“ The Human Advantage “ | Expert Seth Godin On Teaching Excellence [4K]

We become what we do so what holds us back from doing it confronting incompetence which means being willing to acknowledge that yesterday I'm not as good as I am today people don't want to let go of that feeling so they hold on to I'm good I don't have to get better but if we can give people the foundation for them to feel like they can lean forward a little bit their posture changes and then they experience Something differently and then they will this is the question I get so much like how do you find your

passion how do I choose it all this kind of stuff but you're talking about something completely different I don't think you're born with one thing and only one thing that you can be passionate about I think we can choose it welcome back to inspire change with Jordan Mulligan and today's guest is Seth Godin an unbelievably talented author who speaks About many different things from leadership to business to entrepreneurs to self-confidence we had an amazing conversation today and I'm super excited to share this episode with you he's authored over 21 bestselling books in over 39 different

languages and his whole trick and his skill is to give the viewer and the reader of his books an aha moment something that changes inside your brain that will change your life and Perception of becoming successful ACH achieving a goal trying to start a mission whatever it is these books are designed to give you exactly that I finished two of his books and I can 100% stand behind that and in this conversation that we have today there are a few aha moments that I know will connect with you guys today's episode was sponsored by hu

a quick affordable nutritionally complete source of food with everything that your body needs if You go to the link in the description today you can get a free t-shirt and Shaker with some of your orders and also find different offers and products down below I really recommend their Daily Greens it's absolutely changed my morning routine find out more down below but before that here is the episode with seph got in an absolute insightful look into this author's mind and some of his teachings let's dive into it so the first thing that I usually ask SE

is Just to introduce yourself for people who might not know um I'm Seth Goden I have written 21 bestsellers started a few internet companies mostly I'm a teacher what I try to do is help people see things they already are aware of but don't necessarily pay attention to or understand and then I try to encourage people to make things better and just for context like I want to get into how you took the leap from business to want To be a teacher and sort of helping people well I was a teacher first I started uh

in 1977 teaching canoeing up in Canada um I've taught thousands of people how to paddle a canoe by themselves what I discovered is that I got more satisfaction out of being good at helping someone else be good than I did out of actually doing it myself and I didn't necessarily have a plan about how you could weave together the kind of uh lucky life I have now I Just knew I liked making things and puzzles and games and solving interesting problems all in a in a swirl and I knew that there's no way I could

do an ordinary job where someone told me what to do all day that I would last about a week doing that and I got super fortunate the first real job I had after business school uh I launched a line of games with science fiction authors like Arthur C Clark and Ray Bradberry the first Illustrated computer Adventure games and I just got to do do things and do things and do things I ended up with 40 people on my team and my job became helping them see what we were trying to build I was basically teaching

them what was possible even though I didn't know how to code I didn't know how to illustrate I didn't know how to write the music but I could share a vision for that and ever since then I've sort of been trying to weave together projects teaching and Possibility how did you did was there a vision like going forward like I want to do this like how much of it was decision and how much of it was just like kind of like happening and look based um there was definitely not a decision to do what I

do now there was you know I I ran into people who gave Ted type talks long before Ted and I thought I'd love to be able to do that one day and I was lucky enough to meet Tom Peters when I was in business school Jay levenson shortly After that and I saw what it was like to be a business officer and I said I'd love to be able to do that one day but I'm not qualified to do any of those things what's an interesting problem right here right now that I can do and

then another one and I was you know the internet showed up right when I needed it if it hadn't I'd probably be working in a Burger King or something you know the the idea of choosing a passion this is the question I get so much like how Do you find your passion how do I choose it all this kind of stuff and people become Frozen by that sort of decision but you're talking about something completely different right I I take real exception to a few things that are going around these days one of them is

follow your passion I think that's crazy talk because the chances that your passion is a going to take you where you want to go with the world helping you is very low right that if your passion is building Little tiny ships and Bottles there isn't a market for that you're not going to be able to do that it makes a lot more sense to become passionate about what you do as opposed to insisting that you do what you're passionate about so there are people who are passionate about customer service who work in a coffee shop

there are people who are passionate about um helping kids who are monu teachers but they became passionate after the gig showed up so we are way More flexible than we imagine and I don't think you're born with one thing and only one thing that you can be passionate about I think we can choose it so that I completely agree with that because when I was growing up uh I was hellbent on becoming a professional basketball player like that was it and you know I was so ambitious about it I was so invested I so passionate

about it and this is not where I was supposed to be at all far from it but I'm you know I'm in I prefer to be here fortunately I prefer to be here but uh I didn't see those steps going forward but live I feel that living passionately is what got me here but I think for some people it is it the combination of living passionately with I don't know like her eyes and is open to the world reading accept him for different situations and different opportunities to arise is there an element of needing To

because I have there's a kid down the street who also wants to be a professional basketball player so I've had this conversation what is it about being a professional basketball player that he is passionate about is it donkey a basketball cuz you can do that for free right is it um making a lot of money cuz there are lots of ways to make it is it being sort of famous to a group of fans right so you have figured out which pieces of that life you can Actually make a living from without needing all of

the scarce uh super lucky lottery breaks that would get you actually drafted into a pro basketball league so when we separate these things what lights you up right so what lights me up is being on Tepe Lake looking a 12-year-old in the eye and helping them confront Their Fear and paddling a boat but it feels exactly like talking to you right now so I don't have to be on TP Lake to be passionate I Can just figure out what are the triggers that make me feel awake and contributing and go do those somewhere else wow

so the canoan versus business and entrepreneur why the Business and Entrepreneurship because I couldn't uh build the life and the family I wanted living in Northern Canada and working for two and a half months a year when it's warm enough to be on the lake right so it was actually a good thing that I Couldn't do that because if I had done that it would have been limiting instead I said what does it feel like on a really good day up there when I'm surrounded by people who are enrolled in the journey when there's feelings

of mutual respect well I took that exact feeling and helped organize the carbon Alman act which is a a groundbreaking book that 300 people and I wrote together it felt exactly like it felt to be up in aanin park except I wasn't Outside I was sitting there touching the keyboard instead you know the reward that you were getting from those maybe 30 people on the lake is it does it feel multiplied that you're reaching millions of people with the box it does I don't notice you know you you do a TED Talk and it ends

up you know reaching 10 million people I don't know I gave the Ted Talk a long time ago it's out there it it's on its own now for me it's what does it look like to have a puzzle a Problem a page that's not finished a project that doesn't quite work a person in front of me who can go to the next level can I nudge this in a way that solves that problem that's what I do every single day and it's what I do if I'm training my puppy and it's what I do if

