:36Speaker 03

  So Money, episode 2026, Seth Godin on strategy, fear, and finding your path.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  You're listening to So Money with award-winning money guru Farnoosh Torabi. Each day, get a 30-minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh herself. Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons? Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life? Welcome to So Money.

• 2:09Speaker 05

  The only person who's going to change your mind is you. And what I see at big companies, people running for president, is a complete lack of strategy. Because we've been indoctrinated to do our job, to do the tactics, to try harder, without saying, why am I playing a game I can't win?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Welcome to So Money, everybody. I'm Farnoosh Torabi. I have been impatiently waiting to release this episode. I recorded it a few weeks ago. Couldn't believe that I had the opportunity to reconnect with one of my heroes. It's a tremendous honor to welcome back Seth Godin to So Money. If you've been listening to this show from the beginning, and I mean the first two months of this show, you probably remember Seth coming on and helping me launch So Money, sharing his insights on what it means to be rich, opening up about his personal experiences with money. It's an episode that, to this day, people stop me in the street and at events, and they say, loved that episode with Seth Godin.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  I will always remember your conversation. Hope we can top that. For those who may not know Seth, he is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and one of the most influential thinkers in marketing and leadership today. He's written over 20 books, including Purple Cow, The Dip, Linchpin, and This is Marketing. His work has shaped the way we think about creating change, building tribes, and making an impact in the modern world. Today, we're diving into his latest book. It's called This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Explores how we can all create more meaningful and effective strategies in our lives, whether it's in our careers, personal development, or financial goals. Here is 10 years later, our friend Seth Godin. Seth Godin, welcome to So Money. It's always an honor having you on.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  And I don't know if you remember, but last time you were on So Money, it was 2015. It actually aired in 2015, but we recorded in 2014. So this is our 10-year anniversary.

• 4:09Speaker 05

  Every 10 years.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Let's not let it get this far before hanging out again. And it continues to be one of, if not the most listened to, popular, quoted episodes. We talked about the meaning of richness. You were generous in sharing a lot of your personal financial experiences. Today, though, we're going to be talking about strategy. This is the theme that you're focusing on right now. The title of your new book is This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. You've written so much, Seth. I mean, your resume is like, this is your 21st book, right?

• 4:47Speaker 05

  Oh, well, it's hard to tell because I was a book packager for a long time. There was more than 100 in those days.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. You've written about leadership and marketing. What drew you to the notion of strategy and why now?

• 5:00Speaker 05

  So people come to me for advice. I don't do any coaching or consulting, but friends do. And they think they have a marketing problem, and they don't. They have a strategy problem. Strategy is completely misunderstood. People think it's for MBAs or for generals, and they think it has to do with tactics or forcing somebody to do something they don't want to do. It's none of those things. It is a philosophy of becoming. It is a point of view about the world that you believe you can make a change happen, that you want to make something better, that you want to contribute, grow something, whether it's personal finances or an organization.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  But it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. So our strategy is a compass. It's not a map. It's not going to tell you all the steps, but it's going to ask you hard questions about what are the directions that make sense and why? And if you can't talk about it, you can't make it better. So the purpose of the book is to help people talk about it.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  And in the context of what our audience cares about when it comes to strategy, that could be anything from eliminating debt, earning more money, generally just creating more financial security for themselves, for their families.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  On a scale of 1 to 10, Seth, how poor are Americans when it comes to strategizing? You've already talked about how we confuse it and conflate it with, you know, operations and marketing, but what is the crux of the problem?

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Let's say we were talking about a chess player, and they lost every single game. I think we could agree they're not that good at playing chess. So let's look at the profit of Citibank or any other company that has a charge card division. It's huge. The individual consumer is losing. They're losing the game because they don't understand the strategy of what money is for. You are playing against people who are taking advantage of you, who are selling you something today that you have to pay for tomorrow that scales in the wrong direction.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  That a lot of personal finance stress comes from wanting two things at the same time. Stress is different than tension. Stress is, I want to be here and I don't want to be here. Stress is, I want that thing, but I don't want to pay for it for the next five years. Stress is, I want to keep up with my friends, but I want the peace of mind of having savings. There is an enormous amount of stress associated with personal finance. And astonishingly, paradoxically, it happens to afflict people in wealthy countries. That there are plenty of people around the world who make $5, $10, $15 a day who have

