Unveiling The Power Of Strategy With Seth Godin

Here's the deal it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're headed in the wrong direction and strategy is a philosophy of becoming strategy is getting clear about who you're changing and the change you're making so of course culture is part of strategy what Ducker is saying is MBA strategy that solipsistic self-absorbed narcissistic whiteboard Quadrant stuff that's not going to get you anywhere if you don't know how to lead and commit to building something that creates the conditions for change hi everyone welcome to another episode of the show Seth welcome always a pleasure Brian good

to see you always great to see you this is strategy this is strategy we need it because people don't know what strategy Is yes uh maybe including me one of my first questions I was thinking of that Peter duer quote culture eats strategy for breakfast what is your take on this Trucker's right but culture is strategy here's the deal it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're headed in the wrong direction and strategy is a philosophy of becoming strategy is getting clear about who you're changing and the change you're making so of course culture

is Part of strategy what Drucker is saying is MBA strategy that solipsistic self-absorbed narcissistic whiteboard quadrant stuff that's not going to get you anywhere if you don't know how to lead and commit to building something that creates the conditions for change you have always told me you know uh off camera and on camera Brian is basically about two questions although I think as I'm reading this book it's been expanded uh beyond the two questions to Something like 297 questions Fair though I like it um you've always said Brian focus on who it's for and what

it's for and so maybe that's a jumping off point to expand on these thoughts um can you break down the four threads you know how they're woven together you you talk about in the book these four threads let's start there yeah so well what I the reason to write the book is as you know I spend time talking to Friends about what they're trying to do and they're working they think they have a marketing problem they don't have a market marketing problem they have a strategy problem and their strategy uh is dances with four thing

yeah the first one is systems yeah systems are the invisible forces that are there with or without you systems fight to stay the way they are number two are games not games like Monopoly but games like Game Theory games are where we have limited Resources limited time where there are players and rules and where there are outcomes if we call them games it's much easier to not take it so seriously to realize our moves might need to be better but we are okay and we need to see who the other players are we need to

see what plays have worked in the past mhm the third one is empathy the fact is you can't make other people do something because it's important for you That we only engage with the market when the market wants to engage with us and in the hustle of the internet we forget that a lot and the fourth one sorry go ahead yeah please continue let's cap it off the fourth one is time and the way uh to engage time and empathy is uh time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana and this idea

that time flies like an arrow means tomorrow is going to be different than today what are you doing today that will Create the conditions for tomorrow to be B forests aren't built by transplanting trees they're built by planting seeds the right soil the right conditions and then a thing grows so when we weave the four pieces together we can have an intelligent conversation about what you're building and how you're building it but if you ignore all those things and just do your job You're Building yesterday and yesterday is never going to happen Again okay uh

let's unpack that a little bit so what makes up a system and maybe let's give some real world examples well world is a great way to start the most famous system of all is the solar system even four-year-olds know about it and Pluto and all that other stuff why does the Earth rotate the sun it's not cuz it wants to it's because of gravity and in visible force that keeps things the way they are so there is a system of higher education Why is Harvard or Yale famous why does a kid want to go to

you know University of Florida or whatever to see a football team play there's this massive industry built on this tiny little kernel of an idea 400 years ago but the system runs very deep and so when you show up in Silicon Valley to raise money you're part of a a system when you build an Instagram page you are part of a system what is the system why is it there who benefits from it why will all The people in that system make a decision based on what happened yesterday when you show up tomorrow and if

you can't see the system and name the system you're just flying in the dark okay and so can you think of some do you have a case study of companies or people who are I don't want to use gaming the system because that's such a negative connotation but like who are winning I mean I can think of you You sort of jump into a system let's call it publishing and yeah you followed the status quo sometimes and you broke it other times when you felt like trying something different I remember when you went non-traditional uh

I think it was Poke the Box uh that was a non-traditional publishing play uh you've done lots of things in your career that have challenged the status Quo specifically in publishing uh can you talk a little bit about how you've played in that system and how you've won and maybe lost or won and learned well I'm not always the best example because my objectives might not be what other people's objectives are okay I tend to try to find things that are interesting as opposed to things that are traditionally successful uh I can tell you how

many times I've been wrong So you know when publishing discovered the DVD ROM which it looks like a a Netflix DVD but you put data on it they needed people who would build products that could live that way so I invented the official price parenting guide on DVD and it sure looked like publishing was going to run with that but I didn't understand the system the book publishing system has been around for hundreds of years and the thing is book publishers care about bookstores they Don't care about readers they don't care about printing presses they

want to make bookstores happy right DVDs did not make bookstores happy and if I had seen that realize that I never would have wasted two years of my life building a DVD division the system fights back to give you an example of how long the system sticks around in book publishing there are two seasons fall and spring they announce all their fall books and all their spring books even though most Books are sold in the winter why isn't there a winter list the reason is in 1910 when book publishing was in its infancy in the

