Transcript of 711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)

You should join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. That's what James Clear said to me a few years ago at our Learning Leader Growth Summit. Our Learning Leader Growth Summit is the 3-day leadership retreat we have for members of our Learning Leader Circle, and applications are now open to be part of our next Learning Leader Circle. If you want to be surrounded by a group of 8s and 9s and 10s who are striving to be better, this group might be for you. If you want to be surrounded by a group of get-after-it doers, people who are achieving big things, making a positive dent in the world, then the Learning Leaders Circle might be for you. If that's you, go to learningleaderscircle.com to apply. That's learningleaderscircle.com. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader, one of the greats. Seth Godin has written more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, and The Dip. He has posted on his blog every single day for more than 20 years.

Talk about consistency. Before the blog, before his books, he founded Yo-Yo Dime, one of the first internet marketing companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. His new book is called The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. During our conversation, we discussed why Seth is always early to every single meeting. Then what Jackson Pollock's collapse teaches all of us about wanting 2 things at once. Then he shares how to build a, quote, generous failure muscle. And Seth closes with an amazing story about what he learned about leadership from being a canoe instructor at summer camp. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Seth Godin. Seth, man, it's so good to see you again. Welcome back to the Learning Leaders Show.

What a treat. The one and only. How are you, Ryan?

So I've had you on a handful of times over the past 11 years, and every single time you show up early. You are remarkably consistent when it comes to being early. Why is that?

Well, I guess if I'm consistent, I'm not early anymore, because if I then start showing up on time, it'll look like I'm late.

No, but I mean, it's a real thing. A lot of people in your position, they show up maybe right at time or a little bit after, and you never do.

It's a courtesy. I don't understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else's time.

Well, I really appreciate that. I love the new book, and I want to open with a story. So about 2,000 years ago, a monk in northern Italy twisted some dough into a shape, boiled it, baked it, and offered it to his students as a reward for paying attention to their studies. You write that the genius, it wasn't in the dough, it was in the way the monk baked a story into it. What's that story?

Well, there's a knot in the middle of a pretzel, and unlike real life, you can't have a pretzel without a knot. And if you try to undo the knot, you just end up with crumbs. So there's irony in the symbol. What actually happened is that I love designing book covers, and the COVID of this book was going to have some rope on it because When you think of knots, you think of rope. And I played with more than 100 variations of rope knots, and all of them looked banal. They were too on the nose. They were too obvious. And so the notion of the pretzel came to me as this visual indicator of what it's like to feel stuck. So I created what I think is the perfect pretzel. It's hard to actually get a photograph of a perfect pretzel because pretzels don't usually photograph as well as you'd like. But then I needed to make up a story about why I picked the pretzel that wasn't what I just told you. So in the back of the book, I added a story about the monk in Italy and the 3 circles. How does this help somebody?

What's getting in the way? And whatever the 3rd circle stands for. But that came after I figured out I wanted a pretzel.

Oh, how do you find these stories?

So once you have a pretzel and you're trying to teach somebody, This is what I do with everything, is you say, I have a metaphor, I have a simile, I have an example. How do I make it so that when it sticks, someone will teach themselves? Because the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning. And if you can give them scaffolding to figure it out, they will never forget it. So in the case of the pretzel, I wanted it the same way a heart is the symbol for love, even though the thing in our chest does not look like a Valentine's Day card. Once you have the heart, then you can talk about how it feels in your chest when you end a relationship and heartbreak and all these other things. So it all is anchored somewhere. So to tell the story of the pretzel is to begin by understanding where did the pretzel come from? Because we didn't have pretzels 2,000 years ago. And we know not the name of the person, but we know it was probably Northern Italy, maybe Southern Switzerland, somewhere in that little region. A monk started baking pretzels.

Well, how can I use that narrative to start a discussion about the empathy of getting unstuck? That when we see that we can make something better for other people, it's much easier to go forward than if we are constantly looking in the mirror and feeling stuck.

As we started in the back of the book, I want to shift to the beginning of it. The easiest thing to do— this is what you write— the easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn't exist. So name the baggage, drop the baggage, and ship the work. That's like the most Seth Godin thing ever, especially the end. Where does this come from with this acting like we're pretending freedom doesn't exist? So let's name it, drop it, and then ship it again. That feels like your ethos.

