Hey, it’s Marie Forleo and you are watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business
and life you love.
And today you are in for such a treat because my guest is one of the most insightful and
honest and prolific teachers of our time.
Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the
world, and a maker of ruckuses.
He’s been on the internet since 1976, invented permission based email, founded two significant
net companies, and defines his working life by the many projects he’s launched, the
failures he has learned from, and the people he’s taught.
His latest is the altMBA, an intense workshop that helps people level up in a way that truly
lasts.
Find out more about the course at altMBA.com.
You can learn more about Seth and his blog by typing Seth into Google.
Seth, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.
I want to say before we get into the interview, thank you for your body of work over the years.
You have made such a tremendous impact on me personally, on my team, on so many people
that I know, and I think you and I both share a tremendous love of books and I want you
to know that any time I ever find myself feeling like a little stuck or in self doubt or just
any stage of going, like, “Ugh.”
I reach into my bookshelf and undoubtedly yours is one of the books that comes out to
get me back on track.
That’s so nice of you to say.
It’s the truth.
And I want you to…
Thank you.
That means the world to me.
I want you to hear it.
Now, you said something in your most recent book that I thought was brilliant.
In Your Turn, you think that we’re wasting the chance of a lifetime.
So what do you mean by that and what can we do to stop?
To not do it?
There’s the external thing and the internal thing.
The external thing is this is our revolution.
We live in this moment of time when anyone with a hundred bucks can connect to a billion
and a half people around the world any time they want to.
We live in this place where we each have more leverage and a bigger platform than any human
on earth ever had before us.
And internally, if not this moment, when?
Right?
That if we’re not gonna speak up now are things gonna be easier or better a year from
now?
We wait for things to calm down, we wait for it to be the right moment, but this is the
right moment.
That we…
we look back a year in our life, 5 years ago, and we rarely say I’m disappointed that
I spoke up.
I’m disappointed that I did my art.
I’m disappointed that I connected to somebody.
We don't.
What we regret is not doing that.
So here we are in this moment of high leverage and all we can do is watch cat videos and
whine about our boss and I just…
I think we can do better than that.
I agree.
And one thing that I appreciate about you, you know, we got to spend some time together
on Necker Island and I also wanted to say this.
You know, having admired your work for so long and who you are, you’re one of those
people who’s like a hundred times better in real life than you are even in your work,
and your work is freaking extraordinary.
And one of the things that I remember most about spending time with you there was how
challenging you were in the best sense of that word.
Like, “Marie, you should sit at the front of the table.
Marie, you should do that.”
And I was like, “What’s…?
Oh my God, Seth Godin is telling me what to do,” and I loved every second of it because
it was done in such a spirit of, “Hey, it’s your turn.
Go ahead.
Go do it, girl.”
And I love that.
And that’s why I love that book Your Turn.
Well, one thing I want to just insert as an aside because I’m told 5 or 10 of your fans
will be watching this?
Is in real life, you’re exactly as you appear on TV.
Like, it’s not an act that this generous, connected person is actually a generous, connected
person.
Thank you.
So I thought people might want to know that because they didn't get the chance to meet
you the way I did.
Thank you.
So a question that we get often here is from people who are struggling to figure out what
should I do with my life?
How do I find my passion or my purpose or my calling?
And you’ve said I’m not sure that anyone has a calling.
Can you speak to that?
Thank you for teeing this up.
This whole calling, passion thing is complete nonsense.
It’s… as Steven Pressfield would call it, the resistance.
Yes.
That van Gogh, if he had been born 20 years later or 20 years earlier, he wouldn’t have
done what he did.
It’s not like he...
some angel came down when he was born and said, “You’re going to become an impressionistic
painter.”
He wanted to do a thing but he didn't know what the thing was.
And if Steve Jobs had been born 20 years earlier, he would have done a different thing.
This isn’t about waiting for the right answer.
Because there is no right answer.
What there are are challenges we can sign up for and emotions we can experience.
