Seth Godin: How To Market Like A Professional 🎙

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The Tim Ferriss Show #343, 1. November 2018

Meine Notizen

TF bezeichnet SG als „polymath” (= Universalgelehrter)

Über seine Karriere als Speaker

„The first hundred speeches I gave I paid money to give them. And the first time I spoke to Internet World I was number 800-ranked speaker on the list of speakers.“

„Most people who would like the life of someone who gives speeches would like to start by getting invited to Davos or doing a TED Talk. You have to get booed off stage a whole bunch of times!“

„When I started the AltMBA and the other online things I do, there weren’t a lot of people who were saying: „Exactly! That’s what we’ve been waiting for!” You gotta be in this cycle of making a mess in order to slowly organise it into the thing that over time will feel like the right thing.“

Über sich als „teacher”

„Being a teacher is the arc I have had for a long time, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of it.“

„Once I made the decision: I am going to be a teacher, then I am going to say: I know how to teach in one medium or another medium, but the world changes. The forcing change agent here is: What happens when we can deliver education via video? So I played with online video stuff and I saw what was working and I saw what wasn’t. And I wasn’t thrilled at what I could do in that medium alone.“

„I said: Look, if my mission is to teach people — and I am not a consultant and I am not a coach — what’s my tool where I am going to have the most impact on people? So I literally went to the desert and sat there for a few days […].“

Über AltMBA

„The first time we ran it [AltMBA] I knew the people who would take it — the ONLY people who would take it — were people who would give me the benefit of the doubt. Which I have earned by showing up and showing up, but you can’t use the benefit of the doubt too often because then you don’t have it anymore.“

Das Risiko war für ihn nicht die Arbeitsstunden, die er hineingesteckt hatte, sondern das Vertrauen der Leute, das für ihn auf dem Spiel stand.

„I am not IN the AltMBA. There’s no videos of me. I am not teaching it. I just built the system.“

„We had only 150 people in the first session.“

Über Professionaliät

„I made a decision a very, very long time ago, […] where I said: Look, there’s a whole bunch of work I am just not willing to do. […] So I gotta do something else to be worth something. So here’s what I’m gonna be: I am going to be the person who never misses a deadline. I am going to be the person who has very strict rules about what I do and don’t do.“

„So I’m really careful about promising a deadline. I’m really careful about signing up for a project. But once I do, the deal is done, and I don’t have to revisit it.“

„I get that people wrestle with temptation all the time, and I am not saying that the method I’m describing is easy. But what I am saying: When we talk about bosses we admire […] a big part of it is: I’m not gonna be situational about my decision making. I am going to be strategic about my decision making. And that choice… you only have to make that choice once. And you’re not going to be great at it at first, but you can stop acting like a fourteen-year-old and start acting like a grown-up and a professional.“

„Authenticity is totally overrated. Totally! I don’t want an authentic surgeon who says: I don’t really feel like a knee surgery today… I want a professional who shows up whatever they feel like! And so… There are days when you will see me give a talk or see me write or something where it is not my authentic monkey brain saying whatever pops into its head. This is me playing the role of Seth Godin, being the professional who does what he said he was going to do. And if that bothers people that I am not always authentic — I’m sorry, but at least I’m consistent.“

Über das Nein-Sagen

Die Angst davor ist hardwired, bei allen Menschen. Das hat mit unserem lizard brain zu tun, mit Hormonen und jahrtausende lang antrainierten Reaktionsmustern.

Wir haben einfach wenig Übung darin, uns in Nein-Situationen zu begeben und haben entsprechend Angst davor.Wir können mit den körperlichen Reaktionen nicht wirklich umgehen, weil wir darin keine Übung haben.

„It happens to all of us. Now, what will you chose to do about it? If you want, you can chose to be a professional.“ -> strategic decison-making!

„Why are you here? What is the change you are seeking to make? Because, we like to TALK about the fact that we are meaningful specifics, as Zig Ziglar would say, that we are here to make an impact. But if you SAY those things but then you ACT like a wandering generality, you’re not going to have the impact you want.“

Teuer oder gratis

Seth Godin decided what he was going to do for a living and what he was willing to do for free:

• If you want me to give a speech, you have to pay me.
• If you want to read my blog post, it’s free.
• „Being clear about where the free stuff is and where the expensive stuff is eliminates 80% of the people who are hoping to have some sort of transaction with me.“

Er hat eine fixe Preisliste, weil „haggling gives me no pleasure”. „I hate to haggle, so I don’t haggle.“

Tim Ferriss sagt: Josh Waitskin macht speaking nur „free or full price„.

