Interview With Seth Godin on How to Dance With Fear
In this episode, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and expert marketer Seth Godin explains why we get paid to confront fear of failure, what he learned selling dorm-room posters in college, and why he thinks bravery is overrated.
Interview Highlights
The importance of business "sonar" and how to develop it
Why bravery is all about generosity and how anyone can become brave
The #1 fear that keeps Seth Godin up at night (it's not what you'd expect)
What kept Seth going after he got 900 rejection letters as a book packager
2 key elements for bootstrapping your way to success as an entrepreneur
Watch My Video Interview With Seth Godin
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Resources Mentioned In This Episode
Transcript
Greg: Welcome to The Bravery Project. Today I'm talking to Seth Godin and I'm really really excited about this. Seth is an author and marketer and entrepreneur but most of all Seth is a teacher and I had the pleasure of being taught by him recently at Ruckusmakers, which is a seminar he put on in Hastings‐On‐Hudson a few weeks ago. Seth, thank you for being here, I really appreciate your time.
Seth: Well thank you Greg! And having you at the seminar really made a difference. Your contribution did not go unnoticed, people really benefited from knowing you
Greg: I'm glad! So one of things that I want to start off with was you’re very careful when you speak and write about this. The difference between mentors and heroes. And I just wanted to tell you up front that you're a big hero for me kind of virtually and I guess now live when I saw you a Ruckusmaker’s your first book I read by you was Poke The Box and at the time, I’m sure there's hundreds of stories like this, at the time I was in a great job, with great people doing marketing but I was kind of sitting there and saying, you know, how long is it gonna take for me to make an impact in this specific situation.
Seth: Yeah.
Greg: Being young and kind of that...getting the idea of “if I fail more than you I win”. You mentioned in the book. I love that! And at the same time...and so that's what urged me to go off and start creating what I'm creating and get to talk to you now which is pretty cool. I think the idea of failure, we understand it philosophically. And when I talk to clients and when I read your work, we get it philosophically ok I fail more give me more data coming in, I get more of a chance to eventually not fail and succeed. But it's still not that fun to think about it like it's still not like “ok I still have to fail though but i don’t really wanna fail”. When you're urging people and and teaching people and writing is there a way to make failure more palatable or more easy to actually go out and say “this might not work but I'm gonna do it anyway?”
Seth: Let's talk first about how deep this runs. imagine that you're on the subway or the bus and someone with let's say a mild form of mental illness is just glaring at you the whole time. Glaring with just shooting daggers from their eyes, it's almost impossible to feel good about yourself when you get off the train. That you will go through all the depth of your subconscious looking for what you did to this person. Because that's how we require right we're wired. Just as you can see a dog is wired not to hurt look someone in the eye who's got more power to do. We're trying very hard to please the people we're trying very hard not to be seen as a fraud and as a failure. I get that. It's true. We cannot make it go away. My argument is this: we don't do physical labor for a living anymore. Physical labor, digging ditches, carrying large sheets of metal, risking our lives fires. Most of us don't do that, most of us do emotional labor. And the question is “what is difficult about emotional labor?” It's not the free coffee and doughnuts. It's not getting whatever clothes we want to work, surfing Amazon all day waiting for Christmas presents. These are not difficult tasks. The difficult task is: confronting the fear of failure. That's what we are paid to do. That's what we are rewarded for. So when it shows up, and it's hard, when the tension shows up when the fear shows up, we don't get to say: “how do I make this easy?” just like the marathon runner doesn't get to say: “how do I make myself untired.” What we say is “oh, now it's time for me to do my work.
Greg: I love that. One thing we talk about it's the marathon runner knows that there's any pain in the process; in the last few miles. It’s where do you put the pain? So, Seth, when you're writing, you know, you're writing on this blog every single day, you're doing talks, creating all this stuff in the world. Where do you put your fear?
Seth: You know I think that over the years I have built a little bucket that it can go in. And my bucket isn't as big as some people give the credit for. There are plenty of things that I have leverage to do that I don't do. And I don't do them because I feel like it would make the bucket overflow and it would keep me from doing the work I want to do. You know, writing a blog, post every day that gets read by a lot of people is a privilege. But I'm not sure that I could sustain that if, I had to do it live with comments and anonymous people criticizing me and putting it on periscope or meerkat or something. All of those things all of those things would add up in my head home now adding that would overflow the bucket. So what I have done, what the most creative people I know have done is: Not insulated themselves from the fear, but over time gradually built a bigger bucket.
Greg: You kind of whittled away at the things and the spaces where fear can come into it sounds like, by paring down. I asked...I asked our little Facebook group and the Ruckusmakers if they had any questions to ask You. And one of one of the questions I got was: how do you deal with or what are the specific strategies or tactics to deal with fear and overwhelm?