US most of the Publishers were in New York and most of the books were shipped via the Erie Canal but the Erie Canal freezes in December so they couldn't ship books for the winter so there's a spring list and a fall list and 100 years later there's still a spring list and a fall list cuz that's the way we do things around Mhm how about another example I'm thinking of um I feel like right now it's such an exciting time it reminds me a lot of like 1998 when this thing called internet was just getting

started so AI is a is upon us the future is now uh it feels like traditional search is changing there's new AI like you know Microsoft has got their version there's chat gbt there's I can't name them all there's CLA and all the others um it feels like The system is changing with search yes uh even you know social networks are becoming search platforms can you can you help me understand the how to win at search this is a great thing to refi on okay okay so I was at Yahoo in 1999 we had the

chance to buy a company called Google for $10 million that's how much profit Google makes every 30 seconds we had a chance to buy the whole company for $10 million Google understood something Yahoo did not and It's this Yahoo built a site where their entire strategy was get people to come to the site and have them click and click and click and click and click and never leave yeah Amazon had a strategy of get people to come to the site and buy things Google's strategy was have people come to the site and leave that was

the entire orientation of Google for years come here and leave and they made a lot of profit doing that by selling All Those ads Okay that made them all rich but now ai shows up Suddenly search algorithms are different being found is different how we engage with uh each other online is different this is a called a change agent a moment when all the rules in the system are going to be turned upside and Microsoft has made some brilliant moves in the game that's being played and Google is doing terrible at this mhm if you're

a small organization a freelancer somebody who needs to be Found on the internet AI is not going to help you it's just not right because it is working its way through millions and millions and millions of data points you're not going to get more than your fair share of traffic which means you have to have a different approach to the market you need the smallest viable audience a few people a dozen people 20 people 200 people who would miss you if you were gone mhm and then you need to Give them a reason to tell

their friend something that engages in a network effect that raises their status that makes their life better if others come along and if you are relying on perplexity or chat GPT to find your new customers you're going to be waiting a very long time yeah so how do we win how do we how do we jump into that system and take advantage of it well I think the biggest win is to play a totally different game Because you don't get to announce we want to get better at the old game it this is true Western

Union had the chance to buy the telephone company 100 years ago mhm and instead of doing that they decide deed to invest in making better telegrams right this is not a good not a good idea codak the same thing codak the same thing yeah if I was starting today I would use AI to build tools that connect people in ways they couldn't be Connected before and I wouldn't be a victim or hope to get picked by AI I would put AI to work for me right be able to go organizations and say I have this

tool or I have this network or this connection and you will benefit from being part of it and that's a wide open door this is the biggest shift in our world since the invention of electricity and there's going to be a moment before and a moment After right now we're in between MH but we're getting very close to the after part okay so let's stay on this for a minute because I'm intrigued um you have committed to a platform of writing blog posts by now I suspect you probably written close to 8,000 in a row

more more you're at 9,000 now okay yeah so it's like yeah um and that's your platform now you have other ways that people can find you you have a RSS feed to social platforms social networks but Basically it seems like you've committed to creating your own GPT via your blog so could someone do the same kind of thing with it with AI and basically curate aggregate put all the content that you've already created in a GTP I think they call it like an RG or something that's your own okay yeah first of all again I'm

a terrible example if I was being smart I wouldn't put all my eggs into the blog basket I do it cuz I love it and because I have a streak that I'm not willing to break but it's not smart business every year my traffic goes down cuz Google doesn't like blogs and I'm fighting uphill if my goal was to be more welln I'm doing it wrong okay number two we built the first person powered AI it's been on my blog for a year you can go ask seth. blog not me but Seth's blog questions using