• 7:56Speaker 05

  less money stress than some of the people who are listening to this. And part of the reason is, we have been indoctrinated by marketers, by banks, by people who are building a system designed to make us unhappy. And strategy involves seeing that this game is being played and then either choosing to play it or choosing not to play it. But don't walk into it accidentally.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  You brought up game, and that's one of four threads that you illustrate throughout your book. You say there, you know, so it's time, game, empathy, and systems. You say to understand how strategy works, you focus on these four threads. You say they're everywhere we look, but they're also easy to ignore. I really appreciated the empathy piece of this. I don't see that often cited in books of this nature. And I just want to know more about why you thought it was important and the role of empathy in creating your strategy.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Okay, so we'll come back to games, but let's talk about empathy. Empathy is not weak. It's not soft. Empathy is effective. So if you're a stand-up comic and you insist on telling your jokes in Italian, and the people in the room only speak English, it's not their fault that they don't think you're funny. It's your fault because you had no empathy for them. You insisted you were right, but they're the customer. It's a market, and they're not buying what you're selling because they don't understand Italian. So the empathy we need is to realize that the other people involved, our boss, our spouse, our kids, the car salesperson, all of these people don't know what we know, don't

• 9:45Speaker 05

  want what we want, don't see what we see. But if you want them to engage with you, you have to acknowledge that that's okay. That your 15-year-old who desperately wants to spend money you don't have to buy an outfit, they're doing it for reasons that they think make perfect sense because they don't see the world the way you see the world. They think college is going to pay for itself, right? So what we get to do is teach people things so that they choose to change their mind. But we cannot insist that people change their mind because they won't.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  It's fascinating, as you're talking, you know, time, game, empathy, systems, it clearly illustrates the strategy that we always talk about on the show of like, how to make more money, how to convince your employer to pay you more, or how to charge more in your company. You need to appreciate time because timing is important in that strategy. There are better times to ask than others. It is a game. There are chess pieces involved. And the empathy piece shows up, I think, when we talk about the importance of understanding not just your needs and perspective. Obviously, you making more money, that's a win. But what is going to be the win for your employer? Why is this necessarily a good move for your employer?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  What do they need? And then, of course, the systems. Systems, I'd love for you to unpack that a little bit. What do you mean by systems?

• 11:14Speaker 05

  This is so important. Let's talk about the most famous system of all, the solar system, leaving Pluto out of it. There are all these planets and there's the sun. Everyone knows the earth rotates around the sun. It doesn't do it because it wants to. It does it because of gravity. Gravity is an invisible force that pushes it. The wedding industrial complex is also a system. Your wedding should cost just as much as your best friend's wedding, but a little more, right? That that system, which got put into place in 100 years ago in this country, but is thousands of years old in lots of places, is about status, is about culture, is about fitting in.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  That wedding rings with diamonds in them are a hack invented by De Beers. Diamonds didn't used to be worth much at all. They built a system where the groom feels insufficient if they don't have enough money to buy a big enough ring. That's built in. That's the gravity. So if you decide you'd rather put your kid through college than have an engagement ring, you're going to be pushing back against the big cultural system. If we name it, it gets much easier to do. If we see, a true story, a friend of ours, someone I helped think about college

• 12:41Speaker 05

  and applying to college, got into two colleges. One college was sort of well-known and one of the five most expensive undergraduate colleges in the country. The other college was a state school with a scholarship, basically free. Which one should you go to? Right? Well, the real question is, do you want to graduate a quarter of a million dollars in debt? Or do you want to graduate, having spent four years doing this thing, and now you have a quarter of a million dollars that you didn't spend that you could go use to start a business or buy six BMWs, right? That's the choice. But the system pushes the kid to say, well, this one's more famous.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  So that's where I'm going. And it's heartbreaking, but it happens every single day.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  As the kid who chose the state school over the prestigious NYU and other expensive universities, I can attest to the heartbreak in the beginning, but the long-term payoff. And in that example, Seth, you bring us to the next question that I had, which is that you talk about these conflicting desires that we have in many of these situations as we're trying to formulate strategy. And in this, this college example is perfect because it's like, okay, do I want affiliation? Do I want status? Do I want freedom from fear? We can't have it all. So how do we, how do we steer ourselves? What is, what is the compass telling us in these cases?