Seth: Well, the key word is deal with. You know I think better word is dance with. Dealing with implies you know: you deal with termites by exterminating them. You don't deal with fear you dance with fear. Here it comes again what am I gonna do with it that makes a benefit happen, that helps people? So that could be things like you know when I went to business school with Chip Conley all those years ago Chip started a group of five of us every Tuesday in the anthropology department which met down the street from the Stanford business school so we knew Tuesday from 6 to 9 we were going to be in a room where the only thing that ever happen in that room was a positive, brave, exciting brainstorming session about business models and probably thirty times the five of us met for three hours and the minute you walked into the room all you felt like was a creative powerhouse. Because that's all it ever happened in that room, no criticism, no failure, no truth of the market, just “that’s what we do here.” So we can create these rituals these places these moments where we do it on a regular basis and we can make ourselves more afraid of not doing it then we are of fear.
Greg: What are your daily kind of rituals? I want to be careful cuz I know that every creative does their own thing their own way. So I'm not asking for a template but you've also talked about how we kinda can pull out some of the choices and making more automatic it makes it a little more seamless. So I'm curious if you have any rituals that the help you.
Seth: Yeah you know like in my new book Your Turn. I have a rant about Stephen King's pencil. Because people are always asking Stephen King what kind of pencil he uses? And it doesn't matter one bit. And I love hearing the sound of my own voice and I could go on for hours about my ritual and I'm not going to tell you any of them because they don't matter.
Greg: So I’d like to go somewhere I’d like to play with you a little bit are you ok with that? So we finish the sentence: Bravery is ____?
Seth: Overrated
Greg: Alright so tell me a little bit about that.
Seth: We can say he's so brave or she's so brave. One of the reasons we say that is cuz we can point out how special it is to be brave and therefore let ourselves off the hook. Bravery is for heroes, bravery is for people with special DNA, you know wasn't Steve Jobs brave to launch the iPhone. NO actually any of us could choose to be in a place where we do things that other people think our brave and if we overate bravery put it up there with artistic genius let ourselves or others off the hook. No, bravery is for everybody.
Greg: So it give us a way to hide as kind of being a labeler. Seth: Yeah.
Greg: You tell a story about when you started off and book publishing and your first day you know you submit the book it it's great yet, it's a five thousand dollar deal, it is accepted and then you go through something like 900, 850 or 900 rejection letters after that. What were you thinking when you sent out the 901st proposal?
Seth: So this is actually the one that chip and I did together the very first so chip got 2500 and I got 2500. In those days a laser printer was too expensive to buy. So I would have to walk down the street and pay a $1 to print out a page of a proposal. So I would try to make proposals shorter cuz I didn't have enough dollars to print out long proposals and I think that what happened around 900th, 800th submission was I started to learn what people were resonating with, and it's that learning that separates the annoying jerk from the person who's on their way. That I wasn't sending the same bad proposal out again and again and again. I knew my proposals were getting better, and I knew why they were getting better, and I knew if I could just keep getting them to get better it was gonna work because I was sending the proposals to people for a living read proposals and I was sending it to an industry that for a living bought the kind of thing I was selling. And those are two key elements to what we have to do if we're trying to bootstrap our way forward to many people hide by trying to sell the unsellable to people who don't buy what they're selling anyway. And say “well yeah but I made 400 calls today.” Well no you spammed 400 people who didn't want to hear from you. But even though I had 30 people who had rejected me 30 times those thirty people almost all of them wanted to hear my next idea. Almost all of them had interacted with me enough that they knew that one day I was gonna have something they wanted to buy and it's that listening that we see so rarely on the internet you know if you tweet the same stupid way four hundred times in a row don't think that the four hundred and first one's gonna work because no one here is waiting for you to do that. But if you can figure out where the threads are and follow them and earn the privilege ‐ and I've never seen anything but a privilege ‐ the privilege to pitching people that want to be pitched then you can keep going.
Greg: I’m getting this kind of image as you are talking about the thread analogy almost when you’re doing something that might not work you're kind of in a dark room looking for the door and you can kind of keep banging your head against the wall or you can reach out and try to figure out and each tim you get more information about where the doorway might be and I guess that's why it's so important to at least accept that failure is part of the process can you reach out the first time you probably are not going to grab the doorknob right away the first time.
Seth: Yeah. And to take your analogy one step further, you know, it's really about sonar. Sonar, as you get close to the various things, gives you a hint about what's ahead and that sonar doesn't mean you can’t see the door but it means you are getting proprioceptive feedback that lets you understand where you are in the room.
Greg: Ok so that's interesting. So people listening and I'm curious too. How do you develop that sonar? Seth: I think you develop that sonar by learning how to sell.