Ai and it will answer you it's really cool yeah it's not a good business it's terrible business I'm Not making any money from it whatsoever ever and I'm not trying to but even if I was I don't believe that that sort of AI based on my 323 million words is going to be a profit Center because people aren't going to pay for it right so to get specific let's say you're a freelancer let's say you understand how I don't know the um the wedding industry okay there are all these people in the wedding industry who

have things to say To each other who need to be connected to one another it's hard to do that with an AI intermediary in between all of them new value could be created you're talking about the people who uh make food the people who do the flowers the people who Supply the tables and chairs The Cutlery exactly so imagine there's a tireless confidential intermediary who knows everything about everybody in the circle MH now our bride can say who's Available on S Saturday because I got to do a shotgun wedding blah blah blah blah blah well

instead of making 40 phone calls it can just it knows right if you build that Circle of short-term magic important knowledge lots of people are going to pay to access it yeah and there's only going to be one of them so there all of these kinds of opportunities just like when the web came along the first websites were things like Z Frank doing Silly dances nobody was is busy building hotels.com at the beginning right well it's a reshuffle now who trusts you what do you know what can you connect right I mean here here's a

really simple example there are 50 companies all about the same size all about in the same industry they all have payroll you go to them and say my AI is going to look through your entire payroll records and tell you who's overpaid and who's not is that worth $50,000 Cuz it's going to save you a million MH mhm right now that only works if a bunch of companies say yes because I only have one company is worthless but if a bunch of companies trust me enough that that confident information is confidential magic happens or you

do it for an insurance company and say we can look at every Hospital's records and tell you how much an appendix removal should cost and we will look at every single appendix operator you get the Idea right it's that sort of tireless confidential work that is the next Frontier no one's going to build another claw or chat GPT we're we're done with that for right now that there'll be a new version of that in two years right but the interim room are these tiny silos of very special information I got it and and it's understanding

those systems that's critical to be able to see the opportunity right right and so I know People my age say oh I'm too old for this and so they're just checking off they're checking out why would you do that it's not that complicated I'm not asking you to build one of these I'm saying these are tools the same way the steam shuel was a tool you need to know what it can do and you can build a construction company without knowing how to use a steam Shu I mean it kind of reminds me of 2008

uh we're back to tribes it's just you've Got updated technology and so what's what's the good of you know bringing people together having a tribe leading a tribe I mean that's kind of what you're seeing yeah I mean if if all AI does is cost reduced by removing the Frontline customer service worker and anybody who works with information your company's doomed because you can't cost reduce your weight of greatness uh I'm going to bank that Sound by maybe put that on a pillow as well I like to embroider your quotes on pillows now glaze them

on a plate I sort of stole that one from Tom Peters to be fair okay uh so uh let's stay on the four threads for a second so we talked a bit about systems I feel like I know what empathy is do I uh empathy is basically putting yourself in someone else's shoes it's imagining what it feels like to be them you know so if it's taking their Pain away or if it's um you know a surprise and Delight is that what we're talking about here empathy well yes you know what it means what do

we do to put it into practice cuz it's not about giving stuff away let's think about all the misguided things Amazon has done in the last 12 to 14 months Amazon built a company based on saying is it possible for us to be seen by consumers as the best customer service company in the world and also Offer the fastest service and the best prices and by doing all three relentlessly yeah they won and then they started an ad division that last year uh generated billions and billions of dollars of Revenue according to the great work

of Cory Doo now when you do a typical Amazon search the best item is seven 17 on the list you're going to pass a whole bunch of other things where someone paid to move up right if you're A consumer they had no empathy for you they just made it worse if you an Advertiser what they're saying to you is if you want anybody to come to the product you sell you're going to have to pay us right and that's not good for them and then they also make you they also say and by the way

you're not allowed to sell your products uh anywhere else for cheaper than here which means that the only way to pay for those ads is to raise your prices Somewhere else mhm which means that in the short run Amazon will do better none of this has any empathy for anybody except their sharehold yeah that's not a sustainable long-term way to approach at the marketplace that's what a monopolist does yeah if we think about uh a medical provider who forces you through some sort of insurance portal and then when you call them forces you through an

