Seth Godin | The Song of Significance

Seth Godin: Significance always requires making a change happen. The same thing is true with creativity. If you just grab mine a sketch and scribble left and right and up and down, that is not creative.

But if the thing you build an Etta sketch, when you show it to someone else, changes their day, their point of view, their attitude. You have done creative work. So significance always requires change. And what my book is about is. Acknowledging the fact that every successful institution going forward is not going to be a steady state managed cog in the machine.

It is going to be an institution or an individual who causes change to happen. And what we need to do is not have a quiet little diversion from industrialism, but have a big deep breath and say, the reason we are here is to make a change the purpose. Of this interaction is to make a change. If we can be deliberate about that, we can create significant work, whether you're a barista, an undertaker, or a stock trader.

Srini: Seth, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us for probably what is, I think, the fourth time,

Seth Godin:  such a highlight. You are generous and insightful, and I know how hard it is to show up on the regular. So thank you for making this thing. I

Srini: think in many ways those adjectives describe you in a

Seth Godin: nutshell.

Srini: You have a new book out, the Song of Significance, but before we get into the book, as always, I wanna start with something that has nothing to do with the book. And I wanted to ask you, what is one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up doing with both your life and career?

Seth Godin: I won the birthday lottery and I learned so much from my late parents and I missed them every day. From my mom, I learned about giving people the benefit of the doubt, and from both of them I learned about being part of a community. It's not a right or a privilege. It's an obligation. And when you can show up and make things better for whatever community you choose to be in, that's what you need to do.

You, it. It's

Srini: interesting you bring up the community of all things. I remember having this conversation with my parents probably three, four years back and they were talking about how often they see their friends, and I remember how my parents even met their friends in the eighties. We're from under possession.

My dad literally opened a phone book in Canada, called a person and just said, Hey, I'm new here from India. And that was the foundation of 400 groups of friends that all met in Canada. But I think what struck me most when I was talking to my parents about their friends was like, wait, you guys talk to each other every day and you see each other at least twice a week?

I was like, I have friends who live a mile down the, from the freeway. They don't talk to me more than once a month. But I feel like that sense of community that was there such a long time ago seems to be there less and less particularly, like when you talk about something like being involved in local government or anything like that.

I'm just curious

Seth Godin: why is that? I think you're bringing up a few things that mix together. The first one is this idea that we all have way more handshakes in our lives than we did 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. That you don't have to go to Ted very often to suddenly have a thousand people, you're a handshake away from.

So I think the, just the simple math of it is that if it's possible to fall into a cultural connection with somebody, you don't have to see them every day to maintain that. But the second point you're bringing up, which I think is critically important, gets back to this idea of. The work of community, not just the enjoyment of it.

And that that's part of the problem with social media is social media requires no work. It's just signaling and hand waving. The work is what happens when a friend says, my house burned down. Can I sleep on your living room for a week? That you wouldn't have looked forward to that for either of you, but there it is, and you'll take it.

And I think that's a key part of being a human. Is seeking out connection that is going to help us extend ourselves into somebody else's life. Do you see that

Srini: differing across cultures? Because I think that the way you described that, it just describes the way that my parents as immigrants paved their way in Canada and then here in the

Seth Godin: US as well.

Oh, for sure. Years ago my son was canvassing in New Hampshire. And what I noticed as I was walking with him is that nobody had a doorbell. And the reason was if I know you come on in and if I don't know, you go away. And there are plenty of cultures where the village mindset is stronger than others.

And the village mindset, you can see how that could have culturally evolved, is a way of survival. But if it's built in, if the philanthropy model is, we go into the alms room. If you have money, you leave money. If you need money, you take money. There are plenty places where that wouldn't work.

Plenty of cultures where that wouldn't work, but there are other cultures where that's normal. I

Srini: remember David Letterman had Malala as a guest and she was talking about how in the area of Afghanistan where she lived, she said, yeah, people are welcome anytime, and they are free to stay as long as they want.

And Letterman asked her, are you telling me that if my family and I showed up at your house, we could stay for a week? She's yes, of course. And serving tea would be considered rude. She's we would serve you a full meal, which I

Seth Godin: thought was so striking. Exactly, and I think if he showed up with that beard, I might not let him in.