Okay, so I have 100 examples of people who are pretending their freedom doesn't exist. I was with someone last weekend who probably has $9 million in the bank, and he was complaining about the fact that he had to keep showing up to do the task he's known for, even though it's no longer fueling him. I said, well, why do you need to do that? And he said, well, because I need to make a living. I said, no, you don't. Most of the people who are listening to this, if they dramatically reduced the costs in their life, wouldn't need to live where they live or do what they do. We have the freedom to change that, but we want to deny that freedom so we don't have to consider that freedom. That when we look at somebody who is 3 years into a 4-year education and they hate every moment of it, they say, well, I have to finish. No, you don't. You can choose to finish and do it with a song in your heart and make a difference doing it and get to where you want to go. Or you can leave. But no one's forcing you to do this.

It's just the other thing you want, the one you refuse to say out loud, is the baggage. You don't want to drop the baggage. You like being stuck. And many of us— I mean, sure, there are way too many people who are stuck in servitude, who are stuck in poverty, who are stuck because they were born in the wrong end of a system. I'm not talking about those people, but for most of us, we're only stuck because it's comfortable. And exposing the baggage that is keeping us stuck is uncomfortable.

Why would you choose to remain stuck?

Because it's safe. Because it guarantees us an excuse. Because it takes us off the hook. Because it alleviates us from responsibility. Because it means if we don't have any agency, that we're not responsible. So, you know, I tell the story of tuberculosis in Canada. If you live in Vancouver or Toronto, there's a chance you could get tuberculosis. If you live north of there in an Inuit territory where the indigenous people of Canada live, you are not 5 times more likely to have tuberculosis or 20 times more likely to have tuberculosis. You are 500 times more likely to get tuberculosis. And yet we know how to cure tuberculosis, and yet we know how to make the problem completely go away for a tiny fraction of Canada's healthcare budget. But it's easier to treat it like a situation, to treat it like something that cannot be fixed, than to say, I am personally responsible for a 12-year-old who is never going to live to adulthood because I don't want to acknowledge that I can help solve this problem.

I mean, the friction is what holds people back is what I sense. I noticed in more than one of your books you've dedicated and/or mentioned the acknowledgments a woman named Jacqueline Novogratz. I may be mispronouncing that. Why is she so important to you?

Well, before I get to Jacqueline, I just— I don't disagree with you often, but no, this isn't about friction.

Okay.

Friction is a really cool physical concept. And that's why ice skates are so fast compared to walking down the street. It's really hard to live in a world without friction. What I'm talking about is hidden entanglements.

Hmm.

Hidden entanglements are long-told stories about how the world is, how the world is supposed to be, who we are, what we're afraid of, where our status is, what affiliations we seek. All of these things add up. to an invisible web that keeps us stuck. And to just call it friction makes it sound like it's a law of nature and we have no choice. It's not that at all.

Well, we have choice if there's friction. I mean, in fact, that's where a lot of the greatest things happen, is when you have friction in your life and you choose to work through it. I think about all the greatest accomplishments. Usually they were preceded by friction, by something really hard that I had to keep Going through.

Yes, I'm, I'm not disagreeing with that part. I'm just saying the friction is probably internal.

Okay.

That if a lock is stuck, you're not gonna be able to fix it with mental gymnastics. You're gonna need some WD-40, right? And here, so the story of Jacqueline Novogratz, one of my dearest friends, my hero, the woman who changed my life when I met her in 2001. Jacqueline went to Stanford Business School, just after I did, and got a job on the executive track at one of the biggest banks in New York. She was doing exactly what you were supposed to do after you go to Stanford Business School. And she went to her boss, who wasn't the president of the bank but was close, and said, I want to try doing this kind of work somewhere far away because I have a calling to make a difference. And she ended up co-founding the Women's Bank of Rwanda. Working with women who, never mind having a bank account, didn't have a job, helping them figure out how to, for example, make a living baking and selling donuts in the street. And from this experience, she started to see how interconnected the world was and how challenging it was for so many people. And the story she tells in the book I helped her with called The Blue Sweater.

