Metadata
- Author: The Tim Ferriss Show
- Full Title: #476: Seth Godin on the Game of Life, the Value of Hacks, and Overcoming Anxiety
- Category:
- URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/5f9726cb7a9ace326a5503bd
Highlights
But perfectionism has nothing to with Perfect and Perfect doesn’t have a lot to do with quality. So quality has a very specific definition. It comes from Edwards, Deming and the rest of the quality movement of the forties and fifties. The people who gave us the Toyota and what it means is meets Spec, That’s it meets spec. And so if I said, What’s a better quality car, Toyota Corolla or Rolls Royce? The answer is a Toyota, because the Toyota Meet spec. It more reliably does exactly what it’s supposed to do when it’s supposed to do it than Rolls Royce does. Rolls Royce is a different thing. It’s luxury. It’s ostentatious. Spending of resource is to create something most people can’t (Time 0:11:27)
Toyota Corolla or Rolls Royce? The answer is a Toyota, because the Toyota Meet spec. It more reliably does exactly what it’s supposed to do when it’s supposed to do it than Rolls Royce does. Rolls Royce is a different thing. It’s luxury. It’s ostentatious. Spending of resource is to create something most people can’t have. And that’s a fine thing, too, if you want it. And that kind of quality is also, uh, worth chasing if that’s what you wanted. But it’s easy to show that high fashion goods, uh, you know, luxury purses, things that we would say have quality. Don’t actually last is long as something from our EI. So again, back to meeting spec, then the third definition. (Time 0:11:51)
in the case of great Writing, great customer service, great theater the first time you experience it, the unexpected moment when lights turn on for you. I want to call that magic. So if you’ve ever been inside of Richard Sarah sculpture Dia Beacon, it’s a £2 million piece of steel. If I showed you a sketch of it, you wouldn’t get the joke. But if you saw in real life, something would change in you if you understood the genre and what came before, etcetera. So I believe that now that we’ve got a I and robots and offshoring and the rest, the work that’s left for us is the work to create magic. How do you think maybe this is (Time 0:13:44)
to make some sort of creative magic, but they were just waiting for a really good idea. I said, You mean a really good idea? Like a multimillion dollar Broadway musical based on an obscure Revolutionary War character with the entire cast played by people who aren’t traditionally cast in those roles in the soundtrack, sort of based on rap and hip hop like that kind of really great idea, not a really great idea, right? And it doesn’t work because when you read the paragraph about it, or even if you read Chernow’s book, it was obvious that this was a good idea, a good idea, because it is a Siris of moments that create tension and then relieve it. It is based on a mixing of several genres by someone who (Time 0:14:58)
well, first of all, if I’m making you miserable dinner, I apologize. That’s certainly no, no, no, no, no, you’re not. No, I love our dinners. So I think that left way left out the thing I said after I said the thing about eight months, which is where is your bad writing? And there’s no such thing as Writer’s Block, that writer’s block Israel, but it does not exist. What it really is is misnamed. I have a fear of bad writing. I have a fear of what the world will say when it encounters my bad writing. And the way through is to do your bad writing. You don’t have to ship it to the world, but you have to do the bad writing and bad writing over time. If you do, enough (Time 0:20:52)
write a book, they roll their eyes and read the whole thing. What are you proud of me? What a pain in the neck. It takes a year. Just do the other thing. And so I totally get that feeling, and this is where we lead to the second part about being conflicted, and it za small Nike riff, which is that just do it. We’re not going to go into the origin of that phrase coming from a mass murderer, But just do it impacts all that is just like a Manson family reference. Very Gilmore. Wow, I had no idea. Alright, that will be for people to research on their own. Her last thing, he said before they killed him. Wow, just do it now. You’ll never be able to unsee that image. Sorry, just do it implies what the hell. It doesn’t matter. (Time 0:22:50)
the voice. That is the deliberation that I have in my own head. And I do actually have hundreds of drafts like I have shitty stuff, but it’s never quite cross the chasm into good enough to publish. So I’ve been stymieing myself in that respect, and there’s part of me that’s like, you know what? The podcast is easier. It’s fun. I feel like it’s a craft I’m still improving on. Why don’t I just do that? There is part of me that says that, then there’s another part that says, That’s a cop out. In fact, you know, the writing helps you to learn to think as Kevin Kelly to invoke that name again, right? He writes, to think he doesn’t think and then right, and that I’m short changing myself by using perfectionism (Time 0:26:11)
me feel the way that book made me feel. And after that book came out, I felt the same way again. Which is, well, if this is the journey, I found the end of the journey, and I realized 69 months later that that was selfish, and that leads to the other key thing I wanna talk about, which is generosity. Generosity doesn’t mean free people pay for our surgeon is going to save their life generosity means that you’re expending emotional energy, emotional labor, help somebody else. And as soon as I could shift it around in my head to say, There’s somebody over there who could use a hand, then it wasn’t about me anymore, and I wasn’t (Time 0:30:40)
Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you probably won’t feel like engaging in the practice. And if you do, you probably won’t feel that way the next day that what we do is once decide. We decide that we’re a runner and runners go running every day. We decide we’re a blogger and bloggers blogged every day, and that decision lightens the cognitive load so much because there’s no time, no reason to negotiate with ourselves because we already had the meeting, we already decided. Now the question is not. Should we go or not? The question is, should we go left or right? But we’re going. Are there other macro decisions (Time 0:34:26)
