619: Seth Godin on How to Ship More Great Creative Work…and Why Much of Your Work is Actually “Creative”

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Seth Godin
Oh, it’s a pleasure. Who knows where here is anymore, but we’re here together.

Pete Mockaitis
Everything you say or write is profound. Well, I’m super excited to dig into your latest book, it’s called The Practice. And I don’t want to do flattery but I genuinely do mean that you are among the most prolific and brilliant writers that I’ve encountered. I haven’t read all your books, many people have, and it’d probably better if I did. But it sounds like in your book, The Practice, is this sort of your secret or…? Tell us, what’s this book all about, because it seems like you’re really kind of giving away the inner secrets here a little bit?

Seth Godin
Oh, I don’t think it’s my secret. I think it’s our secret. I think everybody knows that they need to ship creative work because being a drone and a cog is no fun. And I think everyone realizes that there’s no such thing as the muse, that talent is overrated, and that if we just showed up and put ourselves on the hook, we can not only do better work but do it with more joy.

And what I wanted to do in this book is capture a whole bunch of truth that we keep reminding ourselves that the opposite might be true. We’re confused. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s all these skills that we could learn that are masquerading as attitudes, etc. All of these things are ways that we can decide to contribute more. So, this book is really personal in the sense that I wrote it so that I would remind myself of what I needed to hear.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And it seems like a number, or you tell me, or perhaps all of them, are coming from your legendary Seth’s Blog short blog posts from across the years. I was just reading “Where do ideas come from?” and it’s almost like poetic. And then I see, oh, that was indeed one of your posts like 10 years ago, and you’ve sort of collected the relevant ones and put them in a beautiful package.

Seth Godin
I think there’s like 220 essays and perhaps six of them have ever seen before, maybe eight.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really? Nice. I didn’t know those. Okay.

Seth Godin
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, maybe let’s hit some definitions just to make sure we’re on the same page here. So, ship and creative work, I think I know what you mean by these things. But can you establish those for our audience of professionals?

Seth Godin
So, creative means it might not work. It’s never been done before. It’s personal. It’s generous. It’s human. It’s for someone else. You’re solving an interesting problem. That’s what creative means. Work, because you have to do it even when you don’t feel like it. Work, because you put yourself on the hook, you made a promise. And ship, because if it doesn’t ship it doesn’t count. If you say, “Well, I had the idea for blank years ago. I was going to write Hamilton,” no one cares because you didn’t ship it.

Pete Mockaitis
“We had the idea for Airbnb but we never did anything with it.” So, understood. And so, ship just really means kind of like deliver, get out the door, execute, do the thing.

Seth Godin
Right. Now, there’s a Nike problem. And the Nike problem is when you say, “Just ship it,” you could think that means, “What the hell. Put crap out there.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying merely ship it. Go without commentary. Do it without drama. Simply do it because that’s the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s dig into a little bit of the particulars here. So, you say that creativity is not a gift for a select few but rather a choice. So, help us think through that, these mindsets here in terms of contrasting them and how does one make the choice.

Seth Godin
Have you ever done one thing in your life that was creative? Have you ever once solved the problem, told a joke, connected with someone who needed to be connected to? The answer, to anyone I’ve ever asked it to, is, yes, of course. So, if you can do it once, then the only question is, “Can you do it again?” And, yes, you can. So, that means it’s a choice. It’s not like you’re sitting there waiting for some flyball to land on your head. The reason we feel that way is because we’re afraid of the bad ideas. We’re afraid of the things that won’t work. And so, because we’re so afraid of the bad ones, we throw them all out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, let’s dig into this fear, this emotional piece. So, we’re afraid of bad ideas and, thusly…Well, I think about professionals all the times in the conference rooms people are choosing not to share things.

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
And a lot of that is fear, maybe with good reason from experience. They get their hands slapped, or they get yelled at, or dismissed, or invalidated in one or another way. Well, can you help us think through? If you got some things to share, and you got some fear, what should we do?

Seth Godin
Fear has some very important elements. Fear that keeps you from crossing the highway on foot at rush hour is a good thing. Fear of a saber-toothed tiger is a good thing. That’s what we evolved to have but it is false fear when we feel nervous before giving a speech because nothing bad is going to happen to you. In fact, dancing with that fear will make a better outcome happen, not a worse outcome.