So try to imagine, she's, I don't know, 5'8, 5'10, striking blonde hair, and she's running in Rwanda at 7 o'clock in the morning because that's what Stanford graduates do. They run every day. Now flash back just 15 years before when she was in high school, 12 years. In high school, she'd had a crush on the quarterback of the football team. And she was a sophomore, he was a senior, and she was wearing her favorite sweater to school one day. The sweater her uncle had given her, he had bought it in Switzerland, and it was of the Alps with blue and white wool. And you can visualize this. She walks over to the quarterback and there are a few cheerleaders hanging around, and they mercilessly, cruelly tease her, talking about how the fact that she was wearing the sweater but there were no mountains. Ashamed, she went home and she and her mom drove to the Goodwill box and ceremoniously dropped the sweater in the Goodwill box. Okay, back to Rwanda. She's running through the streets of Rwanda at 7 o'clock in the morning, and she sees a 7-year-old boy wearing her sweater.

No.

And she starts chasing him down the street, which would have been a fun thing to see. And she finally catches this petrified kid and grabs him and looks in the collar, and her name is written on the tag. And in that moment, Jacqueline decides that she's going to drop the expectation, the baggage, the momentum of being a fancy Stanford grad who is on the fast track at a bank, and instead spends the next 25 years building something called Patient Capital. And the last time I checked, 600 million of the poorest people on earth, people who make $2, $3, $4 a day, have a better life because of the investments that Acumen has made. And so there's one person with a bunch of advantages, but one person who decides to let certain kinds of comfort go away so she could build something she was proud of. And those sorts of stories are the ones that get me to show up and do my work.

One person who decides. I remember asking you on a previous conversation, like, what makes up a leader? And you say, They decide to. And I've never forgotten that. I've used that a lot with people because leadership has nothing to do with your title or any of that. You make a decision and you can lead from anywhere at any part of an organization. I think you've been one of the best at that. We're talking about also getting unstuck, which is what the recent work is about. I look at your blog every day for 11,000 days and all of your books. I've been a big fan for a long time. It's hard to imagine you ever personally get stuck. I'm curious, do you get stuck? And if so, what do you do?

Every day.

Every day. What do you do?

Every single day.

How do you personally, Seth Godin, get unstuck?

Well, first of all, most of the time we don't get unstuck, and that's fine. It's fine because we need clarity about who it's for and what's it for. What are we designing for here? Because Getting unstuck always means leaving something else behind. And if you are monomaniacal about it, you know, I was just talking with the woman who won more gold medals in figure skating than anyone in history. And you don't do that by having a life. You do that by having no life for 15 years. So you're, in one respect, completely unstuck when it comes to winning gold medals. But in another respect, because you've chosen a certain kind of commitment, you are really stuck in terms of, I don't know, deep friendships, in terms of understanding what else is possible in your life. Because the only way to do those things is to not get gold medals. So we only feel stuck if we've told ourselves a story that there's something we really want. But there's something else we also really want, and we're not going to be happy until we get both of them. And it's the but that gets in the way of forward motion.

Let's look at your blog for a second. You write it every day. I've read— is this true— that you have 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 ideas every day for the blog and you only pick one of them? Is that right?

Yeah. How else could you do it?

So how do you do it?

Well, Some of the blog posts are just 3 words and they never get past 3 words. Some of them are a paragraph or 2. And then when I find one that I want to completely pursue, that's often the one I do. But sometimes there's a bonus one and it goes in the queue for later in the world, in life. But if you need to have the perfect idea in whatever creative endeavor you're going for before you begin, you're never going to begin.

Have you worked or talked with Jesse Cole from the Savannah Bananas at all?

I have, indeed.

Have you really?

Yes.

I feel like you guys would be good buddies because Jesse's doing his 10 ideas a day thing, and he has for so many years. And he's built this thing from nothing to now entertaining fans, soon to be all over the world, but currently all over our country. It's pretty inspiring. And when you see a story like his, I went down to Savannah and spent a bunch of time with him. He's like such a genuine, humble, great person Yeah. What do you think when you see a story like that?

Well, first, he's a better dresser than you or me. He sent me a note about being inspired by the book Purple Cow.

Yeah.