• 14:14Speaker 03

  And, and why are these three desires? Because there's so many others.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  I don't think there are so many others. I think if you have health and a roof over your hat, family and food, everyone wants three things: freedom from the feeling of fear, affiliation, meaning fitting in, being part of something, and status. Who eats lunch first? Who's moving up? Who has that kind of competitive peace of mind? What am I missing?

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Joy, happiness.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  But where does, but joy, happiness and comfort come from affiliation and status? Right? They're like, I can't believe it. I'm with my family. I'm at Coney Island. I get to go on the roller coaster. It's a perfect day.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  Right? Well, yes, but it wasn't the vibration of the cyclone that gave you joy. It was the story you told yourself about the moment. So when we think about something as complicated and as expensive as picking a college, affiliation, where am I, what am I going to tell my friends? Where are they going to school? Blah, blah, blah. Because notice, no one's thinking about going to school in Dublin if they live in New York. There are plenty of kids in Dublin who are thinking about going to school in Dublin. Well, we have airplanes, but people think about what their peers are thinking about. Status, what sticker is going to be on the back of the car? So part of what we need to do, and why people like you,

• 15:43Speaker 05

  who have been showing up for so many years, are so important, is you give people permission to say it out loud. If someone says, I'm going to this college because it was sunny on the day I visited, the tour guide was cute, and I want to go to a school with a football team? Okay, fine. But at least say that out loud.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  But don't come up with some complicated emotional thing that isn't true about why you're going there. You're going there because some buttons got pressed on a certain day.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Right. You're asking us, Seth, to basically take a look at ourselves, which is really hard to do and almost detach from all these pressures. This is not a self-help book, but I almost feel like maybe we should pair it with like a psychology book or some therapy session.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Well, all help is self-help, meaning the only person who's going to change your mind is you. And what I see at big companies, people running for president, is a complete lack of strategy because we've been indoctrinated to do our job, to do the tactics, to try harder, without saying, why am I playing a game? I can't win. Right? So years ago, I did a personal finance book. I created it. My name wasn't on it. And one of the things the author suggested is you do an inventory about how often you use your living room.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  Because in those days, the typical middle-class family had a living room and never used it. Do you know how much a living room costs a family that makes $80,000 a year? It costs millions of dollars to have a living room. So go buy a house without a living room, right? And the, it's really hard to do that. And we need to understand why is it hard to do that? Status and affiliation. So let's just name them and then make a new plan because you can win a different game really well. You can live like a king or queen if you walk away from something like a living room. Or I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and you can buy seven houses in Buffalo, New York

• 17:58Speaker 05

  for what it costs to buy a house in certain neighborhoods of Long Island. Well, if you work from home, we need to have a real hard conversation with yourself about why you chose to live in a place that's going to determine your personal finance for the next 50 years. If you still want to live there, that's great. But at least let's talk about the strategy.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Coming up, Seth will talk about how to focus on being remarkable instead of unique, and what the marshmallow test can teach us about financial discipline. All that, plus Seth's take on how to use fear to fuel success. But first, a commercial break. If you're building wealth, growing your career, or running a business, every dollar matters. That's why more entrepreneurs and small business owners are turning to Walmart Business. Whether you're stocking up on office essentials, supplies for your team, or everyday business needs, Walmart Business helps you save money with everyday low prices on an ever-expanding assortment of products. And in today's economy, finding smart ways to cut costs without sacrificing convenience

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• 22:44Speaker 03

  Another behavioral trip up perhaps is that we try to just follow the herd. There's this copy paste mentality. It's just strategizing. And if you Google actually the word or the question, what is strategy? A top result, in addition to your book, is a 1996 Harvard Business Review article that criticizes what a lot of businesses were doing at the time. And if you remember, 96 was the dawn of sort of internet expansion and mass adoption. And what the journalist was saying was that, right now, we think strategy is operational

• 23:25Speaker 03

  effectiveness. And we think that it's using tools like total quality management and benchmarking. And what is lacking and what is ultimately the pitfall of this strategy is that there's no uniqueness in the strategy. It's just everybody's, you know, it's a race to the bottom. And so I wanted to ask you, how important is uniqueness in your strategy? If you're at a, if you feel like you're at a stall, a stalling place, like you have maybe figured out the game and you've timed it, but you feel like, okay, this feels very similar to what others are doing. Is that a red flag?