So, fear needs to be seen as a compass, as an opportunity to lean into that feeling because that feeling is telling us we’re onto something. Because if you’re not feeling it, I would argue you’re probably not trying hard enough.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And so, you’re sharing not just that you reinterpret the feeling, like, “Oh, no, I’m excited,” which is a good strategy for nerves and stage fright, but to actually seek it out, like, “Oh, we got a compass that’s pointing us somewhere here.”

And, boy, we had Tara Mohr on the show say that there are two Hebrew words for fear. I don’t know if I can recall them, like yara and something else, and they’re kind of very different flavors. And one of them is kind of like the fear of inhabiting kind of a larger space. That’s kind of the good one. And so, that very much syncs with the notion of it’s a compass that’s pointing you into some cool territories.

Seth Godin
Yeah. You don’t hire a coach to train you so you can run a marathon without getting tired. It’s understood you get tired. The way you finish a marathon is by figuring out where to put the tired. And the same thing is true for any contribution we’re seeking to make, “Where do I put the fear?”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, “Where do I put it?” in terms of your internal mental categorizations of, “What does this mean? And how do I respond to it?”

Seth Godin
That’s right. And a lot of people are just hoping it will go away, and it doesn’t go away.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s encouraging to hear right now. I mean, you’re pretty legendary and so you’re sharing on the record that you’re still feeling the fear and the stuff right here, right now with this book?

Seth Godin
Only when I’m working hard. I can coast all day without feeling fear. But, yes, if I’m doing my job properly, there’s definitely, “Uh-oh, maybe I reached too far out of the boat,” “Uh-oh, maybe I’m too much in a hurry. Maybe I’m not being clear. Maybe I forgot to do something that would’ve been a useful contribution.” Yeah, all of that, all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that we’re inside your internal mind dialogue, can we hang out a little longer? So, that shows up, and then what comes next in the conversation?

Seth Godin
“Thank you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Please go on.

Seth Godin
“Thank you.” I mean, it’s such a privilege to be able to do this work. And to have that voice in my head to keep me on track, I don’t try to deny it, I don’t try to rationalize it, I don’t argue with it, I just say, “Thanks for letting me know.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful stuff. And as I’m sort of sitting with that, it really is true that if you don’t have any fear, it’s sort of like you don’t care about the outcome, or maybe not the outcome if there’s a whole lot there. You don’t care about the “it.” It’s not a high value to you personally. It’s not of great importance, the stuff, if there’s not some level of fear, in my experience. Is that kind of a fair characterization?

Seth Godin
Well, I guess. I mean, let’s assume you’re not a sociopath. There’s one thing, which is confidence. And confidence is being sure it’s going to work. And the other thing is belief, which is, “I’m not sure it’s going to work but I’m going to try it anyway.” And if all you’re doing all day are things that you are confident about, then you’ve got a challenge because it means you’re not doing any art, you’re not creating anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good. Well, so let’s dig into a few of your maybe provocative assertions. So, you say writer’s block is a myth. What’s really going on here? Why do we sometimes have difficulty getting creative when we want to flip the switch but it doesn’t seem to be flipping?

Seth Godin
Well, no one gets talker’s block or bicyclist block or plumber’s block, so there’s no reason to think that writer’s block would be an exception. What we really have is fear of bad writing. And if you do enough of the bad stuff, some good stuff will get through. But to say, “I am incapable of typing something,” is absurd. What you’re saying is, “Because I am so afraid of what might come out, I don’t want to type anything.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then I suppose it’s quite possible, and really this is a different phenomenon. You could type something and it might be bad. I guess there are times in which you’re in flow, you’re rocking, you’re grooving, and there are times when you’re not, and it’s like, “Okay, I could throw some sentences on this page that I will surely delete afterwards,” versus, “Oh, wow, this is amazing!” So, talk to us about flow. How do we get more of that?

Seth Godin
Well, so people want flow and then they’ll do the creative work but that never is the way it works. You do creative work when you don’t feel like it and then flow shows up. And I appreciate your kind words about my writing but I write bad stuff all the time, you just don’t see it. And my friend, Isaac Asimov, wrote 400 books, published them, and he told me that his secret was he typed for six hours a day every day. And I got to tell you, typing a book only takes about three days. Writing a book takes a long time because it’s figuring out which words to leave out that take all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, let’s think about Seth’s Blog for a second here. So, every day, is it 100% of days? It sure looks like it as I’ve been there, you’re putting something out. So, sometimes you don’t feel like it.