And we've done, I think, a couple Zoom calls. I don't know if we've spent time in person because until very recently, there were no banana action up here in New York. I think when we understand the story of the savanna bananas, it really helps us understand what we're talking about today. So for those of you at home who are just catching up, there are Major League Baseball teams, there are Minor League Baseball teams. Minor League Baseball teams are filled with people who statistically will never play in the major leagues, and they're not paid very well. And if you like the actual game of baseball without celebrities, it's a fine thing to go watch, but it's not easy to sell tickets to a Minor League Baseball game because there's no celebrity, there's no TV. And Jesse took over a baseball team and decided that there was a system, a system of players coming out of college, a system of major league teams that will draft your best players, a system of media, a system of what we expect when we go to the stadium, all of those things. And he would find room within the system to do what he wanted to do, which is produce something that made a decent living, that created joy, community, and connection.

So first, change the name to the Bananas, which is a ridiculous name for a baseball team. Then pun your way forward. So for example, their cheering section is a bunch of 70-year-old women called the Nana Bananas. And then recruit players who might not be the best at hitting the ball but are really charismatic and like to have fun. And then within the rules of baseball, basically be the Harlem Globetrotters. He did this for years and years, sold out every single game. When they would go to another team to play on the road, those games would sell out as well. And a couple years ago, he saw that what was getting in the way of the next level of what he wanted to do was the fact that he was part of the league. So he quit. And the Savannah Bananas now are no longer part of the minor league system, as far as I know. They're a traveling team like the Globetrotters. And so he's on television and he can play with new rules. But at every step along the way, yes, it's a purple cow. It's worth talking about. It's remarkable. And within the boundaries he has established, he's not stuck.

He knows exactly what he's trading for. He knows exactly what he wants to make.

And trying new stuff, Seth, every single show. That's what he calls them, not games, shows. They try new stuff, lots of new stuff. I said, how much of that doesn't work? He goes, oh, Multiple times every single night. Literally every single night. But that's the price, right? That's the price of doing these crazy things is the willingness. Hey, we did it. We learned from it. Didn't work. We'll go on to the next one. That's a portable skill for leaders in all areas. It could be if you got to have some guts, though.

Well, okay, what does that mean to have guts? What does it mean to write a blog post that doesn't go viral? What does it mean to do an episode of your podcast that doesn't work. Guts. Why is it guts? What did it actually cost you to not be perfect? Well, internally, it damages our entanglement with the idea that we are perfect, which is what we were trained from first grade. Will this be on the test? How do I get an A? How do I get rid of defects? How do I sand off the edges? Six Sigma. All of those things are don't make any mistakes. So I was thinking about my book, The Practice, the other day. The Practice, if it was just one page long, would be give up your commitment to be perfect and be useful instead. Most people can't do that. They say, I wanna be innovative, but this is really important and I can't screw up. So by putting that but in the middle of it, there's your pretzel, there's your baggage.

I wanna show you something that I got as a gift. That's one of the coolest and heaviest things I've ever gotten. You wanna check this out? Hold on.

There you go.

Okay, I'm holding up this book for audio called This Might Work by Seth Godin. I don't know, how heavy is this, Seth? Like,

it weighs £18. That's actually not the title. Turn it over.

Wait,

that's the title. This Might Not Work.

Oh yeah, so it's on both sides.

Yeah.

Wow, £18. It feels heavier than that. I think I'm a strong person. Wow. What made you make the book like this? Make it this big, right, with the rubber duckies, all of it.

The only reason it's that big is because you couldn't make it any bigger. I began by reaching out to every book printing facility I could in the United States and overseas and said, what's the biggest book that I can print with the budget that I have and the timeframe I have? And that's the biggest book, the most pages, the largest one. Why would I do that? There's only 3,000 of those books in the world. Bernadette Jiwa edited it. Alex Miles Younger Peck designed it. I wrote it. The whole thing is based on years and years of my blog posts, and we did it from start to finish in 90 days.

Wow.