There are kinds of engagements we can seek out and ones that we don't want to.
If you're the kind of person that only feels good when all the chips are in red 86, well
then you need to go find that kind of activity.
If you're the kind of person that would rather have a small circle of people who are committed
to you for a long time, find any variation of those activities.
But if you’re waiting for the perfect horse on that carousel to come around, you’ve
missed 3, 4, 5, 7 cycles while you’re waiting.
All the horses are just as good.
It’s the same carousel.
Just get on the damn horse.
I love that.
I… when I first started my career and I was starting to do life coaching and I was
starting to get into dance and fitness, I remember feeling when I was in front of a
fitness classroom and teaching, you know, people doing bicep curls or we were doing
hip-hop dance.
There’s a lot of that same feeling that I get even doing what I do now.
Like, connecting with people.
Even, honestly, bartending and making people drinks and talking to them about their meals
and, like, asking them who they are and getting to know them and their dreams.
There was so many threads that I have… now can see in hindsight where it was me being
me.
And who knows what’s gonna happen in another 20 or 30 years or…
And this is where the grass is greener thing gets us into so much trouble.
Because, you know, you have a sensational life, but so do some fitness instructors and
so do some bartenders.
Yes.
Your life doesn't get more sensational when you have more followers on Twitter.
That’s not what you ought to be keeping score of.
It’s does this interaction leave behind a trail that I’m proud of?
And does having the interaction make me glad that I did it and want to do it again?
And, you know, so I know people who run nonprofits and some of them are big and some of them
are small and they’re getting equal amounts of satisfaction because bigger isn’t the
point.
More isn’t the point.
Yes.
And when we, you know, are there bad ideas?
There are tons of bad ideas.
I’m not saying all ideas are equally good.
What I’m saying is finding a thing that works is sufficient and that’s the challenge.
So entrepreneurs, for example.
Too many entrepreneurs think that there’s a prize for originality.
There’s no prize for originality at all.
You should steal a different person’s idea.
You should bring something that worked in Detroit to Cleveland because you don't have
to worry about apologizing and saying, “Well, yeah, I went to a muffin store in Detroit
that works so I brought it to Cleveland.”
So what?
What matters is now there’s someone in Cleveland who’s engaging with you, buying something
from you that gives both of you pleasure.
And there are so many places where we need more of something.
No one’s asking you to be that person who invents something that never existed before.
What we’re asking you to do is choose to matter in a way that aligns with who you want
to be.
Yeah.
And I think it’s also important to talk about this idea how you do things matters.
You know, thinking about the bartending days.
We were having lunch before, all the people on the crew, we’re just recalling folks,
like there was a valet person who I met in Venice in California.
This guy was amazing and he brought such light to what he did and lit up… and I’m still
talking about him and this is years later.
But the level of excellence and joy.
And someone else was talking about these two pizza guys, like the banter they would do
makes you want to go into the pizza store again and again.
It wasn’t even the best pizza, but you just had this quality of interaction and I think
so many people miss that looking for the holy grail of a perfect purpose.
Right.
And what they’re actually looking for is a way to hide by saying I’m looking for
the perfect purpose.
I went to business school with a guy who said he was waiting for the right moment to start
his entrepreneurial venture.
That was 27 years ago.
Wow.
Right?
That I started so many bad ones along the way, but sooner or later you’re going to
stumble into one that you're glad you did.
Yeah.
So you run one of the most popular blogs in the world.
We all love it.
You publish every day and you’ve said it’s one of the top 5 career decisions you’ve
ever made.
Why?
Even if no one read it, I would blog every day.
I think everyone should do so.
And here’s the reason.
If you know that tomorrow you have to say something about something you noticed, about
something that might help someone else, about an opinion you have that might stand the test
of time, you will form those opinions, you will notice those things, you will invent
that idea.
And if day after day week after week you leave this trail behind of thoughtful examination
of your world, you can’t help but get better at whatever it is you seek to do.