AI and all these other things that make the Process of being a patient worse there's no empathy we go down this long list of organizations that say I have no choice I have to jack up profit by hurting my customers they don't get the joke and the joke is simple strategy is resilient when the people we serve would miss us if we weren't here okay that's great uh games so there's games in every strategy Uh break that down a little bit for us well okay so it doesn't have to be fun for it to be

a game it's a game when you have to make choices and those choices affect the other players and so if you are uh you know Chase Jarvis years ago Chase says there are all these people who are trying to sell uh education online I'm going to play a different move my move is my seminars are going to be free extraordinary but if you miss the live One the repeats cost money mhm that was a brilliant move because he ended up satisfying the group of people who cared a lot building word of mouth and then happily

charging for things people trusted would be good right mhm so those are a series of moves in a game I used to have a lot of courses on skillshare my skillshare courses did very well and then one day they made a shift they said for now on everything is uh a penny a minute There's like you just become a member we're not going to sell all theart the way udem me does that was a move and so we need to look at are we racing to the bottom is our move to simply just cut our

prices but be like them or are we making a move by doing something other people aren't willing to do is there a brand that comes to mind right now that's doing this well that's that's playing the game the right way maybe a brand that we don't expect That's not well every time I pick a brand yeah then they fail so I'm not going to is that true it it's it's a little bit of a curse um you know I gave you a couple small business examples when you think about the move Howard Schultz made at

Starbucks he said there's a Dunkin Donuts in a lot of places yeah I'm going to move over here in a different quadrant and offer a certain kind of person a certain sort of Thing then they dominate so then blank Street Coffee comes along and they say we're just like Starbucks except you can't sit and hang out and we're cheaper mhm and then someone else will move over here and someone else will move over there so the the the landscape keeps changing but the idea still comes down to what do people want and what are you

able to do that your competition wound mhm okay and then time talk about time a little bit what I mean timing is Everything as ex time timing is not the same as time time James click has written a brilliant book about the history of time travel now that seems absurd The History of Time Travel turns out the time machine was invented by someone we know his name it's not a real time machine it's just the idea of the time machine before 18 something when HG Wells started writing about the time machine there is no record

of anyone Ever talking about going back in time that's just new which blows my mind right and when we think about time as this invisible axis that's parceled out to everyone at the same rate whether you're a billionaire or not what it means is you get to plant seeds when other people say it's not important and then you are able to carve out spaces that when it does become important you've already gotten there so My blog had 100 readers when I launched it maybe 50 and it wasn't for a year before it became Seth's blog

but by the time my streak was a thousand it was too late for anyone to catch up in my category sure so I saw time as one of those components I may not be the fastest person today but I'm going to be running this race years from now when you've lost interest yeah I feel like I'm running that race too the tortoise the tortoises Race slow and steady uh so maybe that's a good segue into choice because you talk about the choice equals the future um you talk in the book about choosing your clients choosing

your competition uh distribution can you talk about how the choice is the future okay who are your customers right so back when you were working for an unnamed uh arrogant difficult person which One I'm not going to mention any names yeah you signed up to spend your days making that person happy you picked your future when you picked that customer yeah if I was in a fish store uh few years ago on a in a really wealthy uh SE suburb and I said to the owner who was busy it was offseason I said what do

you do with all the jerks who come in here who are demanding this and demanding that he said it's very simple I give Them one warning and then they can't be my customers anymore yeah you can act any way you want out there in your Mercedes but if you're in here this is how we talk to each other yeah for you he doesn't want to he doesn't want to spend his days engaging pick your customers pick your future number two pick your distribution pick your future when I decided I want to be a book packager

and work with major New York City book publishers I didn't get to Decide what kind of books were going to get created they did because it didn't matter that I could prove with a spreadsheet that people would buy my book they were my distribution they were in charge right and the third one is pick your competitors that if you're competing against people who break the rules and race to the bottom that's what you're going to have to do yeah there's one more you mentioned I like it it's pick your validation can You talk about that

one yeah so you and I have talked about this you know are you are you are you counting how many uh Tik Tok views you have are you counting how many YouTube followers you have if you have an easy metric in front of you it's quite likely you're going to pay attention to that and where you look for validation is going to change the work you do right I mean sometimes opt matter sometimes they do I guess in the in the system of things right well if I Need to persuade somebody to go along with

what I'm doing and they are looking at a number to see if I have status then I have signed up for that number to matter right so I decided that if someone needs me to have perfect fstar reviews they aren't the person I need to read my book right I guess I think a company like meta or you know in the back in the day it's Facebook they needed critical mass you know you that's a business that you build that you need A certain amount of users to get momentum yeah uh and so you know

sometimes and then Cheryl and then Cheryl and Mark started measuring something else and you can point to um a couple elections ago should Facebook take political advertising right cuz what they had done is woven together a community of more than a billion people in the spirit of connection and then to make the stock Price go up they start working with unethical organizations that violate people's privacy and they start running ads that divide people they didn't have to do those things that was a very bad strategic decision mhm MH um let's shift to scaffolding I love