And it was only on a Kickstarter, and it worked so well but was so exhausting that 5 years later we did one other edition. That's the Behemoth. The other one was called the Titan, and Again, 3,000 or 4,000 copies, that's it. And now I'm— I can't do it anymore because it broke me. But the reason to do it this way is because a blog is invisible. It weighs zero. You can fit 11,000 blog posts on a microSD card. And one day when electricity stopped running through our pipes, I would like my blog to exist somewhere. And so I thought I might not be the only person who wants the substantial souvenir edition. But a souvenir by its nature is ridiculous. A $30 t-shirt from Disney World— every person who goes to the gift store at Disney World to buy a t-shirt is already wearing clothes. They're not buying a t-shirt because they need a t-shirt. They're buying a t-shirt because they want a t-shirt. Well, this is the souvenir edition. This says there's substance here. Every page I open in this will cause me to think about something. It led to this. I don't know if you have this yet.

This is something I came out with a few weeks ago called This Is Swag.

I need to get

this. It's a self-published collector's item of 30 years of me making ridiculous things. On this page— I'm sorry to bother the audio people, but if you look very carefully, there's a picture in the corner of a baby placed on top of your— the book you just showed everybody. There it is.

Oh, so awesome.

And then I got a note from this young woman when she was 12 saying, here I am 12 years later on top of the same book, which I thought was

so cool, man. I just don't even know how you think of that idea, this monstrosity of a book. It's so cool.

The same way the savanna bananas do, right? Like, You don't see all the ideas that don't ship. And as somebody who's committed to this practice and watching how well it has worked for me and so many other people, the thing that mystifies me is why it hasn't caught on. Right? So, you know, we've been talking for a while and we haven't mentioned AI once. We can talk about AI forever, but we're not gonna. The question I have for people is, It's obviously the biggest change in the world since electricity. It's obvious some people are going to use it as a tool to create an extraordinary advantage and make a big difference. And if you're wrong and it doesn't work, no one will know. So why haven't you done it? To give you an example, I went to this event last week. 185 people were there, and the organizer sent out an 80-page PDF of everyone who's going to be there with a 2-paragraph bio about each one. And I don't think many people spent the 4 hours it would take to read the whole thing, think it through, make lists. That's a big commitment. So I uploaded the PDF to Claude and I asked it to write a 7,000-word, very positive magazine article about everybody who was there through the lens of what it knew about me and my work.

I then took that 7,000-word article. This took me 6 minutes. I took that and I uploaded it to ElevenLabs. Which is a different AI platform that I have trained in my voice, and I had it read the article. Then I downloaded it to my phone. And so as I drove to this event, I listened to myself reading an article that I had not read or written about the event I was about to go to, filled with enthusiasm about all the people I was going to meet and why I was going to be happy to meet them. So the whole project took me 13 minutes. And I told a few people at the event who are super cool about this, and not one of them had tried anything like it. But why? Even with full paid subscriptions, the whole thing cost me $20. So what's keeping you from doing something like that?

It feels like you have to build this— is it idea muscle? Is that the right phrase? What would it be? You've built it over the course of decades of your life.

It's 2 words. It's not a failure muscle. It's a generous failure muscle.

Generous failure.

So this thing has gone on on the internet for too long of the failure Olympics, trying to get yourself rejected as many times as possible.

Yeah.

Walking into a donut shop and say, please give me a dozen free donuts. Now, that's selfish. The generous failure muscle says, who might I be able to help with the next thing that might fail? Because at least for my ethos, I would never hesitate to jump in a lake to save a drowning person, even though I'm not the best lifeguard, even though I'm not certified to do it. There's someone drowning, jump in and save them. And if you think of creativity that way and empathic teaching that way, then suddenly you can let go of the baggage because you're a good person.

I think there's a lot in this most recent work about Change. Change and tension. Creating tension is generous. Change causes tension. Tension isn't the same as stress. Stress is a trap. Tension is the engine of forward motion. So we know that people hear change or they feel change or they see change and they get nervous or they don't like it. They want to keep sticking with the thing that they have, but really it's the engine of forward progress. You're speaking with a leader, Seth, and you want to help them. embrace and see change as an opportunity? What are some of the things that you're teaching them to do?