And if as a byproduct other people read it and trust you more, that’s a jackpot.
Right?
My goal is not to have more readers.
My goal is not to sell more books.
My goal is to be trusted in a way that I can make the change that I seek to have happen
in the world.
Return on trust.
How do you gain permission to talk to people in a way that they want to be talked to?
You don't do that with SEO and with gaming social media strategies.
You do that by showing up in a way that you’d want someone to show up for you.
And I still don't understand why people don't do this.
I think…
not that I’ll get the answer right, but I wanted to ask this on behalf of I know so
many people who will be like, “Marie, please ask him this.”
What I know from my interaction with our audience is sometimes people feel so afraid of being
judged or they’re going to run out of ideas.
Yeah, they should.
Yeah.
Those are all the things.
Being judged sucks.
Right?
So write it under somebody else’s name.
Right?
That… call yourself anything you want.
Talan Stone writing this blog.
No one knows on the internet if you’re a dog.
You just post every day and you can’t possibly get in trouble because it’s not you.
And after you’ve done it for 6 weeks, you know what you’re gonna do?
You’re gonna put your name on it because you’re so proud of what you’re creating.
Are you gonna run out of ideas?
Well, here’s my thought on this.
I write like I talk.
And nobody I know gets talkers block.
Nobody.
No one wakes up and goes… unable to speak.
So if you write like you talk, don't worry.
Because you haven’t run out of things to say yet, so you won't run out of things to
blog.
Do you ever in your own mind, because you’ve been doing this how many years now have you
been blogging, roughly?
Well, before it was called a blog I would say the first email newsletter went out in
1990.
I love that.
So 26 years or so.
That is so awesome.
I remember when I first started doing email marketing it was like 1999, 2000 and it was
woah and, like, PDFs, ebooks, that was like mind blowing.
It was so cool.
Isn’t that great?
So few people saw what you saw.
That, you know, they went ahead and they bought stock in bookstores and they went ahead and
thought, “This just has to keep going in the direction it’s going.”
In hindsight, once you put words and then video onto the internet, it has to change
everything.
Our culture was based on scarce TV channels, scarce spectrum, scarce bookshelf space, and
we blew up all 3 of those.
And of course it’s changing.
Right?
All the way up to presidential politics.
It changes everything when you take the scarcity away.
And the amazing thing is it’s happening in all of our lifetimes.
Usually a change like this, Gutenberg comes out with this thing, Gutenberg’s thing didn't
change most of the world for decades.
Right?
It enabled Martin Luther and ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.
But it takes a long time.
This happens like that.
Yeah.
I’m always thinking in my mind, like what is 2030 or 2035 gonna look like?
I get fascinated with, like, the Ray Kurzweil and all that stuff and I can go deep down
that rabbit hole.
But it is, it’s a really exciting time.
So curious, if that was one of the top 5 career decisions, is there any others?
Well, I think that I adopted a practice of intentionally seeking out things I was wrong
about.
And I learned this the hard way, it cost me over a hundred billion dollars, which is a
lot of money.
That’s a lot of money.
So I was on the internet before there was a world wide web and when the web came along
I said this is stupid.
It’s just like Prodigy, which most people here don't even know what that was.
That was before AOL, it was an online service.
Just like Prodigy except it’s slower and there’s no business model.
It’ll never work.
And so for months my internet company didn't have a website, didn't buy up all the cool
domains.
Business.com went for 7 million dollars, we could have bought it for 10… 10 dollars.
And we didn't do any of the things that would’ve helped us a lot because I believed it didn't
make sense.
So I have adopted this practice of on a regular basis finding a topic that I’m sure about
and describing out loud to a trusted person why I’m wrong.
Taking the other side.
Arguing in detail what could happen that would make me wrong.
And what it is helping me with is not becoming wishy washy and never making a decision, but
every once in a while feeling that feeling, and it almost makes a noise when you do it
of the brain flipping to a different way of looking at the world.