I love how you are making distinctions between marketing and tactics and Strategy they all sort of operate in an order of operations but you talk about building Scaffolding in marketing can you right okay so it's a 100y old term that comes from a te a researcher who found that students kids will get stuck learning almost anything unless a teacher intervenes at the right moment and gets them up the next to the next level then they can work on their own for a while scaffolding is that help mhm and one of the challenges we have of

our Divided class system is a kid who is growing up without enough support isn't going to learn the next thing and the next thing they're going to get stuck right well the same thing is true for customers we need to build scaffolding to onboard them and move them up we need to build scaffolding to make it easy for them to tell their friends that one of the reasons that Facebook grew is it was so drop dead easy to invite other people to use Facebook sure that's scaffolding The engineers who built that didn't get paid enough

because it worked so well got it um what are some you know a lot of people who read my regular articles they listen to the podcast a lot of them are small business owners a lot of them and you know if I'm doing the math right last I check there's about 32 million small businesses in United States compared to I think 11,000 sort of Enterprise size Facebook size companies which Means you know uh 1% of the comp companies in the United States are responsible for 99% of the revenue and the rest of the small business

owners are holding it up kind of like with all these tiny little toothpicks um how does the H how does one if they have a small business think about scaffolding okay so there are two kinds of small businesses the vast majority of small businesses are jobs without a boss M and I'm not opposed to jobs without a Boss if you are a landscape architect and you have no full-time employees and you like being outside and making decisions you have a job without it you can't get five times bigger your hair would fall out right mhm

there are other businesses that are small But Mighty and have a system in place that could benefit from growth and so the opportunity for these kinds of organizations is to say there's institutions that can't do What we do you can't call up McDonald's and have them cater your kids christening they don't do that they they have no they can't compete with you they're not even going to try right so go do that but don't build a little fast food place right next to McDonald's are trying to out McDonald's McDonald's you will not succeed and to

give you an IDE idea of the scale of this it's 2000 24 years ago I get invited to Bentonville Arkansas to Speak at Walmart and Walmart has a big banner for their employees it says you can't out Amazon Amazon they gave up 24 years ago mhm because they weren't willing to go to a place that Bezos was willing to go and it was a worthwhile stall cuz for 25 years they've done fine in the long run they're going to be in trouble but that's a fairly long run 25 years so the point is if you

have a small business you need to look at big Businesses and say what aren't they willing to do right and who am I going to do that for right and that's yeah that makes a lot of sense by the way how how is the um your wife's Bakery doing uh by the way is now in hundreds of retail outlets and um some of the new items are the tastiest ever so the bakery continues to flourish that's great to hear um let's talk about pricing for a second so this This is always a fun exercise for

me I love everything about pricing and price strategy um there's several different pricing strategies whether it's a skimming strategy or a strategy of planned obsolescence or you know all of these different things um how do you think about pricing as releas a strategy price is a story it is also an exchange of money but it is a story uh Journal of wine economists did a study with wine lovers and uh Soo and they found that they all prefer $100 wine to $10 wine okay and then and then they switched the bottles yeah and they found

that they prefer $10 bottle of wine in $100 bottles even more yeah and so it's the story of how much the wine costs that we're paying for not the wine itself yeah and so when we think about our price our price is a signal to people who don't have time to look at everything else so one choice you can make is you can say you can pick anyone And I'm anyone and if you say that you better be the cheapest or the most convenient the other choice is to say you'll pay a lot but you

get more than you pay for your competition is not willing to say that if you can say that and make it true you probably going to be happier so how do you know what are some signs and signals that we're on the right path or the wrong path in terms of strategy how do we know our strategy is Right or wrong so there are some games where logic is the only thing that's involved so a good chess master can tell you after 10 moves who's going to win the game there's no doubt about it MH

that's not the way it works for the rest of us so the question is did you make assertions about what was going to happen next and what was going to happen after that That if you created these assets you would get these results are your assertions working out right is this getting easier or are you lying to yourself and putting even more money after the money you already spent that it's very easy for the people in an industry that's struggling to say I'll just do what I did yesterday and sooner or later it will work

the same way if you buy enough lottery tickets sooner or later you'll win but you don't have Enough money to buy that many lottery tickets MH if your strategy for example was in service of how do I become a well-known public speaker well are you able to turn a tedx talk into a second tedx talk into a TED talk into a speaking gig for free into a speaking gig for a little Etc if there's no progress in that direction you're just waiting for a miracle that's not a good Strategy and so we've been indoctrinated by