But in general, That the philosophy I grew up in a house full of Russian Refuseniks people who had fled the old Soviet Union. It was normal for my family to adopt some Ukrainian refugees. This is what we do for each other, but industrial indoctrination has pushed us apart because it's easier to sell stuff to people if everyone is a stranger.

Yeah, absolutely.

Srini: Speaking of which one thing that you said to me in a previous conversation was that you usually don't write a book until you're on an idea that you just can't let go. So what was the motivation for this book? Why now? After I think five years. Cause I think the, if I remember correctly, your last book was the one about creativity.

Seth Godin: Yeah. That was, if that was right around the beginning of the pandemic, it's not that I couldn't let this one go. It's this one wouldn't let me go. It began when I saw the high jinks of a billionaire who decided it would be fun in public to start humiliating and firing one employee after another and having people root and cheer him on for this sort of brutality.

Then it was expanded as the reality of AI set in, and we saw the enormous turnover at Amazon where people had horrible jobs and wouldn't stay and. Amplified by quiet, quitting and work from home and bosses wanting people to FaceTime. Then I met somebody who invited me to a conference on the climate and the way he was present for his family and the tragedy that he endured.

And just coming back to why are we even here? What are all these hours for that? How is it that in the countries with the highest average income, people seem. To work the largest number of hours and like them the least. And I knew it wasn't a blog post or five blog posts or a podcast. I knew I needed to make a book so that people would have the conversation.

And that's part of the magic of books that as, as wonderful as the podcast is, and as transportable as it is, it's hard to hand someone a podcast and say, let's talk about this tomorrow. But books are organized around that idea. You're talking

Srini: to a guy who's built a podcast for 13 years and doesn't listen to them, so I can relate.

Where I wanna start actually, with this whole idea of significance is by talking about education. And I wanna bring back a clip from you in one of our previous episodes as our jump

Seth Godin: off point. Take a listen. School was invented as you and I have previously discussed, to train factory workers to get ready to go do a job and.

There are no good jobs like that anymore. What we need are people, is it your cousin? Yeah. We need people like your cousin who are going to figure out what the question is. Nevermind look up the answer. And that takes learning. You learn to ride a bike, you learn to walk, you learn to juggle, you learn to do everything in your life.

That's important. Education is reserved for this very thin slice, certification and credentialing, and I'm just like, We have this best, this moment here where we can take a deep breath and say, you know what? Access to information is now free anywhere in the world. If you have a phone, you have access. What are we gonna do with it?

So I wanted to

Srini: bring that back because I always enjoyed talking to you about education and I seem to always want to talk to anybody about education. When we're talking about work, I think education is in a lot of ways the precursor to work for so many people. What needs to change?

Because I remember you and I talking about this and you were saying the parents were really the ones that had the power of change. And I know you wrote Stop Stealing Dreams, which is probably one of my favorite essay collections that you wrote. But talk to me about the sort of education system and the context

Seth Godin: of this new book.

Let's talk about indoctrination for a minute. Indoctrination is what happens when a powerful system brainwashes people to believe things that are against their interests. And Industrialism has indoctrinated us from the age of four to ask, will this be on the test? How do I get an A? How do I get picked those three questions over and over again?

And we took it, we accepted it because it also made us rich around the world. There are more people with more resources than ever before. Everyone listening to this has more resources than the last King of France did. And so we said, all right, we'll take that deal. But now the deal is broken because AI can replace anybody who's doing mediocre work, and we've been pushed to do mediocre work.

So when people like you or I show up and reveal that the emperor really isn't wearing new clothes, most people will find a way to ignore us or disagree with us because the indoctrination is so powerful and. What I keep finding in the projects I do and the people I meet is there are outliers who are eager and ready to do significant work, and the vast majority of people are asking, will this be on the test?

How can I get home in time to watch Netflix? So what do you think it is that separates a person who looks at the resources they have and can be incredibly resourceful with them versus the one who sees the resources they have and still? Looks at it from a standpoint of scarcity, because I always felt that resourcefulness would be far more valuable to me than having resources.

Srini: I'll give you a simple example. I had written about this somewhere. I said, okay, if I had two options, somebody would give me a million dollars today, or somebody over the next year taught me how to make a million dollars, I would take the second deal because that would mean that I would actually learn the skill of making the million

Seth Godin: dollars.

Yeah if it was possible to teach people. That skill that would be a good deal. The thing that I, discu, I spent the last year as a volunteer 10 hours a day for a year and a half, organizing and coordinating the Carbon Almanac. It's a 97,000 word book written by 300 volunteers in 40 countries.