• 24:06Speaker 05

  There are very, very few professions and organizations that should have an original, unique strategy. You are way better off. Let's say you're a small business. Find a small business out of town that doesn't compete with you geographically and just copy them and then make that better. You don't get any prizes for inventing a kind of sandwich shop that no one's ever had before. You get prizes for having a sandwich shop that's fun to work at, that makes a profit. That if you have a locksmith, you don't want to invent a new way to market locksmiths. You want to find some other locksmith somewhere else in the world and do what they're doing because they already tested it for you. If

• 24:48Speaker 05

  you're an investor, you don't want to be the person who pioneers a new way to invest in the stock market. Do the math, realize that, you know, cheap mutual funds are probably the way to go. Go copy that. That's different than what we need to do if we want to build a career, say as a freelancer or somebody who needs to build a practice. In that case, we need to be remarkable, not unique. Remarkable means worth making a remark about. So if your slogan at work, when you're going to the boss for a raise, is you can pick anyone and I'm anyone. I do what you tell me to and I don't complain, you're not going to

• 25:33Speaker 05

  get a raise. That's a race to the bottom, to comply more than everybody else. The alternative is to say, the work I do is worth talking about because it benefits you to brag to your boss or to brag to your coworkers that I am part of this thing that we're doing here. That's not unique, but it's remarkable. That I'm the one who figured out how to do something better, different, that made my boss look good? That's the path to getting the kind of raise you probably deserve.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  I like that remarkable. You also write about elegance. And it's, I loved that because on this podcast, actually, one of the best pieces of advice that really resonated with me was a while back, we had on this Hollywood director, Kari Skogland. She's directed The Handmaid's Tale, The Walking Dead, Americans. And she said, if you have the opportunity, work with elegant people. And similarly, you write in your book that the elegant path is the most useful way forward. Can you share Seth's definition of elegance in relation to strategy? And how can we achieve this? I feel like sometimes it's just luck. You

• 26:48Speaker 03

  don't always get to choose who you get to work with or what you're facing. There are external factors.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  All right, let's leave that part, the luck part out for right now. If you watch people swim in the Olympics, it's very different than if you watch the person at the local pool who's trying really, really, really hard. The person who's trying really, really hard is splashing a lot, but they're not going very fast. When you watch people swim in the Olympics, they just seem to magically go forward because they have an elegant stroke. So I had a professor, when I was in college, I was an engineer. He got hired by the developers of a 40-story building in Boston. These people had made a mistake when they built the building and all of the drywall, every time they painted it, stains came through and they would have

• 27:35Speaker 05

  to paint it again. And the inelegant solution is rip out all the drywall, start over. That's going to cost tens of millions of dollars. They went to Henry. Henry said, I will solve your problem for $40,000. So they signed a piece of paper and then he wrote down the name of a chemical and he walked out. Because he had the experience to know that if they put this chemical on the drywall, the problem was going to go away. His experience and insight led to better technique, which led to saving tens of millions of dollars. A barefoot runner looks like they're not trying very hard, but that's because they practiced for so

• 28:15Speaker 05

  long to be elegant at understanding the system. What makes a good surfer is they find better waves. That a great surfer on a choppy body of water doesn't look like a great surfer. The art is in finding better waves. So back to your friend, the director. There's always luck. That's not the question. The question is, when it's very difficult, when do you draw a line and do something that's hard now that creates the conditions for better later? Right? So if you're a director and the producer in the studio insists that you