Greg: Ok.
Seth: I learned how to sell by selling ice cream sandwiches when I was 15 at the high school cafeteria and then I started a ski club when I was 15 1⁄2, 16 and then I used to sell the lessons that I need to teach about summer camp in Canada and then I started selling posters when I got the college on the first day of school I landed all these posters on the school commons and you could see which posters people wanted to buy you could look people in the eye you could understand, oh when I put this sort of thing in front of someone this is the sort of thing they do and I learned the hard way what it was to talk to someone who wanted to buy but didn't wanna buy what I had, and I learned how to judge accurately the difference between someone who says they're not interested and someone who truly is not interested and selling face‐to‐face is underrated and super valuable if you can do it in a way where you are welcome.
Greg: You know I’m a coach and, in a way you know the coaches, a lot of coaches get into the game because they wanted to serve people and help and be great coaches and a lot of it is selling obviously because you have to get a client in front of you and selling I think one of things you say is selling can be great market research you know working with people in that way because then you can scale it and do the marketing thing. But a lot of the people who succeed as entrepreneurs early on that I see are great at sales to start off and they just gotta get that one.
Seth: Right and acupuncturist can also be good at sales even though the acupuncturist doesn't have to stand outside waiving all her needles around and saying “may I poke you?” The fact is you go back to the acupuncturist the second time not because she put the needles in the right place you go back the second time because she sold the service to you in a way to makes you want it again.
Greg: So I would like to flip back to bravery briefly because it seems like there's, there's kind of two views. There's the bravery is overrated and I'm hearing that and then there's the bravery is something that all of us can have too. It also kind of seems important if it's, if we define bravery as dancing with fear in some way. So do you think bravery can be cultivated?
Seth: Oh you bet! Where else is it gonna come from?
Greg: So how do you cultivate bravery what are some strategies that you've seen our that you’ve used.
Seth: Well okay. Let's understand that in an industrial real life or death scale we know that the Navy SEALs figure out how to turn people who are average into people who are brave beyond measure so given time and money we can force people into this, we can brainwash them into being brave. So let’s leave out guns and crazy things like that and say “yeah but how do I become brave?” And I think it's pretty straightforward: you become generous first.
Greg: Ok tell me more.
Seth: If you can figure out how to become relentlessly generous in a way that changes people around you for the better, in a way that benefits them without benefiting you in any visible way and you get hooked on that then the next thing you're gonna wanna do is be even more generous and the only way to be even more generous is to do something that might not work. We become more generous by putting yourself out there to way that might not work. So we can agree that mother Teresa was one of the bravest people of our generation, right? But she never made a penny. Bravery doesn't mean closing the sale, bravery means how far can you go on behalf of someone else. And too often people who are in some small way broken aren't willing to be generous until after they are “successful” until after they are “well off” but the way you become successful and sometimes even well of is by being relentlessly generous.
Greg: What scares you?
Seth: You know it varies over time in this stage of my life the thing that scares me the most about my work is not doing it justice. You know I've got half an hour with you will this be the best podcast I ever did I'm certainly trying for that and if I fail at that I will be disappointed with myself for not having the guts to put myself into it. More people read my blog then in a long time, will I waste it? Tomorrow I got a chance to talk to people in this case April Fools. Will I waste this 2015 April Fools can I do it justice I'm afraid of letting that opportunity go by.
Greg: Sound like the fear changes cuz that pressure that you feel now is try different than when you just get started off, you kind of have others fears that kind of it will this even work in general.
Seth: Yeah and then in between is the huge brown fear of being found out to be a fraud because the fact is if you were not bending steel or digging ditches you are fraud. That what right does Greg have to be talking to people about bravery he is not brave all the time? What right does Seth Godin have to talk about anything because the number of failures is right there and it's huge. I’ve failed more than most people you know we don't always have a right to do any of this stuff it's all just a bunch of hu ha that we do with each other in a way that's as generous as we can but if, you know, some inquiring reporter wants to write an expose day to prove that we're fraud they will succeed because at some level we are all vulnerable and we're all human. And the way you can be called out on that is by someone saying “you're not as blank as you think you are” because the only way to leap, the only way to make a difference, is to be better at “whatever” than we think we are.
Greg: Why did you write this book What To Do When It's Your Turn. Why you write it?
Seth: I think paper is important. I think words and pictures matter and I think that culture is changed more than ever from the bottom up. That when Clark Gable took off her shirt in a movie and wasn’t wearing a t‐shirt, t‐shirt that sales plummeted. That's top‐down culture change. Culture change now is that Greg tells fifty people about this book and Susan gives three of her friends a copy and I've been studying the world of publishing for my whole professional life and bookstores are broken and I miss them and publishing is floundering and I love those people. We need to figure out a way to keep changing the culture, so it struck me this was a moment in time when I could speak up without using a blog post in a way that would have more leverage to change the people I care about.