N very few of us had ever met before. None of us met in person, not once to make this book. We built the book, illustrated the book, designed the book, proofread it, fact checked it. And footnoted it and delivered it ahead of schedule in five months, which would've been impossible 10 years ago, and couldn't have been done by a tiny team of paid humans.

This was the way it needed to be done. But what was fascinating about it, among many other things, is some of the people I invited to do it who had just as much spare time as the ones who leaned into it, said, Yeah, I just, I don't like the structure. I need someone to tell me exactly what to do. So high performers in the old days could be high performers, simply cuz they waited to get picked and waited for instruction.

And there were people on our team who were 90 and there were people on our team who were 17. It's not about age, it's not about country or income level. It was simply about. Have you developed the instinct and the skill to work with a clean sheet of paper? And I know you're fascinated by chat, G P T and the rest of the AI tools.

What's fascinating to me is even though they're available to everybody with an internet connection for free, only 1% of the population is doing productive experiments with it, and everybody else is just going back to watching tv. Yeah

Srini: I've probably done hundreds of experiments with it in the last.

Few weeks enough to publish an entire book about it. Because speaking of ai I'd like to hear your perspective on this. In my mind, what I realize is that what this is gonna enable us to do is do what we do best. The things that only humans can do well, which are critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, and ai.

It just enables us to do those things better and faster, eliminating a lot of the tedious work. Which to your point, if you're mediocre at what you do, then I think you should be concerned. But I wanna hear your perspective, like how will this shape the future? Particularly when we talk about this idea of being significant,

Seth Godin: it's very tricky to talk about what humans do best.

Because by population, by per capita headcount, what humans do best is follow instructions and sign up to be cogs in the industrial machine. I did some work with De Delight years ago with Acumen, and we were in a little village. In India that had no electricity and perhaps four families had bought these solar lanterns, even though the solar lantern was cheaper, safer, more reliable than kerosene and could charge your cell phone paid for itself in 90 days.

So I spent time talking to the four families that had purchased one, and I spent time talking to families that didn't purchase one. And this attitude keeps coming up and AI is gonna be the same deal that. Most people who are spamming you and me are just following a playbook. Most people who get paid to be copywriters are just following a playbook.

They're gonna lose their jobs to ai, for sure. And then they'll find something else to do, a different playbook that someone else invented. And in this moment, which hasn't been going on for very long, what you have pointed out, what I've pointed out, is when they shuffle the deck and the world changes, this is the moment.

To stop following somebody else's playbook. And you know what? People, I had the folks at 11 Labs train the AI in my voice. It's so good. My wife cannot tell. It's not me. And I did an episode of my podcast with IT reading pretending to be Me, and almost none of my listeners figured it out until I gave

,

it away at the end.

Now. Wow. Given that I can now speak for as many hours a day as there are CPUs, if I wanted to run with that, the amount of things I could do with that are enormous. Yeah. And so can everyone else. But once it's baked in, then people won't be able to run with it. They're just gonna have to be a clerk who's working for someone who figured out what to do.

I think that the thing that

Srini: became very apparent to me as I started to experiment with all of these tools was I thought to myself, wait a minute. Adam Smith and the Industrial and the Wealth of Nations said, division of labor is the key to maximizing output. And I remember thinking, wait a minute, but labor is prohibitively expensive.

And suddenly the things that were only accessible to people with deep pockets and enormous resources are now available to the masses. And thought is like, what are you gonna do with this? This is amazing. It's like you've been handed the power of hundreds of people all in your hands. I can produce exponentially higher amounts of work and it still doesn't take away from the fact that I am still it still depends on a human.

I remember one of my cousins told me this when we were having a conversation, which made it into my new book. He said, it's, at the end of the day, it's still 50% human input. Like you are the one who puts in every prompt and trains these things.

Seth Godin: Yeah. So Adam Smith and Carl Marks, the fascinating thing that happened was, Adam Smith said a pin making machine can replace the work of dozens of pin makers.

So if you're a pin maker, you're in real trouble, you better go buy a pin making machine. And Carl Mark said, until workers own the means of production, they will be taken advantage of. Going back to Steve Wosniak, we started handing workers the means of production and now, In 2023, the means of production come for free.