Seth Godin
Oh, I write three, or four, or five blogposts for every one you read. And I have a backlog because I don’t want to break a streak. I don’t wake up at 4:00 o’clock in the morning and type something and hit publish.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you got a backlog and you’re cranking whether you feel like it or not. And are there some rituals there for you?

Seth Godin
Well, the real ritual is I ask myself a question every single time I see something in the world that I don’t understand, and it’s, “Why is it like this?” because I refuse to believe the world is magic. And so, I want to understand “How does a refrigerator work?” “And why do some doors pull and some doors push?” “And how did that person get elected?” Everything around us happened. Why did it happen? And if I find that my answer is worth sharing, it becomes a blogpost.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love this so much. So, “Why is it like this?” gets the wheels turning in all kinds of places. And then what happens next? So, you’ve got a curiosity about the refrigerator or an election outcome. Do you Google or what’s the next step?

Seth Godin
No, you make an assertion, right? I mean, some things you can look up but not many. You make an assertion about, “What are the fundamental human desires, and needs, and wants, and hopes and dreams, and fears that led somebody to do what they did?” And Milton Friedman would like to believe that everything happens because you get paid. Well, that’s clearly not the case.

So, why is it that there’s hundreds of thousands of people with podcasts who, deep down, know they’re never going to make a lot of money doing it? Why is it that when Monster came out with Beats headphones, which could be seen in any test to be inferior to headphones that cost much less, how did they build a multibillion-dollar brand? Why do people buy those headphones? Questions like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, you’re right. And they really do get you…Well, I guess that’s what I find so intriguing is you pose these questions and I’m already curious about them, like the refrigerator and the Beats, I just kind of want to know now. But you say the next step is not so much to go Google something, but to think more about the deep fundamental human stuff behind it.

Seth Godin
Yeah, I mean, that doesn’t work for physics. Refrigerators, you should not make assertions. You should just Google how they work.

Pete Mockaitis
Someone desired cold profoundly for their food. Okay. And with the Beats, though, I am, I almost did it right now, the history of Beats I pose. But you stop and think like, “What do people want? What are they after? What is the brand speaking to?” It’s like they want to be cool with a particular flavor of cool, it’s like, “I want to be like that Dr. Dre,” or so. I’m just…

Seth Godin
No, you’re onto something. I think what Noel figured out was that headphones were a chance to create jewelry for men. And he came up, by working with Dr. Dre, with a piece of jewelry for a certain demographic, psychographic, that you could justify wearing right next to your face. And the market for jewelry is so much bigger than the incremental head-on market for electronics that do a job because those are a commodity. And what happened in many communities is having artificial Dr. Dre’s lowered your status. Having real ones raised your status. And so, that’s what he was selling, was status not audio reproduction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, let’s think about, as I read your book The Practice, what comes to mind are those who are producing, I don’t know, books, videos, movies, etc. I like your definition of creativity, it was broader. But if you imagine yourself in an environment of a white-collar worker going into an office, when you could go into an office, and interacting there, what are you thinking that there’s something that this community of professionals likely does that stifles their creativity? Are there some recurring mistakes that you encourage folks cut out?

Seth Godin
Well, yeah, the biggest one is they think it’s not their job. Like, let’s pick an accountant. Accounting is not bookkeeping. Bookkeepers are, generally, my bookkeeper excepted, generally, commodity providers that you don’t care who it is, you just give them the data and they give you back the answer. It is a cog’s job. But to be a successful accountant, you’re doing something that involves engaging with other humans.

So, the accountants at Enron did a bad job but not because they were bad at bookkeeping, but because they lost their moral compass and weren’t able to have creative, useful conversations with their clients. And that’s hard work, and it’s different every time you do it. So, it’s so easy to avoid it and say, “I’m just an accountant,” when, in fact, if you want to win at accounting, by any measure, you have to be a human before you’re an accountant. To be a human means you have to solve the interesting problems that accounting presents.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what, that is exactly why I stuck with my accountant for all this time, it’s like, for one, I thought, “You know what, I’m not really good at this stuff, so maybe I probably should outsource it,” but then when I looked at the bill, it’s like, “Ooh, do I want to keep with this?” But, sure enough, it’s like these little gems, it’s like, “Oh, well, if you’re a single-member LLC, but we have your taxes and S-corp, then the result is that a portion of your stuff is a wage and the other portion is not, something to payroll tax, like all this stuff.” It’s like, “So, you’re just making money appear for me. Oh, thank you. This is like you create more money than I pay you and take something off my plate.”