• 28:57Speaker 05

  cast a mediocre person for the main role because they're sure that that's X, Y, or Z, it's not easy to say, if you put that person in, I'm quitting.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  But if you say that, and you bring in this actor who ends up transforming the entire movie, people say, oh, they were really lucky. No. What they saw was a strategy forward, which is they're not going to get this to make this movie ever again. And here in this moment, they could trade a little bit of their status for a chance to invest in tomorrow.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Right. I'm learning that elegance, it comes from experience. It's a gift sometimes of just experience. That swimmer who's swimming really hard, but making a mess, maybe one day they will be elegant and it's thanks to the practice in the pool.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  And lessons. Lessons matter. He's, I've known this guy for 10 years. He's not a better swimmer than he ever was before. He needs, he needs a lesson. I don't have the guts to give it to him.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  But something, there's this book called Suck at Something, and it's all about, you know, hey, I mean, I'm terrible at tennis, but I love the ritual. I love the outfits. I like being out on the court. And as frustrating as it is for the other player, because I can't get the ball over the net, I'm having a great time. And that is worth something. So.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  I love hearing that. I want to share a book recommendation, which I almost never get to share.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  What is that?

• 30:30Speaker 05

  Timothy, Timothy Galway wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  It is the single best sports advice book ever written. It's 50 years old. It will change. I don't even play tennis.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  It changed, it changed my life.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  The inner?

• 30:46Speaker 05

  Game of tennis.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Game of tennis. Okay. Interesting.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Get back to me. Let me know how it worked.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Thank you. You touched on delaying gratification. This is it. This is the thing, Seth. I mean, they, they've done the studies. If you can delay gratification, you have a better chance at a lot of, a lot of success in many realms of life. It's the hardest requirement of creating a viable and healthy system, would you say? Do you think this is it? This is like, you can conquer this, you can master this. It's.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  Okay. So I got stuck on the word system, but it is critical. Let's talk about the marshmallow test.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  Do listeners know about this?

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:27Speaker 05

  Okay. The short version, it's Stanford kindergarten, nursery school. You've got three year olds. This feels really cruel, but they did it. And they say to a three year old, here's a marshmallow. I'm leaving the room for 20 minutes. If I come back and you haven't eaten it, I'll give you two marshmallows. That's the deal. Turns out, most kids eat the marshmallow. But the kids who wait 20 years later, have higher income, higher job satisfaction, lower obesity, went to more famous colleges, better career opportunities. Everyone said, wow, this is very, very important. We need to train kids to not eat the marshmallow. And self restraint is everything. So it always struck me the wrong way. And I've written

• 32:08Speaker 05

  a bunch of times about this. If you grow up in a house where there isn't enough food, you are used to adults not keeping their promises.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  And the right thing is to take the marshmallow. Because why should you trust this adult who's going to say he's going to come back with two? That it's not that we're born with self restraint and grit. It's that we learn it from an environment around us. Turns out in a follow up study, kids in Cameroon do much better than almost any other country. Not because Cameroon is rich, but because Cameroon parenting on subsistence farms, a lot of it is about self-control. Right? So now you're 40. What are you going to do? You didn't grow up in a two marshmallow household. You can create the conditions to learn to

• 33:04Speaker 05

  be like that. You can start with easy things. You can figure out where you're going to get the little zing of a treat every day that doesn't satisfy the system that's manipulating you. Go do that somewhere else. Right? Have no discipline when it comes to playing one more round of Scrabble on your computer. Fine. That costs nobody anything. But when you're at the, when you're at the store with a credit card, that's the moment when we need the credit card to go back in your wallet. That's the marshmallow test right there. You can create conditions, coaches, support groups, none of which cost any money. Where like

• 33:47Speaker 05

  in that moment, you could call up your friend or text her and say, great news. I didn't do, I didn't buy the extra thing. Cause right now, the system is built that you get an emoji smile back when you say, look at the cute shoes I just bought. We need the opposite to happen. We need scaffolding to reinforce self-control.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Does this advice also track when we're talking about systems that are corrupt or broken? And there's large systemic systems, right? So we're talking about the housing market, the economic system within that there's racism, there's discrimination. And so just thoughts on that, because you know, rerouting that seems almost impossible.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Okay. So all systems are corrupt and all systems are broken for some people. Right? So the system persists because the system is happy to persist. Right? That there are people who want maximum security prisons to be the way they are, because they are part of the system and they benefit from that. The status quo rewards them. Systems that stick around are good at sticking around. That the challenges in our country in, due to colonialism and racism, status, challenges of caste, challenges of income inequality, they're not there because the people in charge are evil. They're there because the status