If you just have an internet connection, you have exactly the same tools as the c e O of Adobe. You have exactly the same tools as the president of a small country. So now that workers own the means of production, what will they choose to produce? And the problem with the indoctrination, and I spend a lot of time coaching high school and college kids, is.

They are petrified of improv and they have been so pushed to get a degree from a famous institution and to get a job that their friends think is cool, that most of them are blinking in the moment when they should be paying attention. Speaking

Srini: of what you say in the book, that we've built massive systems designed to produce goods and services beyond imagination.

While we simultaneously market enough insufficiency and jealousy to sell them. And I wanna talk about this from two perspectives. When we talked about this idea of significance on the individual level, like what is it that enables somebody to become significant in an organization or on an individual level, whether it's in their community or just through their creative or, and how do you even define what it means to be significant?

Seth Godin: Th this is a great question and it gets back to your work in creativity. The thing is, It's not up to me, it's up to each of us. I interviewed 10,000 people in 90 countries and I gave them a whole bunch of choices about what was the best job they ever had and they all picked the same four or five things.

And it comes down to I accomplished more than I thought I could. People treated me with respect and the work I did mattered, and these are significant choices. Significance always requires making a change happen. And the same thing is true with creativity. If you just grab Anta sketch and scribble left and right and up and down, that is not creative.

But if the thing, you build an Etta sketch, when you show it to someone else, changes their day, their point of view, their attitude. You have done creative work. So significance always requires change. And what my book is about is acknowledging the fact that every successful institution going forward is not going to be a steady state managed cog in the machine.

It is going to be an institution or an individual who causes change to happen. And what we need to do is not have a quiet little diversion from industrialism, but have a big deep breath and say the reason we are here. Is to make a change. The purpose of this interaction is to make a change. If we can be deliberate about that, we can create significant work.

Whether you're a barista, an undertaker, or a stock trader. You say that agency gives us control over our time and it encourages to choose our, encourages us to choose our own adventure because it demands responsibility and some authority. Agency is antithetical to controlled industrial piecework.

Srini: And it, it got me thinking about my time in organizations. And keep in mind, I haven't been in a formal organization for 10 years other than the one that I run. Yeah. I get to do what I want. I have plenty of agency, but I felt like part of my issue with it was that I'm pretty much just being told to follow instructions and anything that is out of the playbook basically will get me punished.

And I know that there are places like this still where people, because I've had people literally come to me, And say I love your work, but how do I, how can I be creative at work? I can't be creative at work. I work at a law firm, or I I do something that has no creativity in it, which I don't believe is true, but I think largely is part of this mindset.

When people feel like they're trapped in an organization like that, what is the option here to leave or to change it? And how do they do that without getting

Seth Godin: themselves fired? Okay. So the first thing about creativity is it comes with responsibility. You're not off the hook. You're not allowed to say, I was just being authentically creative.

Don't criticize me. That's not what creative is. Creative is to see a problem, earn enrollment from the people who have the problem, and then work with them to solve the problem. So if I was working at a company, Or an organization that was very clear that they did not want anyone on the factory floor at the warehouse in Akron Amazon to take any initiative whatsoever.

If that was really clear, I would leave. You, don't get tomorrow, over again, go somewhere else. But if I was a fancy lawyer instead of whining about the fact that I'm a lawyer and I can't be creative, I would look at the fact. That just about every happy and successful lawyer has done something that some of their partners raised an eyebrow at the beginning.

So if I was at a law firm, I'd start writing, for example, articles about the legality of, I don't know, copyright an AI or the legality of taxation in NFT until I was seen as a leader on that frontier. And if I wrote good, creative, thoughtful articles about that, it wouldn't take very long. And then once I'm seen as the high status leader on that frontier, my day will be filled with interesting work, not doing the will for the next old person who walks in the door, and that's available to anybody who's got a legal license.

So it's not hard to overcome, it's just scary because to be creative means you're putting yourself on the hook to say, I'm selling tickets to this event, and I will sing a song that will make you cry. If you don't, you failed. This is the difficult work of being creative, and again, it has nothing to do with the scale of what you're doing.

It has to do with the emotion and intent of what you're doing. Whoa. Check out that flock

Srini: of birds.

Seth Godin: They're so

Srini: synchronized. I wish we could be like

Seth Godin: that at work. Then you should try monday.com. It's a work management platform. Yeah. It might ruffle some feathers to change the way we work.