Greg: Looking at it more broadly, cuz I love that, why do you do what you do in general?
Seth: Um, you know work is a practice now for many of us. If you've got a roof over your head and are making a decent living you still have a hundred hours a week when you're not asleep or at work. And the question is “what will we do with that time?” and for me the practice, I’m not practicing medicine and sometimes, you know, I get to be in front of people that practice helping the culture change in a way that I'm proud of is, I think, an interesting way to spend my days it would make I hope my mom proud and it's a privilege and I don't want to walk away from them just sit on the beach and I don't think I'd be any good at playing the stock market, so this seems to me like a useful use of my time.
Greg: I love it. In your book The Dip, one of the main ideas is that being number one you disproportionately get more rewards and more respect and you have more power to be generous the number to your number three and so it's about being the best in your world and however you define world. A lot of the people in my audience and me all the time we have trouble kind defining what do we want that world to be an uncovering what that little world is and that’s sort of the game in a way. What advice would you give to someone who's a year in or two years and and its still kinda thrashing around and defining what is that world that I want to change or do you do that right up front or do you never really find out?
Seth: You know about this the other day. The smallest possible world that could sustain you is the world you can choose. So my job when I started being a book packager was among the world of 30 people how could I be seen as the best at making complicated books like almanacs. Just thirty people that's the whole world, or when I started writing for Fast Company the entire world were the hundred thousand subscribers of Fast Company. That's all I wanted was those hundred thousand people to open the magazine to my page first and then to Xerox what I wrote and give it to people who weren't in my world cuz that would expand it. Right when I started blogging which is right during the Fast Company days the number of people who were reading content on the internet and were seeking change at work and were part of the drive that you and I are now part of. How many people was that? A hundred thousand two hundred thousand it wasn't a billion and so being the best blogger for those people wasn't to daunting cuz they were only 12 other people who were trying to be the best blogger for those people so then when twitter shows up, twitter is daunting because it looks like you need to tweet to 200 million potential people. Well I didn’t go on Twitter cuz I said to myself, “To do the work that would make me the best at using Twitter I will have to stop doing something else. What do I want to give up that I’m already good at so that I won't be mediocre at this?” And almost everyone who tweets on Twitter is mediocre by definition, right? By definition one state of deviation is ninety‐three percent. Ninety three percent of the people on Twitter are mediocre at using Twitter because they're putting in a little but if you're willing, the way Chris Brogan did a bunch of years ago, to answer every single @ message to do this to do this to you could be the best in the world for this community at that. Laura Fitton, Pistachio, became the best little world at her niche and transformed that into a company which she sold we she transformed into a great job blah blah so again, minimum viable audience, as my friends copyblogger say, minimum viable audience.
Greg: So is that little world they are trying to change is that the same as a niche or do you see them as different?
Seth: You know the word niche first came out in the popular business culture from Trout and Reese’s book Positioning. Find a niche and fill it, find and a slot in the prospects brain where you can be right next to someone else's and fill an existing spot. They have a lot in common my take is this. If you say to people “find a small and niche” they feel like they're compromising and trading down. What I wanted to say with a very similar strategy is “the whole world that cares is your niche.” It’s not everyone it’s just the world that cares, treat different people differently, find the weird, find the edges, those people are your niche. Niche is not defined by you it is defined by them and I think that's a huge distinction. This group do they see each other when they look in the mirror, do they say we all have this problem because if they see it and then you show up with that language they will see you as the person who can help them.
Greg: So same with tribes the tribe already kind of exists and you just uncovered it. Awesome thank you Seth. I’m going to respect your time and let you go. I have one more question for you from another rocket maker is kind of a fun one. So what's the most creative or thoughtful expression of gratitude that you've ever received from a client friend or colleague?
Seth: Without doubt it is when someone reports to me how they took what they learned and did something with it that benefited people in ways I never could have expected. That they have saved lives, built institutions, taught people, built schools, raised money, started organizations, hired people in ways that I didn't say “go do that then this will happen” they took some tools I gave them, added some insight on their part, and built something that transformed their part of the culture. That is what I wake up hoping will happen every single day that is the legacy I am seeking. Not, “who did I teach?” but “the people I taught, who did they teach?”
Greg: Well you’ve definitely done that for me so thank you Seth. I encourage everyone to go out and check out Seth’s stuff at SethGodin.com, pick up his book and get some for some friends. Seth, we’ll will talk soon.
Seth: Thanks Greg, we'll see you later.