And that flipping is essential if we live in revolutionary times, and I think we do
now.
So an example, I have spent time with people in the record business.
And when you talk to someone 10 or 15 years ago in the record business about how it was
all gonna end and it did end, like 2 years ago.
They would just yell at you and argue with you and throw you out of the office.
I’d been thrown out of some great offices.
But every once in awhile you’ll see someone say back to you your words as if they believe
them.
And every once in awhile they’ll go, “Yeah,” and then you can just hear the noise.
And that person now can just clear the table because all their competitors don't believe
it and they do and that is a really useful practice in small and in the big.
So do you find yourself doing that regularly when you’re considering taking on a project
or looking at what you want to do next?
You know, I am not a good role model for how to take on the next project.
I spend way too much time in the pre-committal stage.
What do you mean?
Well, so I wrote a book called The Dip, which is all about why quitting is a useful tactic,
but that you should never quit when it gets hard.
Don't quit your gym in February if you joined in January.
If you’re gonna do that, don't even join.
Right?
But quit before you start or quit once you’ve realized it’s a dead end.
But quitting in the key moment is the wrong idea.
Well, quitting before you start means outline the plan, act as if, describe what could happen,
and then you’re either in, in which case you’re in to the end, or you’re not.
And in that moment, it’s really easy to just let it sit.
And sometimes I let it sit too long because I’m afraid because I don't want to commit
3, 5, 7 years of my life to building a thing.
Right?
And sometimes I lit it sit because I don't see it clearly enough.
And sometimes I let it sit because, in fact, it was a bad idea.
Right?
And other people are better at pulling the trigger and saying go.
I used to be better at it, but as the stakes have risen and as the amount of time I have
to spend a decade on a project goes down, I’m more hesitant to commit, and that’s
not necessarily a good practice.
I need to get back into that spirit of how do I pick among three and really commit?
And go for it.
Let’s talk productivity, since we’re kind of going right around there, and your ability
to devote time to things that matter.
So there are times for me, like, for example, we were talking off camera before we sat on
set about how, like, earlier this particular year for me was crushing.
Like, there…
I just got buried.
There was B-School, we launched a new website, I was doing this Oprah talk, and I remember…
I heard the Oprah talk was great.
Thank you.
I’ll send you a link.
But my email was out of…
I felt horrible because I care about people and it was just like this long, you know,
I’m like, “Oh, God, somebody help me.”
And I’m curious to hear from you over the years, even if it’s current or before, how
you manage?
Because you’re such a thoughtful person, you create so much, and as our world continues
to get more connected and there’s more kind of avenues in.
I know you’re not on Twitter and you keep comments off, so that’s one thing.
But even email, how do you manage to not get buried by it?
And even broader in all your projects, you know, making sure that you have the time for
your creative thinking but also for Helene and for the kids.
Alright, so there’s boxes within boxes within boxes, so let me try to decode it a little
bit.
The first thing I’ll say is that productivity is an economic measure of how much you output
for the amount of time and resources you put in.
Some people have figured out how to be naturally more productive than others per minute, and
the way you do that is by having an instinct to ship, not an instinct to polish, to be
perfect, to justify you’re not shipping.
That most people hesitate to ship not because it’s not ready but because they’re afraid.
So I did a poster about a year ago called buzzer management.
We’ll put a link to it below.
That’s how you win at Jeopardy.
The people who win at Jeopardy aren’t better than the people who lose at Jeopardy except
in one thing, they press the buzzer before anybody else.
And the only way to press the buzzer before everyone else is to press the buzzer before
you’re sure you know the answer.
So as your brain is thinking maybe I can get it… now you press the buzzer.
And in that last moment you’re going to come up with something.
Right?
So you agreed to do your Oprah talk.
Was it done the day you agreed to do it?
Oh, hell no.
But you pressed the buzzer.
I did.
Right?
You pressed the buzzer, which is going to require…
so do I have a blog post coming out tomorrow?