Srini: That's

Seth Godin: the thing.

monday.com lets you choose how to manage your own work, but at the same time, it keeps you and everyone else aligned on projects, big picture workflows and

Srini: company goals. Sounds

Seth Godin: like working together is no longer a bird in Get it Because Yeah I get it. Go to monday.com to get started for free.

Srini: W let's talk about this idea of intent, because I know one of the things that you have written about, and I've heard you say it, I'm, maybe you've even said it to me on an interview, is that you always say, before you start anything, this might not work. And I have pretty much adopted that, and I've realized it's actually incredibly liberating.

But it's a paradox. People are like, wait a minute. You think the benefits of believing that you might fail increase the odds of success? I'm like, yes, because you're not attached to the outcome. But talk to me about that idea of this might not work and how we can, people who are listening to this can actually start to make that part

Seth Godin: of the way they think about all of this.

Okay, so before I forget, I wanna talk about something you said as an aside just now, which is attached to the outcome. And I think you and I talked about this when we were talking about the practice. I have the clip from it. Last time. Do you want me to say it again or do you wanna play the clip? Let's play the clip.

Just all right. Let's see if I read your mind and got it right. I'm pretty sure you did. But yeah, here we go. We were in alternated, in brainwashing, wanting a map. Why did that happen? It happened because map makers need customers, and so from the time that we're in first grade, it becomes very clear that the way to move forward is to comply.

And the way to comply is to do what the teacher says. So you do well on the test. And parents have been brainwashed into thinking that they're effective if they have kids who aren't part of the same system. And there are certain places where this attachment to results is really important. If you're a mechanical engineer, civil engineer, you're building a bridge.

The only thing I care about is does the bridge fall down? Yeah. But most of us don't do that work and. Getting attached to an outcome that is out of our control actually undermines our work.

Srini: And so let's start off there

Seth Godin: as a jump off point, right? So when you get attached to an outcome, what you're doing is you're using all the force of will to somehow through telekinesis caused something outside of your control to change. And that is exhausting. And it's also ineffective that if you and I are swimming across the Hudson River, we could become attached to each other by six foot ropes and we will both drown.

On the other hand, if I'm watching you swim while I swim, I can stay near you. That's up to me, but I'm not attached to that. And if we're gonna do creative work and we need desperately, need somebody else to get the joke. We will fail to tell a good joke because we will compromise. We will imagine, we will basically suffocate our creativity.

When you say this might not work, but add to it the generosity of I am doing this in service of solving an interesting problem. That fusion power is just a series of engineering exercises of what might not work until finally we find out what does work and. You don't have to be working on saving the planet.

You can work on a very small problem for a very small situation that a four-year-old has walked into the doctor's office and in this moment you want to change this four-year-old's affect. You can say something to this kid, something you're not sure is going to work. That is way more likely to work than if you just read a script out of a book.

So

Srini: one of the other things you say is that tools can create efficiency, but value can only come from change from humanity and from the rare form of connection that comes with significance is the emotional labor of showing up. Because we care, the opportunity for all of us lies in the emotional labor invested by enrolled and committed employees who seek to make a difference.

That's the competitive advantage that extraordinary organizations produce. How does somebody design an organization to fill it with those types of people? And I remember you make this very clear distinction between leaders and managers as

Seth Godin: well. Okay. Emotional labor. Ariel Hawk Child first used that term 60 years ago.

I am using it slightly differently. We know what physical labor is, and if you wanna build an institution where people do physical labor, you know exactly how to do that. You say there's a hundred bags of concrete over here. We need to end up with those bags over there. Please move them. And you can measure whether people are doing physical labor or not.

Emotional labor is doing work. We don't feel like it might involve smiling when we don't feel like smiling, but it also might involve digging deep and creating when we're afraid. Emotional labor is the work. Of using our emotions, it's developing our real skills. It's showing up with honesty and loyalty and integrity and care, and all the things that are exhausting.

And once you say it like that, building an organization that seeks that out and rewards that isn't particularly difficult. You just have to measure correct proxies, not false proxies. If I'm running a restaurant, if all I'm measuring is, did you bring the food to the table before it got cold? I'm not measuring what the diner is actually keeping track of and why the diner showed up at the restaurant to begin with, but if you changed the mood and affect of the group that is paying $400 to eat dinner here tonight, if you created the environment for them to have the best night out they've had in three months, that took emotional labor.