school into thinking if we just do exactly what we're told sooner or later we will get a prize right that is not how we work in a world of change in a world of change we have to say if I acquire this asset will it give me the resources to acquire that asset and can I repeat that enough times to get to where I'm going yeah so is it as simple as saying a strategy is sort of your goal is your North Star you talked about You know it's more of a compass than anything else

it's I love goals and um Zig Ziggler taught me a lot about goals a goal might be part of strategy but strategy is not a goal strategy is a goal along with a sketch that becomes a plan of how I'm going to get to that goal right and so the subtitle of my book is make better plans plans are not strategies managers love plans because plans imply that if you do everything on the list you will Get the output right so a pilot has a flight plan and if she does all the steps she's going

to get to Cleveland that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about first you have to make the plan I can't guarantee the plan's going to work but if you don't even make the plan you got real trouble So the plan is the assertion here we go and that assertion includes where are we going but it also includes how are we going to get There okay um and in my experience you start with a strategy you have your plans that go along with this and then your tactics and then you kind of see how it

goes and your strategy could change right I mean there's nothing wrong with changing your strategy there's nothing wrong but you're much better off changing your tactics a good strategy doesn't demand to be changed very often so what we're Trying to do back to the empathy thing the people you're hoping to serve if they knew what you know would they buy from you most of the small businesses I know the answer is no right yeah I'm trying really hard on my air condition installation yeah but are you saying there's something about how you install air conditioning

that's that much better than everybody else or you just really looking for work cuz the Fact is that if you're the only person in town who has the device that can clean the this and the do the other thing then yes smart people who are well informed will pick you because your strategy created that asset but this just Bold American assertion of I'm better because I said so that's not a strategy right that's just a bunch of Tacs okay uh that seems to make sense how about um you know something You mentioned over 50 times

in the books is status we've you and I have talked about status before uh I'm going to keep talking about it until people understand what I mean yeah let's let's keep it going um you know price price has price and Status goes hand in hand you know sometimes low price and high price you know I'm someone who uh if you go to thrift stores for example and that might be a flex like I am someone who values not spending money on fashion right Right or if you wait in the line at Chanel and you're number

70 in the in the line and you have to wait three hours to get in and then you get to buy the $5,000 bag that says something about your status as well I've got the time to do this status doesn't have to involve cat so right this is an astonishing story there is a chain of stores in Germany called Aldi and the two brothers who started it had a bitter falling out one brother wanted to sell cigarettes The other one didn't and so they split it into Aldi Nord and ALDI Su and one of those

two I can never remember which one expanded to the United States by buying Trader Joe's and the other one banded to the United States by starting Aldi both Aldi and Trader Joe's will sell you food for close to the same price but Trader Joe's offers the status of really cleverly packaged and delicious store brands that people will wait in line to get and ALDI offers the Status of showing your friends you're too smart to buy things that are expensive it feels like Thrift they do that on purpose right that they give you a cardboard box

that's left over to put your groceries in it's probably cost them more to do that than to have a paper bag but it's part of the message so both Aldi and Trader Joe's have strategies and both of their strategies are about different kinds of status yeah I'm going to let that sink In for a minute it's It All Rolls back up under it also becomes a default of picking your clients because once you pick that strategy then it also it's automatic right yeah exactly yeah exactly and so the problem with most small businesses that I

know that are online is they're on upwork they're on Fiverr they're on Rover and they're like here I am I hope you picked me and so what you're getting are customers who just want someone Cheap and easy well then don't be surprised if that's what they want cuz that's what you set up for right there's a lot of people out of work right now how does that relate to job hunting if you are kind of the same you know you're one of a thousand resumés in a pile how do you how can someone navigate that

if you're looking for work well if you pick your distribution which is resume getting read by an AI machine don't be surprised That the way to do it is to fit in more than anybody else mhm right if you pick your customer which is big company that doesn't care who they're hiring you can apply at an ATM don't be surprised that they don't care who they're hiring mm right there are plenty of jobs for people who are unique Irreplaceable Ling pins who create enormous amounts of value in an idiosyncratic way they're just much harder to

find on demand but when I talk to bosses they Keep telling me that's who they're looking for but then they get people who show up who pretend they are the people but when pressed they act like the people who are trying to fill a box so again the tension here of which one are you picking a job that's easy to get or a job that's worth getting let's say more about that benefit of tension uh H how do you create the tension and and what are the benefits of it maybe You know going back to

another example um you know if I think about a a freelancer like um chip kid or Debbie milman or uh Sarah Jones or I mean I have a long list of colleagues and Friends yep they don't have any trouble filling their days because they generously organized something in public MH right if you want a great book cover say get me chip kid well how do you know who chip kid is cuz he did this he did this he did this he do this he do this He do this he's not just in a Rolodex somewhere

