Seth Godin: Failing On Our Way To Mastery 🎙

Der Podcast

The Knowledge Project Podcast #105, 23. Februar 2021

Meine Notizen

“The internet is not a mass medium. […] The internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people – but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage!”

“We are not who we are because of our atoms or molecules or DNA. We are who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves – about the pain we’re in, the hopes we have, the dreams we live with. Pick those! Be specific about those, and then those people not only will find you but they will tell the others.”

“Hobbies are great. Hobbies help make us more human.”

„Don‘t sell your hobbies! Do your hobbies for you.“

„I didn‘t know one 50th of what I know now. But I‘m not sure if I did know the things I know now that the outcome would have been any better.“

“I think people appreciate a thoughtful, quick, generous ‘no’ more than no response and more than a ‘yes’ you don’t follow up on.”

“I give speeches for a living. It’s one of the only things I charge for. And if it’s a Non Profit in New York City, I never charge them. But everybody else I charge them because it’s not fair to some people to charge them and not others. […] So someone will send me a note and they’ll say: ‘I’m doing this thing for twenty entrepreneurs. There’s no budget. Will you come speak to us for twenty minutes?’ What I’ll write back is: ‘Well, here’s four videos of me on YouTube. I have found it’s way more effective for your group to have everyone watch the videos before the meeting and then have a discussion with each other about what I said.’ Way more effective. 99 times out of 100 that never happens. Because they weren’t actually asking me to come say something to them that they couldn’t get somewhere else. What they were actually doing is saying: ‘I will gain status in the eyes of my peers if I can persuade you to give us a very expensive speech for free.’ And I heard that and I saw that and I wrote back basically saying: ‘Yes, but you will gain more status with your peers if you can persuade them to exert emotional labour to actually learn something.’ So I’m not doing it to tweak people, I’m doing it for the one out of 100 who are doing what they said they were doing, which is trying to help people.”

“I’ve seen 10,000 talks live and in person, because I have given a thousand of them, and almost all of them are terrible. And they are terrible for a couple of reasons. First of all the person giving the talk is afraid. And secondly, the person giving the talk is mistaken about what the talk is for. If you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation. If your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that insight, then you should either write a book or write a memo and say: Here, in an asynchronous way, this is what we know. If you’re gonna show up live, in person, in real time, synchronous, you are performing, and the goal is to not deliver the information but to deliver emotion. Cause a change in the people who are hearing you. That is its purpose. What change are you seeking to make?”

“So when I give my basic presentation, it’s 150 to 190 slides, delivered over the course of 45 to 50 minutes, and in that period of time I will tell a large number of stories, and I will change the emotional state of the audience – up and down and back and forth. And it will be better because other people are in the room with you. That is critical. […] My talk works better if you are not the only person in the room. And yet almost every talk I’ve ever seen, that’s not true.”

“A book is two things. First, it’s a signal to the reader, to say: This person who you know could have written a blog post decided to devote a year of his or her life to handing it to you in this complete form that is timeless and shareable. And the second part is: And now you can share it. You can have a book group. You can hand it to somebody else and say: This.Let’s talk about this. And those two pieces together are what every one of the successful books I’ve ever done have in common.”

What most books get wrong: “The authors of most books are looking for many of the magical elements of status that come from successfully being published. They pay attention to the bestseller list, they game it, they pay attention to reviews, they worry about what their friends think of the book – even though their friends don’t read books, even though it was not written for those people. And they listen way too much to risk averse editors who are gonna do 50 or 100 books a year. Those people only spend three days total on your book, and then there’s gonna be another one. Whereas this is your book, and you should write it at the length you need it to be to make it singular and idiosyncratic and peculiar, because we don’t have an information shortage and we don’t have a book shortage.”

Seine Prüfung im Symbolic Logic Kurs im College: „The Symbolic Logic test was not only open book, open note, it was unlimited time in the room. So you got there at 8 am, you could stay as long as you wanted. […] After three and a half hours in the logic exam I said: I could probably get a few more points here, but I have met my spec. And I left. I was one of the first people to leave, but someone stayed there for I think it was 18 hours. And the question is: What did they get in exchange for that focus on perfectionism?“

„How dare you? is not said often enough to people who are seeking to shame us.“

„The work is not personal. The work is the work. In the resources I had allocated I did the best work I could to meet the spec. Here it is. This is not me, this is the work. And if you don’t like the work, teach me so I can change my spec for next time. But I will not shame myself, nor will I let you shame me, because that’s not helpful.“

Coaching vs. criticism: „Coaching is not telling someone the answer. And I think I heard you talking to Derek [Sivers] about what happens when you make someone’s idea one percent better. When you make someone’s idea one percent better, you actually disincentivize them, not incentivize them. […] What’s helpful is helping people see what they are capable of, given what they told you was important to them. Criticism is completely different. Criticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge, who is not trying to earn status by hurting you, is able to help you see the world as it is. […] But the part about domain knowledge is critical because you not only have to know it when you see it, you have to be smart enough and practiced enough to put it in words to teach someone else.“

Seine wichtigsten Business Lessons:

1. People don’t want what you want.
2. „If you play any game in which money is involved, the fact that people have a different story about money will cause you to make mistakes. And they will either be mistakes because other people are better at piling up money than you are, which is extremely likely. And so if part of what you are seeking to do is playing on that axis, they‘ll beat you if they have the chance because they think that because it’s easy to measure and socially acceptable, that’s all that matters. And so the phrase ‚It’s just business‘ is really a horrible phrase, but lots of people mean it.“
3. „Finally coming to grips with the smallest viable audience. And not just settling for but completely embracingthe fact that 1000 true fans is more than enough. You don’t need to be on the cover of a magazine. You don’t need to be on a bestseller list. That the status games are really significant.“