So let's do that on purpose. And then there was a second half of your question, but I was so present with the first half. I forget. I think I forgot as well. We'll get back to it. I'm sure it'll come to me. One thing that you've talked about is these four kinds of work and these two by two grid with stakes and trust as the two axes.

Srini: Can you e expand to that and explain how that plays a role in the idea of significant work?

Seth Godin: Okay. So it's a little hard to visualize, but we will try using the magic of radio. There is surveillance and there is trust. Surveillance is important for certain things that we purchase. So if you go and buy five pounds of flour at the supermarket, your expectation is that item has been under surveillance since it was first created, that machines have been measuring to make sure there's no metal screws in it, that strangers have touched it along the way, but it's unadulterated.

That when we are in a situation where the stakes are high, but trust is low, we use surveillance to figure it out. At the other extreme, our high trust, low stakes thing, this is when we walk in to the community center or a place we go often, and we're probably not gonna die from that cup of coffee if it's not perfect.

And our relationship with the barista, having someone know our name, walking into a place where we feel comfortable, it's all worth it. And then as you can imagine, there are two other corners. There is the things where we have surveillance, but the stakes are low. And this is what happens if you go to hear classical music performed in that we are insisting that people play it as written.

We know it's exactly the way it was supposed to sound. Now the magic of Glen Gould, since you're Canadian, I have to bring up Glen Gould, is he did the Brandenburg Concertos as his first recording and has his last recording, and they're not the same because in fact, trusting Glen Gould to do a use emotional labor to express what's in his heart via piano is the magic of it.

And there is a difference between someone or an AI playing Bach and Glenn Gould playing Bach because we didn't use surveillance, we used trust. And then in the, I can go into the other

,

corner, but you get the idea. What we seek as we try to find significant work is please don't put us in solitary confinement, and please don't put us under surveillance, because those two things are inner innovating and are dead ends.

What we want is to be trusted as we do human work, work that might not work, creative work, and do it for someone who wants a change to happen. That can be lots of different kinds of jobs, but we've gotta seek it out and maintain the fact that we earned it. It was funny when you mentioned

Srini: that you may have heard it the Canadian Brass did a rendition of the flight of the Bumblebee.

I played the tuba for nine years, and Charles Dollenbach plays the flight of the Bumblebee on a tuba, and you're thinking, wow, how the hell is that possible? It's the craziest thing you've ever heard. It sounds insane. In the audio book, which I produced myself I have the flight of the Bumblebee in several locations because I found a.

Seth Godin: A CC licensed version, and I am confident that there were no tubs involved. So as soon as we're done, I'm gonna go look that one up.

Srini: Yeah, you'll have to, I think you'll get a kick out of it. I remember the follow up question to to, to our previous section. So you make this distinction between management and leadership, but you also talk about job interviews as false proxies.

So talk to me about that, because I've always thought that job interviews are bs like I remember very distinctly. I had learned how to do really well at interviews. I was always terrible at the job, but I mastered being interviewed because there was a book, like You literally, I don't even remember what the, there was a company that made like a guide where here are all the questions you'll be asked in an investment banking interview, or, here's how you answer the interviewer's question.

I was like, okay, I've just basically mastered performance, but it's all an act. Like I realized I would've been better off telling half these people what I actually think I would hate working here. Which I didn't have the courage to do that.

Seth Godin: I would now, Yeah. It's not that different than Tinder, right?

So managers use power and authority to get people to do what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. We need managers at places like fast food restaurants, at high surveillance locations. Leaders are voluntary. You could be the lowest rank on the org chart or the highest doesn't matter. Leaders are showing up saying, I'm not sure this is gonna work.

I'm going over there. Who wants to come? And just cuz you're a manager doesn't mean you're a leader and vice versa. With that said, when we seek to add people to the team, we tend to look for easy digital ways to measure thing. The problem, as we learned in Moneyball is that these proxies, if they're incorrect, get us into trouble.

So in the United States, The average height of the president keeps rising dramatically, even though there's no evidence that tall people are good at being the leader of the free world. Yeah, and we use cast and we use social status, and we use whether there's typos in your resume, we use, whether you went to a famous college all as false proxies, the fact that you went to McGill doesn't mean you're gonna end up being a better, I don't know.