Debbie milman podcast has you know been going on for 14 16 years so all of that leadership means that when you get Deb milwin you know what you're getting and so she doesn't have any trouble being asked to do interesting things because she's interesting and it's easy to feel like you're a victim because no one's picking you but you can start by picking yourself elegant Strategies what are elegant strategies it's super simple An Elegant strategy is a strategy that helps you get to where you're going with the least amount of effort because you're riding the

waves with Grace because you see the system because you're playing an efficient game because you have found your way forward and through as opposed to wrestling around in the dark it sounds like something I Want it also sounds like uh Magic like well it's okay so let me give you a a super easy trivial example okay please let's say you come from a family that doesn't have a lot of money and let's say you want to go to an overpriced famous old educational institution okay if you do a little bit of research you will see

that more than half the people who go to Harvard University get in Because of Athletics you will see that Harvard just recently in fact started a um woman's rugby team I think it's rugby and invested a fortune was it rugby I it's a sport at least as obscure as rugby let's pretend it's rugby yeah and spent a fortune building it up there coach has a big problem the problem is there are almost no high school students who do that all right and so if you're 16 years Old spending your time to be on the football

team doesn't make any sense but if you're 16 years old and you live in an unusual Place compared to where Harvard usually recruits like um Ghana and you learn how to fence the chances of you getting into Harvard just doubl mhm it's way easier to get into Harvard as a fencer from Ghana than it is to get in as someone who's pretty good at calculus mhm that's an elegant strategy You are using the system to accomplish your goal right why does Harvard have all these Sports well that's a long story that involves anti-Semitism anti-asian sentiment

Etc but that's what they picked so they already decided what their system is their system is if you're somebody who doesn't look like you and me and you are really good at an obscure sport you're on a different line than other people and so the elegant strategy isn't a hack the elegant Strategy has empathy which is there's someone in Harvard who doesn't know all the reasons why they have these policies all they know is they got to get themselves a good fencer yeah it's making me think so I've got a son who's 16 who uh

runs the 400 meter did you watch any of the Olympics or some of these I'm allergic to the Olympics but I hear you okay fair enough he's a runner I'm not a runner but he's fast and so we're thinking about Strategies uh because he comes from a family that believes in uh paying your own way to college you know getting in on Merit and if that means you go to a junior college first that's fine and Trans in faor or if you don't go to college at all that's fine if you get a get some

sort of trade if you learn a skill it doesn't matter you know uh anyway so he is his strategy is to run his way into a D1 or D2 or D3 school that's the strategy uh and so We're thinking about that and uh I would I would tell you as someone who has written about the uh College industrial complex a great deal that's not a great strategy right I'm realizing that as I listen to your Ghana story um so help me then empathy yeah if if you want empathy what's his what would be the best

school he could possibly go to for for him uh I think he would like to go to Duke great yeah Duke the Yale of the South um the admissions people the coaches they all have problems they're bureaucrats and they come to work every morning with a problem mhm if someone shows up and solves their problem they get in right right like I when I was in under grad I had breakfast every single morning with the head of admissions he was my buddy and we brainstormed all of these and I looked at applications and everything else

he had a problem he had To make his boss happy about the incoming class so what is it about Brian's son that if I let this kid into Duke I can brag to my boss I got this kid right well unless he's the state champ the the track coach coach isn't going to give me a hard time about getting him in right right and so the strategy I proposed to some kids um which is really effective is let's say he's into something that isn't Sports let's just Pick physics sure right the physics department at Duke

is pretty lonely because there aren't that many high school kids who are into physics right so I would go I would go now notice nothing here is a manipulation everything we're doing here is very straightforward and everyone who's involved is going to be happy yeah it's strategic I would go to the website of Duke and find five physics professors Mhm then I would research any papers or books they've written then I would read their papers or their books and I would write an email to each one of them this has to happen more than a

year before I'm applying asking them honest insightful questions about their work and I would have a correspondence with this person for 9 months about their work and then I would send them a note saying I'm going to be on campus uh can I stop by and Introduce myself and then I would stop by and if I like the person and they like me I'd say I'm thinking of coming to Duke it might be my first choice can you help if that physics Professor sends a note to the admissions office saying in all my years I