Seth Godin
I got to interject here, it’s much deeper than that. He didn’t simply make you more money because there are lots of ways someone could make you more money. They could teach you to be a bond trader. What he did was he made you feel smart.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Seth Godin
He made you feel like to not hear this tomorrow would make you stupid. He helped you with your reflection of your own status, which changed your relationship with other people around you. So, there’s layers beyond layers beyond layers, and this accountant may think that all they’re doing is work in the system, but what they’re really doing is understanding what Pete needs to hear to feel engaged in a positive cycle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that connects. And I recall…I just want to hit this for a moment, this notion of layers and human needs and desires. I remember I was reading something you wrote, and we talked about benefits versus features, people don’t want to drill, they want a hole in the wall. But even more than they want a hole in the wall, you took it further. Can you recap that for us?

Seth Godin
Sure. So, Ted Levitt, in ’62, wrote that no one wants a drill bit, what they want is a hole, and they have to buy the drill bit to get the hole. And I’m like, “No, you don’t need a hole. You need a place to put your lag bolt. Well, you don’t need that either. You need a way to hang a shelf. Well, you don’t need that either. You need a way to get the books off the coffee table. And you don’t need that, you need the way it makes you feel when your spouse says thank you.” That’s why you went to the hardware store.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, likewise, with this accounting situation, it’s like, well, yeah, there’s some economics stuff going on, sure. But even more so, it’s true, I do like feeling smart, and I do like feeling, like together we have accomplished something that is, I don’t know, optimal, clever, that is we found an opportunity, legally and appropriately, and we grabbed it in an exciting way. It was exciting for me. I don’t know even though it was accounting.

Okay. Well, so, oh, you’ve got so much stuff. Let’s hear about impostor syndrome. So, you posit that that’s not so much something that we need to cure and get over, but rather it’s something else. Tell us about that.

Seth Godin
Right. So, no one talked about impostor syndrome until two women wrote about it 30 years ago, and now, suddenly, people are acknowledging that they have it too, “I feel like a fraud. Who are they to speak up? Who are they to have a podcast? Who are they to be creative? How do I make it go away? How do I make impostor syndrome go away?”

And people are surprised when I say, “Well, but you’re an impostor. They can’t go away because you’re an impostor. You’re accurately feeling something, which is if you’re leading, you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before, you can’t be sure you’re right. You can’t prove that you’re qualified.” Therefore, we have to embrace the idea that all leaders, at some level, are impostors. And, again, it’s a symptom that you’re doing this generous creative work.

Pete Mockaitis
So, once we embrace that, then we feel okay about it, or what happens then?

Seth Godin
No, you never feel okay about it, not if you’re a normal person. What you do instead is say, “This is work,” that’s in the subtitle. Be awesome at your job, not be awesome at your hobby. If it’s your hobby, you should do it exactly the way that gives you short-term and long-term joy. But if it’s your work, well, good news, you don’t get blisters and calluses at your job. You don’t have to stand outside in the rain and dig a ditch. Bad news, you have to do emotional labor. And the emotional labor means dealing with impostor syndrome. It means dancing with fear. It means showing up when you don’t feel like it because it’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really like that when you put them right next to each other as a contrast. It’s like you’re choosing a form of hard or a form of discomfort.

Seth Godin
It’s labor. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about the movie Office Space, where, at the end, the guy chooses the other one, he’s like, “You know what, this is better. I prefer the construction.” Okay. Well, so tell us, Seth, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Seth Godin
Okay. So, the reason it’s worth writing a book, and not another blogpost, is because books are easy to share. You can say to two or three other people, “Let’s all read this and support each other through it.” That’s why I wrote a book. I believe we are not spending enough time looking at each other and talking about how we will make things better by making better things. And so, my hope is that people will embrace a practice and use it as a tool for good.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. All right. Well, now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Seth Godin
Years ago, my friend and teacher, the late Zig Ziglar, said, “You can get everything in life you want if you’ll help enough other people get what they want.” And some people hear that as transactional so I’ve sort of altered it to, “Life can be helping other people get what they want,” and that’s a good compass for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Seth Godin
Oh, the most important thing that people need to learn, truly learn, is statistics. And the most interesting thing they can learn, as far as I’ve discovered after reading a lot of books, is just how profound the process of the evolution of species is. If you want to understand how COVID is doing what COVID is doing, if you want to understand epidemiology, if you want to understand how we have to dance around our future on this planet, you need to understand what Darwin figured out, that many, many small changes, repeated through inheritance, over long periods of time, creates the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Seth, you’re so fascinating. Statistics, I didn’t expect you to say that. Why is that so critical?