Chiropractor or accountant than someone who didn't. But it's easy to measure. And when we have job interviews, what we're generally doing is measuring whether someone is good at job interviews. Why is that a useful proxy finding out if this is the sort of person you'd like to hang out with? Mostly what you're gonna do is hire people like you or hire people who look like the ceo.

Which again creates barriers for people who aren't part of the dominant class or cast. And as a result, it's really expensive because we've dramatically reduced the size of the pool that we are able to work with. And the alternative to false proxies is simple. Measure the right stuff. Measure the important stuff.

If you want to hire a receptionist at your medical practice who makes people feel welcome why don't you just hire people who make people feel welcome? Seems pretty simple. It's just hard. And one of the things that's possible now, thanks to the magic of the trail we leave behind is to be judged on our work, not on our resume.

That it is easier than ever to create a body of work and to share that with folks. It is easier than ever to say to somebody, I will pay you. To come in on Saturday and be the receptionist. Let's see what you do when you do the job for a day. As opposed to me saying, wow you're very charismatic in the job interview.

You're hired. Cuz I learned nothing from that. No.

Srini: I had a community manager when I hired her. Her first response was string, yeah, I don't need a job. And I'm a civil engineer. I don't know anything about building communities. I was like if you can build a bridge, you can build a community.

You're smart and you know how to solve problems. And I've seen it we'll figure it out. And that was by far the best hiring decision I've ever made.

Seth Godin: I would say that what you hired for was enrollment in the journey, not a skillset. Yeah. And what this person did as a skill previously was not nearly as important as their willingness to embrace new skills and not become attached to the person they used to be.

It is so true. I see that with so many

Srini: people. They don't realize they have transferrable skills, but they also aren't willing to take on new things. So how then do organizations begin to change their culture in order to embrace this mindset of significance and give people the freedom to do

Seth Godin: this?

So Harvard asked me to come give a talk at the business school, and they changed the title of my talk. To Seth Golden on how to make people feel significant. And this broke my heart because it's so classic big company we're not gonna change being industrialists. We just want people to feel like they get to be humans when they're here.

That's the opposite of what I'm describing. What Satya Nadella has figured out is that productivity measurements are usually a trap. If you're gonna start counting lines of code committed to GitHub, then people are gonna start committing lousy lines of code. If you start instead measuring the right stuff and realize that you're in the change business, you are no longer in the industrial business.

So Steve Ballmer missed four of the most important breakthroughs in the tech world over a 10 year period of time. He left. I don't know, a hundred billion dollars in value on the table. Because all he wanted to do was build an industrial ratchet where he could increase his power, as opposed to saying, I wanna build an institution that explores and experiments and discovers, because they had so much of a headstart.

They could have owned search and they could have owned smartphones, et cetera, et cetera. But because they couldn't industrialize their way into it, they failed. And they failed. And they failed cuz he tried to bully his way through it. So what my rant is about is organizations that sooner or later are gonna disappear as industrialists waking up before it's too late and saying, let's not try to put a significance stucco layer on top of our industrial heart.

Let's get right down to the center of what we do and realize that if each person here is doing significant work, our institution will become resilient and significant. It reminds

Srini: me of something that I had Ozon, Varu say to me in our conversation about his most recent book. And it was this whole idea, a terrific book, by the way.

Yes, it is a fantastic book. Absolutely loved it. And he talks about this idea in his previous book, he talked about not being able to copy and paste someone else's path to success. But in this one, he also said, you can't copy and paste your previous past. Discuss what I thought was really fascinating because I've seen that tendency in myself.

It's oh, this blog post went viral. How do I reverse engineer that and try to do that? And again, or the way I wrote this book worked really well. How do I do it again? And I realized we've become victims of our own success. I remember that there was even a term for it in this book called the Both and Thinking, where they called it the S-Curve Paradox of Success or something like that.

Let's just use Google as an example and the fact that they seem to be playing catch up with open ai. Like I think it's the first time in the existence of Google that we've seen something that look on the surface might look like an existential threat. How do people and organizations prevent themselves from becoming victims of their own success, I guess is really what I'm trying to say.

Seth Godin: The hard work is. To burn your boats at the very same time. You don't become dependent on staying wherever you landed. And to do both of those things at the same time is really challenging. So it took me decades before permission marketing came out and became a bestseller. So when the phone rings and they say, we'd like to pay you twice as much to write the Permission Marketing handbook, and then after that, the Beginner's Guide to Permission Marketing.