Okay, so stress is bad. Stress is wanting 2 things at the same time when you can't have both of them. Stress is a boss who doesn't appreciate you. Stress is having to make the rent when you don't think you can make the rent. We're trying to reduce stress in our lives. Tension is good. You cannot shoot a rubber band across the room without pulling it backwards first. When Taylor Swift says, I'm going to play in Amsterdam in an 8,000-seat arena, she is inflicting tension on her fans. There's only 8,000 seats. You gotta go talk to your mom or dad and get the money to go buy a ticket. You better hurry because it might get sold out. You, you have to go to a place you've never been to. But these are all filled with tension that you can release with forward motion. If you don't want to create the tension, don't have a concert. But if you don't have a concert, you can't create any joy. So great teachers create the conditions for their students to witness a growing gap between where they are and where they could be, to confront their incompetence. Because anytime we learn anything, there's a moment before we learn it when we know we could learn it, but we don't know it and we feel incompetent.

That creates tension. And so some kids who have been indoctrinated or bullied or whatever face that and opt out. They don't enroll in that journey and they fall behind. They sit in the back of the classroom, they don't raise their hand, they get the minimum done because no one's persuaded them that that tension is worth it. But effective leadership is voluntary. It's not mandatory. You can't force people to follow you because then you're a manager. Effective leadership is like effective teaching, which is creating the conditions for people to want to dance with the tension to get to a new place.

How do you do that?

Well, all of us have experienced it, so you already have a hunch as to what it feels like. And then the question is, could you practice it? And if you want to learn how to juggle, You know what it feels like to throw a ball. You know what it feels like to drop a ball. If the cost of dropping a ball is too high, you will not juggle because you need to catch every ball, and you'll never learn how to juggle. If, on the other hand, you commit to a process of throwing balls until the catching gets easy, you'll learn how to juggle. And the same thing is true for leadership. How do you put yourself on the hook? How do you use your freedom to create tension for other people, to create the conditions for them to want to go to this new place, even though you can't give them a guarantee? I can't guarantee that if you take my calculus class, you will learn differentials, but I can guarantee that every day we will find a small puzzle in front of us and find the joy of solving it.

When you think of leaders and/or leadership, is there like a person or two that immediately pop to mind and say, ah, that's a leader, I love that person? You mentioned one earlier who you've dedicated a few books to. I'm wondering, though, because you do such a good job of bringing concepts to life through stories and people, that I'm curious to hear about this very broad topic that I'm obsessed with, which is effective leadership.

My life is filled with these people. I can't start listing them because of all the ones I would leave out. and all the incompleteness of it. But I think we can all easily recognize the folks who their default is, will this be on the test? And their default is, how do I deny my freedom? And their default is, under the circumstances, I can't do X, Y, or Z. And then we know people who realize they are the circumstances, who are showing up to be in that liminal state between here and there. The limen is the part of the doorway on the top and the threshold's on the bottom. And the limen and the threshold determine the difference between here and there. And that liminal state is what it feels like to step over the threshold.

Hmm.

And I've never met anyone who never does that. So the question is not, are you a leader? It's how much? Because you already know how to do it. The question is, do you care enough to do it more?

Yeah. I get to work with people who are highly accomplished. They're leaving a positive dent in the world. And so sometimes that can actually be paralyzing. And in your book, you write about Jackson Pollock and one of the issues of when he tried to kind of try something new with this expectation that people are going to be rabid fans, like, on day one. Can you tell the story of Jackson Pollock and what leaders can learn from that?

So Pollock was the most famous American painter of the 20th century. He had 3 years in a row that were the envy of anyone who has ever done a creative work. If you want to understand that in dollar and cents terms, I found one of his pieces just sold at auction for $181 million. And he was in Life magazine. He was the poster child. And after 3 years, he said to his wife, Lee Krasner, who's also an artist of some renown, I don't want to spend the rest of my life painting cover versions. of Jackson Pollock paintings, because he could have done that nonstop. There was always going to be a demand for those things. So he walked away from his format, from his method, even from the size of the canvases. He locked himself in his studio in Long Island and he did a totally different way of painting. And because of his momentum, his first show was a big show and everyone hated it and not one painting sold. And to this day, I've never seen one in person, and I go to museums all the time. And this led Pollock to a self-destructive spiral that ended up with substance abuse and him dying in a drunken crash where he killed an innocent person.

Why? Because he wanted 2 things, not one. He forgot that when he was coming up, he was rejected, he was ignored, he was living the life of the creative artist. Yeah. What he wanted was 2 things. He wanted the feeling of the creative artist, but— and it's the word but, not the word and— but he also wanted to be acclaimed and embraced and rich. And needing both, he got neither. And that story encapsulates what we need to do. It's not the price we pay, it's the choice we make. Of which baggage are we going to let go of? Because when we add a but to the middle of the sentence, we're trapped.