Seth Godin
You know, I read an essay last week that we should get rid of calculus in high school and teach everyone statistics instead because you don’t need to know calculus. Calculus is a stepping stone to higher math but very few people need higher math. Everyone needs statistics. The people who think that the polls were wrong on the last election don’t understand what polls are. The people who don’t get what interest rates are and why risk even exists in the world, I mean, all of it. You can see the world so much more clearly if you understand what statistics are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite book?

Seth Godin
I think it’s really weird that people associate books only with school. The average American reads two books a year, buys one. And that it’s awkward to talk about a book you wrote. But the book I wrote, Linchpin, which took a year of my life, which changed my life, which I listen to on audio on a regular basis, is a book that I would say to people, “Here, I wrote this. I hope you’ll check it out.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Seth Godin
Okay. So, the best tool I purchased in the last year is an Austrian smoothing plane. It costs $300. It takes shavings of cedar that are microscopically thin. And every time I touch it, it makes me smile. It’s just magnificent. And in terms of my job, I just discovered the indigo press, which can be used to print PDFs in book form. But they have one giant laser printer, bigger than a house, and I’ve used it before, but now it can print, and I know we’re on the radio, but you can see these.

It can print these matte packaging, for example, that you might find at Whole Foods that they put granola in, and it can do small runs of just a couple thousand at a time. And so, this I find this company called ePac that has an Indigo printer. And I just got to say I just keep looking at this stack of things that I made, and it puts a big smile on my face. So, that’s a giant tool, and an Austrian smoothing plane, it’s a small tool. And between them you might find something juicy.

Pete Mockaitis
What is about the Austrian smoothing plane that makes you smile?

Seth Godin
It does exactly what it’s supposed to do with no complaint. It’s perfectly engineered. It doesn’t weigh a lot. They could’ve made it heavier. It doesn’t have unnecessary controls, but the controls it has do exactly what they’re supposed to do. And I’ve been woodworking for 40 years, more, 50, but I’m not great at it. But this tool, I was great at it. And that says something about the design of the tool.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Seth Godin
I don’t go to meetings, I don’t watch television, and I don’t eat meat. I think those three habits have helped me a great deal.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me about not going to meetings. What do you do instead?

Seth Godin
I think a conversation between two people is not a meeting, it’s a conversation. Those are good. If you’re putting the other bunch of people so that you can make sure that they’re working today, that’s just about compliance. That should be cancelled. If you really want people’s input, you should create a shared Google Doc, and create an environment where people will be encouraged to contribute to it. If you want to tell people what the specs are for the tech standards at the conference you’re running, you should send a memo. But there’s so many things that we’re doing today, because Zoom is so easy to click a button on, that consume most of our day, that are mostly about power not about communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, tell us, how do you decline a meeting invitation?

Seth Godin
Oh, I think there’s very few penalties for being respectful, clear, and direct. And so, I say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this meeting. Can you send me a Google Doc instead?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s short and sweet. Well, all right, next stop, you’ve written a lot of stuff. Tell me, is there a particular quotable gem that you hear more often than others, like, “Seth, I loved it when you said blank”?

Seth Godin
I would say the shortest blogpost I recall writing ever is the one I hear about a lot. I don’t know if it’s the most, it’s, “You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where should we point them?

Seth Godin
You can get excerpts from The Practice at TrustYourself.com, which used to be the title of the book but I changed it with my editor but I kept the domain. And you can read 7,500 blogposts, if you’ve got some spare time, at Seths.Blog.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love that your bio, you can get there by just Googling Seth. There’s a power move. That’s good.

Seth Godin
It’s the equivalent of my Dr. Dre headphones.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Seth Godin
it’s pretty simple. Never ever say, “I’m just doing my job.” Simply do your job. Do it in a way that we would miss you if you were gone. Because, yes, management has been exploiting labor for a really long time, but if you’re going to go to work anyway, you might as well go to work and be a linchpin.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, this has been a joy. Thank you so much. I wish you lots of luck and fun and all the ways you’re shipping work.

Seth Godin
Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for the time. We’ll see you.