• 35:14Speaker 05

  quo is good at reinforcing false proxies to keep people in the system making choices. So what we don't get to do is announce that a system is broken and fix it tomorrow. What we can do is build right next to that, new systems, but also use the system against itself to cause it to change. Because the system doesn't actually want there to be things like caste, systems of caste and racism. What it wants is status and affiliation. It wants a feeling of safety. It wants to make a profit. Well, the minute they can

• 35:56Speaker 05

  do that by ensuring that there's clean water in Flint, Michigan, it will instantly. So the, the jujitsu here is to understand who are the, where are the nodes in the system? What are they measuring? How are they determining what to say yes to? And then how do we create the conditions for the system to create a different output? One that actually benefits us?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  You've given us a lot of great prompts, and this is part of the book as well. It's very poetic. There are a lot of metaphors. It's philosophical, but there are also some questions and prompts that you offer readers so that they can start to, to think more strategically. One of which is, what is the fear that I'm eagerly creating by showing up with my change? This stops me because I just wrote a book about fear. I'm obsessed with fear. I think it can be used for greatness if we know and have the tools. But do you think that we can use fear to develop a good strategy in our financial lives, in our careers? And how so? How can we implement fear wisely?

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Well, you're the expert, so I'm a little hesitant to comment too much, but you should add to what I'm saying. What I'm trying to get at is this. If you want to make a change happen of any kind, you are going to create fear in someone else. And probably fear in yourself. We're all afraid, you know, you're moving to a nicer house. You're afraid in that moment, even though you sacrificed to do it. If you go to your boss and ask her for a raise, you are creating fear in her. Because she's saying to herself, either, what if I say no and she quits? Or she's saying to herself, what if I say yes and my boss is mad at me? You created fear by asking that question. So if you're not willing

• 37:47Speaker 05

  to create fear and tension, nothing's going to change in your life. And if the change you seek to make is important enough, then you can create the fear on purpose. And that doesn't mean you make a threat. It just means you acknowledge this is happening. The same way, if you're running a restaurant, it makes sense to have some of the smells from the kitchen go into the dining room, because people will be hungrier before the food comes. Right? So how do you make it so that the conditions are such that when the fear shows up for your boss, the easiest thing in the world for her to make her fear? Feel good is to give you that raise. That's what the project is. That's the game.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  I like that. I like that. I agree. When, if you're not scared, you're not doing it right. That's the, the short answer. So to close here, Seth, you know, so last time you were on So Money, it was, it aired in February of 2015 and we talked about money and what it means to be rich. In your words, you said, rich is being able to afford choices. You said, everyone who's listening to this show is rich to the extent that they have a computer, they have the time to listen to a podcast. And those two things by themselves make us richer than anyone on earth dreamed of being 200 years ago. Does that still sound right to you?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  And have you in 10 years revisited this sort of notion of wealth and richness, given that we've had a few events in between, including the pandemic and insurrection, elections, other events?

• 39:28Speaker 05

  Sometimes when people quote back things I said, I don't remember saying them and I disagree. I remember saying this and I agree. What I would add to it as a 64 year old is this. America got hung up for a whole bunch of complicated reasons on actual money that could be counted. And I think the other kind of rich is way more important. And that is the things that cannot be counted, but they can be felt, that you made a contribution, that people would miss you if you were gone, that you love and are loved. And I think that matters a lot more.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you, Seth. This was wonderful.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  You're the best. Can't wait. We're not going to wait 10 years, I promise.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  No, we're not. We are not. Congratulations. This is strategy.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Thanks so much to Seth Godin for joining us. His book is called This Is Strategy. The link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with a friend. It is the best way to support this show. I'll see you back here on Wednesday, where we're going to be in conversation with my friend Hannah Cole, who is the founder of Sunlight Tax. But we're having her on to talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Hannah and her family live in Asheville, North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene has left a trail of destruction. Hannah's art gallery with over 10 years of work was completely destroyed. Hear how she's supporting her community and what we can do to show up for everyone who's suffering right now from the impact of these storms. Thanks for tuning in and I hope your day is so money.

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