Reading about organ donation, and depending on the country, the rates go up 800% when the donor form is opt out instead of opt in. It's basically people just don't want to deal with the paperwork. You share that story, and one, it just makes me believe, hey, just make them all opt out so that you're automatically opted in. That would be better for all of us. So hopefully that's what happens. But that story or that fact, how does that help others? How does the understanding that help others be more effective at whether it's being creative, being a better leader, showing up better for their families and their communities?

Well, so we were talking about creating the conditions.

Yeah.

And so what we see here is most people would rather not be responsible for their organ donation status. If you're not responsible, you accept the status quo. So the examples in Austria and Germany— in one country, if you don't do anything, you've opted in, and the other country, if you don't do anything, you're opted out. So what we seek to do is build things within our organization, within our family, within whatever setting we've got, where the momentum of the system pushes people to get to where we as a community Hope to go. So I'll tell you an interesting side story about donation. I had someone in my family who needed a kidney, so I saw the whole thing up close. Then I knew somebody else who used to work for me who needed a bone marrow transplant, so I saw it again up close. And I spent a lot of time thinking about why are we so hooked on this opt-in thing and where's the baggage here. Because there are some people who, based on the way they see the world, do not want to opt into this process, and they will speak up clearly to say you can't just do this.

And then there are people who want to switch the process, so they come up with ridiculous ideas like paying poor people to donate their organs on their death, which is just creepy and horrible. So this is a game. Everything I write about is games. Games, systems, they're all the same. It's about scarcity. So working with a well-known cardiologist, I wrote an article for Transplantation, which is the journal of the transplantation industry, about how we could solve the problem of organ donation in 12 weeks for no money. And first, why does it take someone like me who knows nothing about what I'm talking about to innovate this? And B, Look how hard it was to make the change happen. So what's the solution? The solution is simple. If you're not willing to donate a kidney, it would seem that morally you should be unwilling to accept a kidney.

Mm-hmm.

And so it would be super simple. We just add one field to the database where they keep the records, which is on what date did you fill in the organ donation card. And so if there's a tie, the person who moves up the waiting list first is the person who's been on the list of donating the longest. So now there's this race to get on the list as fast as you can, because it doesn't pay to get on the list in 3 years because there are going to be all these people ahead of you. And so every doctor would have a moral obligation to say to every patient, you better sign up right away because I want you at the top of the list. And if we did that, we wouldn't need the list anymore because we'd have so many kidneys lying around, we wouldn't have a scarcity, right? Done. Problem solved.

I love it.

Except first, me just saying out loud doesn't do any good. So then I spend 3 months with Jonathan writing it in medicalese so it gets accepted by the journal, and it gets accepted by the journal, and that's still not enough. Because then what has to happen is I have to go to 50 medical meetings, and I have to organize conferences, and I have to create the conditions for people to feel safe that they will not get in trouble for this change. And I didn't do it because I had other things I chose to spend 6 months of my life on.

Yeah,

but that was a tell of how the system is organized to reward the system. It likes doing what it's doing. That's why it's the system.

Okay, I got 2 quick questions before we run because I want to make sure you can be early for your next thing. What did you learn about leadership from being a canoe instructor?

I learned everything about leadership from being a canoe instructor. I started in 1977, and the conditions were this: it was at one of the oldest summer camps in North America, and you could do anything you wanted all day as long as you did something. And the thing is, there was really exciting things like windsurfing or horseback riding.

Oh, we got a screen share here. Wow.

But canoeing is Placid, and canoeing is you and the water. And so if you're 12 years old, it's a hard sell. I couldn't demand anybody come to my dock. I couldn't require anybody to put in the effort. All I could do was create the conditions where you felt like your status, your group affiliation, your dreams were more likely to come true if you hung out. With me and with the self-competition of, could I do a little bit better than I did yesterday? And to do that, I had to put on a show. I had to show up with a personality and a voice that wasn't mine. And it is mine now, but I picked it. I wasn't born with it. I experimented, like Jesse, with 100 different ways to find the heart and soul of a 12-year-old. And get them to say, yeah, I'm in. And when someone didn't want to come, when someone said, nope, I like sailing better, you know what I said? I said, great, go sailing, have fun. Because it's not my job to persuade everyone. It's my job to persuade someone.