I do.
I actually pressed the buzzer 10 years ago.
So I know that’s gonna happen.
So I’m apparently super productive because I’m good at buzzer management.
I’m good at saying I have this much time and there will be a thing when I’m done.
Most people hesitate to do that because they’re afraid.
So that’s the first thing I’ll say.
Secondly is once you’ve been busy pressing the buzzer, now you have to say to yourself,
“What am I not going to do in order to be able to do that?”
So this is about making promises and keeping them.
So I’m not going to say to somebody please go ahead, engage with me in this level and
I will get back to you, because maybe I can’t.
I don't go to meetings.
I don't watch television.
So right there I save 7 hours that most people waste every single day.
That 7 hours gives me a lot of space to do things that make me seem insanely productive.
Right?
Because I’m not doing these other things.
Other people really should go to meetings.
Other people really should watch TV.
That will make them productive in the way they seek to be productive.
I'm just saying you pick.
So Twitter was easy for me because I said to myself, if I’m going to do Twitter I
should commit to it.
There’s a dip.
And if I commit I should figure out how to be really good at it.
If I’m gonna be really good at it, I’m going to have to give up something else.
So what do I want to be less good at that I’m good at now so I could be good at Twitter?
And I looked at what I thought would be the upsides of that and I said, “I don't wanna
give up anything I’m good at to be good at Twitter.”
Done.
And I never have reconsidered it since because I don't need to.
And there are other areas where I have said, you know what?
I’m going to give up this part of my thing to do that thing instead.
But we have to acknowledge we have finite resources, finite time, finite connection.
How will we use them to produce outcomes that we’re proud of?
And the worst thing to do, in the words of Zig Ziglar, are to be a wandering generality.
What you need to be is a meaningful specific.
That means you have to claim it, you have to put yourself on the spot, you have to make
a promise and say I do this.
You can count on me.
That’s what you’re gonna get from me.
I love it.
Ok, any email tips from you?
Because that…
The most important email tip.
Tell me.
Do not send Seth Godin email.
Yeah.
I mean, you know that…
Just don't send me email.
Don’t.
That’s the most important tip.
I love it.
Like, let’s just leave it right there.
That’s perfect.
There you go.
Disappointments and setbacks.
So they come up with work, they come up with business, they come up with our life.
And I feel like one of the themes that I’ve seen throughout your work over the years is
having people be really comfortable with failures and setbacks and all the twists and turns.
Can you talk a little bit about that journey?
We have a lot of people in our audience who are just starting out.
I feel like there’s so much fear about if they fail or if things are going to flop and
you always have such a great point of view on it.
I used to think that Monopoly was a good board game and I, in fact, invented Godin Monopoly,
which you can find the rules for online.
But I thought it was good.
At one point, my kids and I were so good at it we could play it in the car without the
board.
We just knew where all the properties were and we would roll the dice in our head and
do the whole thing.
Wow.
Monopoly is not a good board game.
I’ve come to that conclusion.
But there’s a good lesson here and the lesson is this: unless you’re 4 years old if you
lose at Monopoly I think you realize it’s not personal.
Right?
It was a game.
You didn't get the rolls you needed, maybe you made a couple of strategy mistakes, but
you can play again tomorrow.
It's not about you.
Don't have a tantrum.
Don't turn the board over and don't beat yourself up.
It’s just a game.
So what if we take that mindset, which is very adult and very mature and works for us,
and apply it to what happens if your book proposal doesn't get sold or apply it to what
happens if no one responds to the comment you posted under this thing.
In all of these things.
You didn't get a promotion.
Well, that’s a little bit like landing on Park Place when someone else has an apartment
there.
Sorry, but it’s not necessarily about you.
We are playing this game with 1.5234 billion other people, moving pieces around, contributing,
investing, sometimes landing on other properties, figuring out what to roll next.
Right?
If you can look at it that way, the question is will you be better at the game or will
you be worse at the game?