haven't had a kid this precocious this interested in what we're doing and I would like this person in my department you have made the physics professor's day stay better and if the person in the admissions office gets That note compared to some kid who's vice president of the student council or whatever why wouldn't they pick your son that's an elegant strategy I love it I love it yes yes yeah um the wheels are [Laughter] turning I got to get to work on that with him he's got to get to work on that it's very it

it's so unfair that we ask 17y Olds to make the most important financial decision in their lives yeah yeah Duke Duke could be good because his brother's there of course you know UNCC is not a bad school either I mean good enough for Michael Jordan yeah the problem is we you and I know nothing about what makes something a good school we just know what makes it a famous School true a dear friend of mine she and I started working together before she uh went to college she went To junior college did great that got

her scholarship to famous uh California school then her work there got her a scholarship into medical school and now she's the best doctor I've ever met and that Journey involved nothing with famous schools famous wasn't yeah yeah I agree yeah does it have the right opportunities maybe the right people the right environment yeah I would love for him to go live close to his brother because they're so far apart in age and It's just you know life has happened that way that I would love them and they're close but I'd love them to have that

Bond you know be even closer uh maybe the last thing we've got a couple minutes here can you break down the 2 by two positioning grid I looked at this and I thought okay fascinating I've seen something like it before what is it and why should we care about it this is one of the most important elements of a Elegance strategy we're trying to be empathic here we're trying to make it very clear that we can't be for everyone that we should be for someone so when we pick a position on a grid where every

one of the four corners is a good one and we're just going to pick one we're not denigrating our competition right we're not differentiating ourselves we're saying for people who want this we have this yeah so what is Ferrari position if you Go to a Ferrari dealership and say I'm looking for something to haul my nine kids around with they don't try to persuade you to buy an Enzo right they say my brother-in-law has a Volvo dealership down the street let me call him for you y right if you want to buy a chocolate bar

and you don't care about price or slave labor or quality you should buy a hershy bar or Nestle bar cuz they're very very very good at making you feel like a six-year-old and They're cheap and convenient on the other hand this quadrant this quadrant is for people who can tell the difference and who want this kind of story Etc right right so the hard work is to honor your competitors enough to admit that they might be the right choice for someone and if you can't articulate which quadrant you're in neither can your customers do you

think there's a Temptation to to see ourselves or our brand what we're doing in multiple quadrants you think that's part of the problem yes people do are either honestly saying to themselves I'm terrible only an idiot would pick me or they're saying I'm working harder than anybody else everyone should pick me yeah we're for everyone therefore yeah right like so you go to a local pizza place and they've got all those signs and stuff to Try to make it sound like they're the best pizza place in the state well no because there also convenient local

and inexpensive you can't be convenient local inexpensive and the best pizza place in the state yeah you're local convenient inexpensive so Own It whereas if you go to that place in Arizona which was uh for a long time the best pizza place uh in the country you're going to wait an hour and a half for a piece of pizza that's the deal They have a different position in the marketplace you can't try to position yourself for everyone last question uh yes sir sunk cost it's hard to ignore sunk cost like my sunk cost of my

Pepperdine University uh experience uh it is a cost that is sunk I paid for it and uh was a big price tag on that education uh how can I ignore sunk costs so when was the last time you ran one of your events in uh Orange County let's see uh it was April of this year and actually technically I ran in the event in New York right but they used to be on a different scale right like the one that I flew out for that was an Enterprise thing where if you run a couple of

those a year you're done and you built something with an enormous amount of effort you earned a lot of trust you pulled it off you did all the Hard part and then covid or whatever it's like I can't do this anymore it's a sunk cost I it would be stupid for me to do it again and have it fail regardless of how hard I worked to make it work yeah that's a sunk cost it's a gift from old Brian to you yeah the market sh don't have you don't have to accept it you can say

thank you for working so hard but the world has shifted no thank you but we get stuck cuz we say ah I have to keep doing this I'm trapped no You can just say no thank you and go do the other thing and I have walked away from many assets many projects that were hard one right like the information please business Almanac 850 Pages award-winning it was magic and then they invented the Internet like I don't need to do the new addition cuz it's it's not worth any mhm I know you worked hard to give

me this gift Seth but I can't use it and so we when the world changes we need to forgive our former self and say No thank you I mean we were just sitting back you know chopping it up reminiscing about the good old days and all that you know tracking my roots where I came from and where I'm going [Music]