Tim Ferriss: Er macht Speaking nur full-price. Wobei die Benchmark der aktuelle höchste Preis ist, den irgendein Kunde bereit war für seinen Vortrag zu zahlen.

Über den (richtigen) Preis

„Price is a story. It’s not an absolute number.“ — „It’s really important to understand this.“

Price is a signalling strategy. Für manche Kunden ist es viel wert, zeigen zu können, dass sie sich einen Vortrag von Tim Ferriss zum höchsten Preis leisten können.

„The hard work here of building a career as a freelancer, where you are going to get paid fairly, is doing the hard work to get better clients. And then having the guts to turn down people who don’t value your reputation when they want to hire you.“

„The idea that people can’t afford it, is crazytalk.“

„We need to please a small group of people. And one of the signals that is available to us is price.“

„And the signal says: If you are looking for the lowest price — and everything that comes with that — we are not those people. On the other hand: If you are looking for a fair price — and everything that comes with that, the customer service, the attention to detail, the fit and finish, the voluntary constraints — we’re that.“

Über die smallest viable audience

„Your problem is fear. The fear of someone saying: You’re not as good as you say you are.”

„Living with the fear is the hard work of the professional.“

„The way we niche [our audience] down is by committing to wanting to niche it down. To not have false niches that are actually just excuses to reach everyone but to be really, really specific.“

„The statement: We do this! and being clear about what ’this’ is and why, is totally different than the freelancer who says: What do you need? Because ‚What do you need‘ works great if you are the local handyman, but it stops working great if suddenly there are a thousand local handymen and everyone’s a klick away.“

Marketing-Slogan für die smallest viable audience

„We’re not saying: We made this, please come buy it. We are saying: We see you. We see who you are and what you believe. And we assert: If you are THAT kind of person, that believes THIS and is looking for THIS, we PROMISE that when you engage with your time and money with us, you will get THAT.“

„If you can articulate that arc, you’ve got a shot at engaging with the smallest viable audience.“

„What are the needs and the dreams and the desires that people are walking around with unfulfilled?“ — „And you say: Hi, I’m here to help you achieve what you already wanted!“

Tim Ferriss über Seth Godins Case Studies

• „I love how encyclopaedic your knowledge is of case studies. It’s really one of the things that immediately leaps to mind as a distinguishing character of a lot of your work is pulling in and dissecting case studies.“

SENSATIONELL! (1:25:40 – 1:28:10)

TF: How does someone develop the feeling of sufficiency so they can have the empathy that is necessary to be good and then marketing the gifts they have and what they can provide? How does one develop that self compassion and that feeling of sufficiency?

SG: Here’s my best take on it: As soon as you can adopt the posture that you are needed to do a generous act that someone in worse shape than you is drowning and that you have something to offer them, it shifts from a selfish act that is shameful to a generous act that is making a difference. […] Once we realise that there actually is somebody who would miss us if we were gone, then we can get out of our head and realise we are not doing this to get in the light or to hyphen the light. We are doing this because someone else needs us. So the big shift is to stop thinking of prospects, stop thinking about people you are marketing TO, or AT, and instead say: Where are my students? Where are the people who are enrolled in this journey who I have a chance to teach? Because if I am a teacher and the student is coming along for the ride, I don’t have to yell, I don’t have to interrupt, I don’t have to hit kids with a ruler. All I need to do is take them to where they said they wanted to go. And that fits into the person I think most of us would like to be — which is: the teacher we would remember years later. The person who turned on the light for someone who didn’t have a light.

TF: Seth, I aspire to be half the communicator you are. I am just constantly astonished how clear you are able to convey the thinking —  which of course in the first place must be clear to you before you can impart it to others. That was very beautifully said and I think very, very important. So thank you for that.

SG: That means the world to me.

Über Ideen

„Here’s the thing: Writer’s block is a myth. What people get stuck on is not that they are out of ideas, it’s that they think that they are out of good ideas.“

„My only argument is: If you put enough bad ideas out in the world, sooner or later your brain will wake up and good ideas will come.”

„I have done 7.400 blog posts, and I have done four perfect ones.“

„So you just gotta keep making the work with generosity because then your lizard brain will give up on censoring you because it realises you are not going to give up and at that point it will say: Well, we might as well make it better.“

„I write daily because I am a professional and this is what I do.“

„You don’t get better by getting rid of typographical errors. You don’t get better by being more realistic in your painting. You get better by serving the needs and wants and desires and dreams of the smallest viable audience you sought to serve. And if you are not serving them by offering them a way forward, status, attention, … it’s no wonder there’s no line out the door.“