And what we know is, you will be better at the game.
You will be better at the game because you can approach it with joy and you can approach
it without being locked up in intense fear.
Right?
And so isn’t that the goal, to be better at the game?
Yes.
So we can be mindful, we can be present, we can breathe and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.”
And that answer, that’s interesting, is so much better than, “Oh my God, I’m never
getting it and then that’s gonna happen and that’s gonna happen and that’s gonna
happen and then I’m gonna be dead.”
Because we all fear being dead, but we don't have to fear being dead every time the phone
rings.
Every time we get the little tweet sound, it actually isn’t fatal.
So don't act like it’s fatal.
I love it.
You have a recent post called The Momentum Myth and so I want to talk books and launches
and consistency for a moment.
I loved the graphic, we’ll put it up here, the cumulative sales from your recent book
It’s Your Turn.
And you wrote, “Fast starts are never as important as a cultural hook, consistently
showing up, and committing to a process.”
So many folks that I get a chance to interact with, I feel like they’re like I want it
now and I’m like you have no idea how long it takes.
So I was wondering if you could speak to…
So let’s talk about the worst name ever for an internet company: Kickstarter.
It should be called KickFinisher.
Because people, like, come up with some cool idea, they put it on Kickstarter, and they
hassle every single person they know to get whatever promo they can.
It’s urgent, it’s urgent, it’s urgent.
That’s not how it works.
You actually start 4 years, 6 years beforehand.
You build a network.
You pay it forward into the community.
You are trusted, you are liked.
And then the Kickstarter is easy because you just whisper to people, “Oh, yeah.
You know me and the thing I do?
It’s ready.”
That’s the end.
It wasn’t the big launch, it’s the big finish because it’s the end.
So the Kickstarter I did for Icarus and the others, we hit our goal in 180 minutes because
I took 10 years actually before I pressed the button, not 10 minutes.
Right?
Yes.
And so this approach that we have in social media of, and we learned it from NPR.
Right?
So NPR, we’re listening on drivetime and they come out and basically they say if you
don't pull over and send us 50 dollars now we’re going off the air in 7 minutes.
Like it’s an emergency.
That’s the only way they know how to raise money from us on the air.
So we think that’s what we have to do with when we launch anything.
When we have a new tweet or when we write a new book.
Emergency!
Everyone go get it right now.
But when we look at the people we admire, the Brene Browns and the Gretchen Rubins and
people like you, that’s not how they did it.
None of them.
None of them did it this way.
So it turns out the long way is the shortcut.
Seth, you have such a fantastic phrase around raising kids called raising free-range kids.
Can you tell us about what that means?
So I did a free ebook that turned into a TED talk, TEDX talk, called Stop Stealing Dreams.
And the idea is we fail to ask a key question as taxpayers, as parents, as educators, and
the question is what is school for?
We keep running this multibillion dollar operation, trillion dollar operation, but we don't ask
what it’s for.
I know what it used to be for.
What it used to be for was to train obedient factory workers.
We didn't have enough, so we built this system on purpose to train kids to sit for 9 hours,
to do what they were told, to learn how to use a number 2 pencil, and on and on and on.
And it worked.
We got plenty of factory workers who were compliant, who would put up with all sorts
of nonsense in a dark room for 8 hours for a paycheck once a week.
We also taught people how to consume, because that was the other big problem.
In 1920 the average kid owned 2 pairs of pants and one pair of shoes.
Right?
You don't know a human being who owns 2 pairs of pants and one pair of shoes anymore because
we needed to train people to fill their closets with stuff, and we did that at school.
So what is school for now, right?
Is school to cocoon our kids and to keep them ultra safe and to make sure nothing bad ever
happens to them and to train them to go to the placement office when it’s time to look
for a job and to go to a famous college and go a quarter of a million dollars in debt?
And blah blah blah.
I’m ranting.
Well, I think we agree it’s not for that.
Right.
