Seth Godin: Invite the monkey for tea 🎙

Der Podcast

Invite the monkey for tea

i.e. showing up in the face of self doubt

BK: But that’s hard to do, man…

SG: Of course it is! If it wasn’t hard, there would not be a scarcity of people like you and me. This is our only hard work that we do. The only hard part.

BK: So the only hard part you are saying is to make friends with the self doubt. And to know how to put the self doubt just a little bit out of the way down the table when you are going to write. Or create. Or do whatever it is that you do.

SG: Yeah!

Criticism is a trap, because it is a way to hide

SG: Reassurance is futile. There is never enough reassurance in the world. So if you are looking for: „Everything is going to be fine, the self doubt will go away”… You can record what I just said and repeat it ten thousand times but it’s not going to be enough. Reassurance is futile, don’t look for that. 

But the other side of it is: Criticism can be a trap, because it is a way to hide. Because what you can do is: The self doubt can pick out the criticism that addresses the thing that made it the most nervous, amplify it and use it to keep you from going there again. 

And so if you don’t want to amplify your self doubt, don’t expose yourself to criticism that the self doubt wants to hear.

BK: If it’s your mother who told you you can’t be an artist, and if it’s your mother’s voice that’s in your head when you don’t show up to do the work – don’t show the work to your to your mother until it’s published!

SG: Don’t ever!

BK: Don’t show the work to your mother. Because what you are doing is you’re saying: Please stop me from taking this chance.

SG: Exactly, exactly.

BK: So don’t give people who are going to stop you or institutions that are going to stop you the power. 

Constructive feedback

BK: Can you talk a little about how you process that. How that doesn’t defeat you. How you choose… Yes, you shouldn’t show your mother if it’s your mother’s voice, but you should find your way… I think or I’m asking you: Should one find a way to improve the work by seeing how it hit certain people?

[…]

SG: So for me, my writing gets better when I watch people in the wild who have read it or interacted with it. […] You should almost certainly not send the whole thing to a lot of people and let them roll on it. But it makes a lot of sense to send people you care about a chapter and see how many of them INSIST that you send them the next chapter. 

[…]

SG: There are two kinds of comments that I hope for. I rarely get the first kind, but the second kind makes it still worth it. The first kind is: chiropractic care, significant spinal surgery, to say: You know what? If you moved these three chapters to the end and wrote three hundred words about this, lights will turn up. Every once in a while that will happen to me, very rarely. 

BK: That’s a spectacular kind of feedback, I think.

SG: […] The second reason is not because I want people to praise it but I want them to dare me to amplify something. Every once in a while I will send something to people and they say: You can do better than this. And that’s great too, that simple sentence.

BK: And that doesn’t hurt you?

SG: No, not at all. I look for that. 

Es geht SG darum, dass „fellow travellers”, also Leute, die das Business und das Handwerk kennen, ihm dabei helfen, seine eigene Arbeit zu verbessern. Vier Sätze von denen ist ihm viel mehr wert als jemand, der sagt: Auf Seite 17 hast du dieses Wort verwendet, ich würde eher…

BK: A fellow traveller is someone somewhere along the path that you are going. Somewhere close to where you are.

SG: Yeah, the mentor thing is way overrated. […] But the real reason is: People who are successful are almost never good at actually coaching people who are not successful yet. It’s a totally different skill set. 

Your overhead has to be close to zero

SG: Your overhead has to be close to zero. You gotta be able to last. And so that means brown rice and black beans. It means living in a place way smaller than you can afford. It means making sure that you are not going to have to declare creative bankcruptcy in three weeks if you don’t sell something.

BK: And to translate… it means also: If you have kids and you have a life, then you … don’t quit your job. You don’t put yourself in that kind of pressure.

SG: Correct.

If you want to be a professional, you are going to get tired

SG: And you delete Facebook and cancel your cable TV subscription and make it so that you’re not (a) spending money and (b) spending the time on things that feel comfortable because you’ve just made this commitment to this craft. And you should be honest with yourself, which is: If that sucks too hard, then just admit that you don’t want to really do it. You can be a walker, you don’t have to run a marathon. Just walk two miles a day, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you want to be a professional at it, you’re going to get tired. And you gotta build that into the deal, because otherwise you’re just going to keep fooling yourself.

Über self-talk, der einen durch schwere Zeiten bringt

Der Sinn davon, Seth Godin täglich zu hören/lesen, ist nicht der, jedes Wort von ihm aufzusaugen oder das alles zu verarbeiten oder alles in mein Leben/Business zu integrieren.

Der Sinn davon ist, dass mich allein der Klang seiner Stimme daran erinnert, wofür Seth Godin steht. Seine Stimme zu hören, erinnert mich an die Botschaften von ihm, die mich am meisten inspiriert haben. Seine Stimme erinnert mich z.B. daran, dass ich strategisch und professionell handeln möchte.

Jeder braucht solche Stimmen. Für manche ist es die Stimme von Tim Ferriss, für manche ist es Tony Robbins, für manche ist es Gretchen Rubin. Für Seth Godin war es Zig Ziglar, den er 3 Stunden täglich gehört hat. Häufig war das, was Zig Ziglar ihm gesagt hat, völlig irrelevant, aber es hat ihn an das erinnert, womit Zig Ziglar ihn wirklich berührt hat.

Es geht um exposure und Erinnerung und emotionaler Verbindung mit dem WHY.

Authenticity

Authenticity ist für BK „being comfortable in your own skin“