And then after that maybe I'll start MailChimp. I knew how to do all of those things, but I didn't do any of them. It probably cost me money net present value wise to turn those things down. But by turning them down, I created the conditions where Purple Cow was possible. And so what an organization has to do, Western Union has to say.

The Telegraph is not going to live forever. How are we gonna take the people on our team who want to explore the liminal state of between here and there and have them go build the telephone? So when I was at Yahoo, it was 1999. They were the center of the internet. The internet was the center of our future.

I was one of five vice presidents, and I went to Jerry Yang and I said, Jerry, here's what I wanna do. I'd like you to cut my salary by 90%. I would be happy to keep my stock options. I'm gonna take two people. I'm gonna go across the street to a $600 a month room, and we're gonna build the business plan of the next five companies that you're probably gonna go acquire for 5 billion each if we don't.

And Jerry turned to me and he said that sounds great, except everyone here would want to go do that, which is the stupidest excuse in the history of the internet. To have your company fade away to nothing because they had exactly what they needed in-house to build the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

But instead, they said, what we do around here is turn the crank of what we did yesterday.

I, I wanna finish

Srini: with two final questions. I know you gotta go. Like this is something I've heard myself say to people a hundred times when I describe your writing. And I always say the genius of Seth Godin is that he manages to say so much with so few words. And that is an art that I have aspired to.

So I'm just curious like where does that come from and is that just years and years of practice

Seth Godin: that leads to that?

I'm so tempted to give you a super cogent answer cause I know you're inappropriate. Yeah. Okay, so I'm working with my friend Ava on this very question. A koan is a Buddhist riddle that enables actual learning to happen because all learning is self-learning. Auto doism is all there is. Education is different, but learning sooner or later, if it's actual learning, you're gonna teach it to yourself.

If somebody says, why, when will a dog reach enlightenment? And the monk says emptiness. That's a riddle and you can think about it for a really long time and get the punchline maybe. So what I have worked to do in my work is in front of other people watching how their eyes light up, seeing if something sinks in.

Reading my email to see which parts people highlight and not highlight when they write back to me. I'm looking for the zinger. I'm looking for the anecdote or the sentence, or even the word, like remarkable or significance that gets under somebody's skin so that they can then do the incredibly difficult work of figuring out and learning what maybe I tried, but sometimes I learned something that I didn't even intend.

And it's so much easier to just use more words and to find deniability cuz you have so many words. But my work is not to do that. My work is to maybe be misunderstood, but often open the door for someone to learn something they wanted to learn.

Srini: I have one final question for you, which I know I've asked you before. So I'm always interested in hearing how people answer this question when they come back to the show. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something

Seth Godin: unmistakable? Ever since I heard of you in your work, that word has really stuck with me.

And in this age of ai, how could it be more important that. When I trained an AI on the 8,000 blog posts that I have on my blog, I was pleased that it didn't sound exactly like me yet, cuz it meant I still have some blogging left to do, but my voice in 11 labs is not unmistakably me. It's hard to tell. So what it means to be an unmistakable creative is pretty simple, which is you are generous enough to reach far enough outside whatever boat you're on.

That you are causing a change to happen that pretty much could only be done by you. And that's frightening work indeed. Particularly when mediocrity is so simple and so attainable these days. And one thing I did not expect when I started on the internet in 1976 and when I started doing it professionally in 1991, I didn't expect so much anger.

And division, but I also didn't expect so many people would work so hard to make it banal, but they do. And what it means to be unmistakable is refuse banality. Beautiful.

Srini: I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us as always, and share your story and wisdom and your insights with our listeners.

Where can people find out more about the book and everything else you're up to? At this point, I think unless they've been on the moon for the last 20 years,

Seth Godin: it's pretty easy to find you. I built a page at Seth's blog slash song and on, I've got videos and limited edition stuff and specials and everything else.

So everything you need says stop log slash s o n g. Amazing.

Srini: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Seth Godin: Thank you. Oh my goodness. I'm so happy you came through. That's the sound of Kim getting a random act of helpfulness. We just told her the helpful SoCal Honda dealers will be paying for her dog's. Much needed mri. And we paid her for sharing that story on the radio. And we can help you too, with a great deal on a reliable award-winning Honda like the 2023 CR-V.

To find the helpful SoCal Honda dealer near you. And to submit a random act of helpfulness for someone you know, visit SoCal honda dealers.com.

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