Yeah, it's not for you. I learned that from you many years ago. That's okay. Okay, last question, Seth. I don't think you're a champagne drinker, but I'll ask it in the same form because I like the question. It's, uh, the champagne moment. It's exactly one year from today. And you're surrounded by the people that you love, and you're popping bottles, spraying it all over each other. Grape juice, champagne, whatever. I'm curious, Seth, what are you celebrating?

What a fascinating question. My confession is I don't celebrate.

No?

No.

No celebrations?

I'm just thinking about this now.

Birthdays? Kids?

No, a birthday is not a celebration. A birthday is a chance to look someone in the eye and tell them you love them.

That's a celebration.

No, the kind of celebration that you open champagne for is, we made it, we won. And the day I sold my company to Yahoo, I wasn't happy.

Why not?

Because it was the end of something. It wasn't—

Why'd you sell it then?

Because in 1998, under the conditions I was in, it was exactly the right thing to do.

Not about the money?

No.

Okay.

And a couple years later, when I made the New York Times bestseller list for the second time, and my agent came in, I was running a seminar in my office, there were 40 people there, and she handed me the fax, and I started to cry. Not because I was happy, but because I felt nothing. Nothing.

Really?

I had done the work. I didn't need to make the list. I just needed to do the work.

But it created an emotion in you, though. That feels like something, like some sort of a celebration.

I guess I'm just telling you, I like to do the work. I like to figure out where can I create value. But once value is created, it has never been part of my ethos to say, all right, let's pop a cork.

On to the next. Yeah. I think that's a commonality among the people who are putting a positive dent in the world. I don't know if that's a good thing, though. Do you think you should get better at celebrating?

Oh, you don't want to see what it's like inside my head. It's a mess.

What do you mean?

No, I'm just— everyone's walking around, you know. I have very rigid, controlled ways of eating. I don't do drugs. I don't drink alcohol. I haven't had meat in 40 years, not once. I have no interest in eating dairy, not even a lick of your ice cream cone. There's just rules, because by making these structures, I can put my energy into something else. I'm not compromising. I am not constantly renegotiating with myself about whether this is something I do or don't do. And since I have these boundaries in so many areas, which is, I think, because I have undiagnosed limited attention span, when I need the flurry of magic, I gotta go invent something useful.

Hmm.

And so everyone's got their stuff. I wouldn't trade it in. If I thought it would be worthwhile to trade it in, I would. But the prizes that I get are not the prizes of someone applauding. They're the prizes of me seeing that I had a conversation with somebody yesterday, and today they are closer to getting to where they want to go. That's my prize.

It feels like you are super disciplined.

Yeah.

Yeah. I could go forever on all this stuff. I appreciate you as always, man. Like I said, I've looked up to you for a really long time and always read all your stuff. This book is called The Knot. Problems Can Be Solved. We touched on like 2% of it, so I highly recommend people get it, read it, and then ship it. Do the actual work. It'll make you better. Seth, thanks again, man. I told you before we started recording, I'd love to do the next one maybe in person because I think it'd be cool just to hang with you in a room and talk through all this stuff, man. I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Ryan. Keep making a ruckus. I appreciate you.

That is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, ryan@learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Seth Godin. A few takeaways from my notes. Let's build your generous failure muscle this week. Try a thing that might not work but could help someone else, like a new tool, a new format, or a new way to serve A customer. If it fails, the cost really isn't that much, but if it works, someone is better off. This is low downside, but really high upside. Build your generous failure muscle like Seth Godin, like Jesse Cole. Next, name the freedom you are pretending you don't have. Pick one thing you tell yourself you have to do and say it out loud as a choice. Instead, then you can decide whether you still want to choose it and then create tension. That's where growth happens. Think about one person you lead and the gap between where they are and where they could be, and then set up the conditions that make them want to close that gap. Much like Seth being a canoe instructor.

Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leaders Show with Seth Godin. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you write a thoughtful review. You definitely subscribe to the show and you rate it, hopefully 5 stars. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.