that extra beat? Well, that’s a skill, and you know, whether it’s Dale Carnegie or anyone who’s followed in his footsteps, you can learn those things, and at first you seem as awkward as someone who just learned how to ride a bike, and then you don’t got it. So, uh, I should also say that just to reinforce what you’re saying, becoming a better listener and that extra beat training yourself to utilize that extra beat is absolutely a practice. I member Calif Usman, who wrote for Esquire for ages and ages and ages and has interviewed everybody. Mohammed Ali E. Think corporate chef, you name it, and his expression has let the silence do the work. Yeah, and (Time 0:40:31)
I don’t think there’s anybody who wants to argue that Joni Mitchell was a hack, nor anybody who wants toe argue that she didn’t have a huge contribution to music, but her cover of the House of the Rising Sun. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t familiar with her version of it. It just wasn’t any good. And fortunately she was patient with herself. She didn’t say, 00 I’m bad at this and then go work at a 7 11 And so where we need patience is in confronting the things we’re going to get better at and in strapping in for, ah, useful journey and where we need impatience is with our fear and with our selfishness about worrying. What’s your (Time 0:42:32)
when it finally comes, so better, I think, to merely do the work. Be generous with the work and improve our skills so we can do it again. And that gets back to Elizabeth King’s quote. You are a fantastic presenter, public speaker, teacher. Of course, these things tied together, although not all good public presenters or good teachers. But you are excellent at all those things. And remember advice I was given which I don’t follow Aziz well, as many, which is presentations, fail more often from too much information rather than too little. I think this is true books also in part of the reason why, as one instance, the four hour chef was such a (Time 0:45:45)
when you have assets, when you have a chance to go forward. And in the book, I tell the story of R E M and R. E. M was a successful college radio band that was gigging hundreds of times a year. But they were not the r m of today. They weren’t this famous, legendary band, and they made two decisions they invented to constraints before they made a new album, and the constraints were We’re going to stop touring for four months and you’d be amazed at how few bands and that constraint if you saw the Go Go’s documentary, the Go Go’s would have definitely had a half a dozen more hit albums if they had just stopped touring for three months when they were all burning out. Uh, and then the second thing they did was they switched (Time 1:04:50)
and so I had to stop and then a few years later, I did it again with squid do, which was before Pinterest and all the rest. Um And so what I’ve learned is that veering away from the next two zeros of upside is really expensive and the single best way for me to live the life I wanna live. And so I didn’t write the sequel to Permission Marketing, and I didn’t start mail chimp and I didn’t. You know, there’s all these things I could have done if I was a business builder. But I’m not a business builder. The game I’m playing is have I heard enough trust to do another generous project that I’m proud of, and if so, do I get to do it again? What other elements of the life you (Time 1:10:25)
By the way, I counted maybe 20 20. Why write this book So as you and I both know writing a book is a ridiculous venture. It takes a really long time, and then when you’re done with it, almost nobody says fantastic the way they do say, if you made a new record because when you make a record, you go, I’ll listen to it. But you make a book. They asked for a prize because they finished reading it. Um, so I only write a book when I have no choice and what makes me have no choice? Well, what I learned a really long time ago is once I (Time 1:16:21)
the learning to throw instead of catch. If someone were to ask you, how would you teach someone to be creative? And I’m asking that in a deliberately may be problematic way. But what would your answer be if they were, like, great, I get the swimming example, I get the juggling example. I want to be more creative. What’s the equivalent for becoming more creative? What would you say? It’s exactly the same, and I’ve done it many, many times. Here you go. If you wanna learn how to juggle, you have to drop an enormous number of balls. If you wanna learn how to swim, you have to sort of drown. And if you wanna learn to be creative, you have to show me an enormous number of bad ideas. Pick the smallest (Time 1:25:10)
of course it is because Marissa and the rest said, Let’s not have 183 links on the home page. Let’s have to The search results themselves weren’t that different for years. But the leap was you know what a search engine is. This is just like that search engine, except it’s different. But if they hadn’t seen Yahoo and Alta Vista, they never could have built Google. And we wouldn’t have known what to do with it if we hadn’t seen a search engine. And so what Genre says is there’s a box and I can’t think outside the box because it’s dark. But on the edges of the box, I have leverage. You got to know what the boxes before you can make a thing that is going to be seen as creative. Uh huh. (Time 1:28:55)
the year I was in Stanford, they had a master’s class. It’s a Stanford pool and I couldn’t resist. I went and this guy comes out to teach it. He’s the consultant to the U. S Olympic swim team, and he’s assisted by the coach of Stanford Swim team. His name’s Bill Boomer Bill had a very significant potbelly and one arm, and I’m like, This guy is going to teach us how to swim. And the beauty of it was It’s all about the process and not about the outcome, because you don’t get good at the outcome for a long time. And the second part when we were talking about incompetence before what you didn’t mention, is learning to (Time 1:23:16)
Keep listing your bad ideas. Let’s prove that you’re bad. Ideas are not fatal. That’s part one part two domain knowledge and genre. It is true that every once in a while, an outsider shows up with something that nobody on the inside ever thought off. But that’s not usually what happened. What usually happens is someone who has good taste decides to be willing to be creative and good taste means you know what your audience wants 10 minutes before they do, that’s all. You can’t have good taste unless you have domain knowledge and understand genre. So if you combine those two things shipping on the (Time 1:26:00)