So what is it for?
I think it’s for two things: teach people to lead and teach them to solve interesting
problems.
And the way you do that is by teaching kids to fail at solving interesting problems because
that’s the only way you ever get good at solving interesting problems.
That this idea of failing.
Failing and getting lost on the subway and finding your way home, failing when you put
up a blog post.
And if you’re 12 I hope it’s under another name, but putting it up there and no one likes
it.
Failing to get your Wikipedia edits approved.
Once we get into this habit of realizing it’s not fatal, then we get back to that whole
Monopoly with, like, we are adults trying to undo the damage that all that well meaning
training did.
Well, let’s change the well meaning training, shall we?
And instead say what it means to be a free-range kid is coming home with straight A’s is
fine, I’ll accept that, but what I’d rather have you do is come home and tell me something
amazing that you learned in the spirit of doing something good for someone else.
Come home and tell me some really dramatic failure that occurred as you are trying to
solve an interesting problem.
Don't come home and say I did the chemistry lab and it came out perfect.
Come home and say I did the chemistry lab and something exploded.
Because now you’ve learned something that doesn't work and realized that that exploration
pays off over and over and over.
Love it.
One other thing you said before we wrap up is one of the only metrics you care about
when you're considering work you’re doing is will people miss you if you’re gone.
Can you talk about how we can use this metric or perhaps other questions like that as we
continue to grow into our careers and into our bodies of work to help us keep on track
with doing work that matters?
Well, so let’s start with email and work our way into the more serious stuff.
What’s definition of permission marketing?
The definition of permission marketing is if you didn't send that email tomorrow, that
blast, I hate that word…
Me too.
...would people call and complain?
Where is it?
They would if you didn't send it.
The would if I didn't send it.
What would happen if Banana Republic didn't send it?
No one would call.
No one would say, “Wait a minute.
Where’s my 8th savings coupon of the week?”
So that’s not permission.
Permission is the privilege of being looked forward to and being missed if you were gone.
And we can work all our way up there in terms of are we showing up with the generosity and
the presence that people begin to count on us, that they look forward to us being there?
So the studio is right upstairs from the City Bakery, which has been there for 25 years.
If Mari stopped having the salad bar tomorrow, there’d be an outcry.
Right?
There’s 18 places within 3 blocks of here to get a salad.
Those places could get rid of the salad bar, no one would mind.
But his place, it matters to some people.
And the key part of the equation is not just matters, but some people.
None of us will ever matter to everyone.
Fascinating, I was in a health food store last night and there was a song from Wings
on the radio.
And I said to the 28 year old cash register clerk, I said, “You know who’s singing?”
She said no, but I’ve heard the song a thousand times.
I said, “I’ll give you a hint, it was one of the Beatles.”
And she… and I said, “You know who the Beatles are, right?”
And she said, yes.
I said, “Can you name them?”
And she couldn’t.
And, in fact, most people who are 28 can’t say John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
That… the most famous musical group of all time doesn't last forever with everyone.
Our goal isn’t to touch everyone, our goal is to touch someone, to change someone.
Just one person.
If you get good at that, then do 5, then do 100.
But stop worrying about everyone.
Everyone doesn't matter.
Seth Godin, you are amazing.
Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
It was wonderful.
Thanks.
Now Seth and I would love to hear from you.
What’s the biggest insight that you’re taking away from this episode?
Now, as always, insight without action is worthless.
So also tell us what’s the single most important action you can take from that insight to put
it into practice in your business.
Now, as always, the best conversations happen after the episode over at MarieForleo.com,
so go there and leave a comment now.
Once you’re there, be sure to subscribe and become an MF Insider.
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Thank you so much for watching and I’ll catch you next time on MarieTV.
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I write like I talk.
And nobody I know gets talkers block.
Nobody.
No one wakes up and goes… unable to speak.
So if you write like you talk, don't worry.
Because you haven’t run out of things to say yet, so you won’t run out of things
to blog.