I'm standing at the checkout trying to figure out why there's such a long line and how they could fix it it's all the same well what's the most important for somebody to learn something like What's the thing they need to have when they come to whether it was canoe in or business okay so all knowledge is self- knowledge in that if it's in a book you don't know it yet you know it once you do it we become what we do so what holds us back from doing it so if if I'm going to talk

about basketball for a second I'm terrible at basketball I could probably get better at basketball I will not get better at basketball by reading about it Or watching YouTube videos I will only get better at basketball by shooting in a way that makes me realize I can shoot Better Than I Used to which means confronting incompetence which means being willing to acknowledge that yesterday I'm not as good as I am today people don't want to let go of that feeling so they hold on to I'm good I don't have to get better but if we

can give people the foundation for them to feel like they Can lean forward a little bit then they lean forward and when they Lean Forward their posture changes and then they experience something differently and then they learn because they did something yeah I see that with my son you know a lot like es especially with realizing he's done something he's he's got better maybe he got the I'm training my son to play basketball as how old is he he's seven but he he's very tall so so do you remember uh when he was a Toddler

I do yeah so why do we call them toddlers because they're not walking because they toddle and every single person who has been fortunate enough to be able to learn to walk has learned to walk by walking poorly they take a step they fall down they take a step they fall fall down they two steps they fall down they don't give up on walking at that point they toddle their way through it and your son is doing the same thing now With basketball and with reading and with everything else that learning is about creating the

conditions for people to teach themselves not lecturing people on something that's in a book wow so what is required to have people teach themselves like what's the most important thing because in the book um tribes you talk about self-confidence a lot and I think an absence of self-confidence is a huge issue for wanting to take on new skills and learn So all change involves tension it's the tension of this might not work the tension of what will other people say the tension of this might work and then what will happen so if I want to

shoot a rubber band across the room what do you guys call that an elastic an elastic across the room I pull it backwards Before I Let It Go if there is no tension it doesn't go anywhere we create tension when we establish the conditions for learning we Can't shy away from it we have to see it it's on there right there on the table tension is going to be created how will people deal with that tension well the class clown deals with it by not listening to you disrupting the thing and hiding their fear right

other people put that fear to work and say I need to learn this more because that's the way to make my fear go away but we see the fear we dance with the fear we create conditions of safety and Tension at the same time apparent risk we want to create the conditions for someone to feel like the thing they're about to do is risky but it isn't really because if we can train folks to look forward to that thing that feels risky they will want to do it again and then the cycle continues that's part

of it and the other part of it is what about our peers affiliation who's to our left and who's to our right what are we all doing People Like Us do Things like this that you are defined by how your friends see the world because you have chosen them to be your friends you're in that Circle so if you're in a group of seven people and they're all angling to get into Medical School you are more likely to push yourself because you see the people you want to be in sync with pushing themselves so when

we create these conditions it's not about obedience or compliance it's about what's it like around here when we're in A learning culture what is the most important thing when you're choosing or maybe even realizing the people around you that you know that you hang around with you spend your time with how important is it and then also I guess there's there's certain situations where we have to spend time with people that maybe not fit that criteria family um I guess there's old friends as well that maybe we grew up with like do we Cut them

off like I'd love to know you know your thoughts on it yeah I have two friends who have shared this with me uh my friend Anthony Ayano who's a great sales trainer was uh in a heavy hair metal band hair down to his waist and living a very fast life and uh he had a brush with danger and woke up the next morning and said if I keep doing this I will not last and he just deleted every single one of the people who he had been spending his life with and said it's Important to

me to go to a different place and live a different life that's dramatic that's traumatic that's not what most people ought to do but it demonstrates just how important that circle is if you're surrounded by people who are saying that'll never work then you're much less likely to do something important so don't show your work to people whose habit is to say that'll never work figure out who's that circle of people You bring your new ideas to who's that circle of people you go to when you're seeking confidence or reassurance who's that circle of people

that you need when you do need direct criticism and the same way it doesn't make sense to go to a hamburger place and ask for pizza doesn't make sense to go to a circle of friends that specialize in one thing and hope that they're going to encourage you to do something something else have you got um any studies or facts that back This up like do you know do you know any of any like if you surround yourself with successful people or wealthy people you're going to end up like this well so it I mean

the aphorism Rings true but there are specific studies about this in terms of um you know how we create culture what exactly makes an Ivy League school like Harvard work do they have better teachers do they have better books it's mostly that you're associated with people who are on the same path so That there's this amplification of what's going on but my work isn't to do peer-reviewed research my review work is to say to the people who just heard me say this oh yeah that makes sense because they know it makes sense but they're not

doing it it's easier to be frustrated than it is to shift the circle of people that you're counting on and if you don't want to be frustrated start by Shifting the circle of people tell me what happens after that tell me What happens when you start a mastermind group or a circle of people that you have to check in with just for five minutes every day online five minutes where you have to go this is what I did yesterday right so we I run this thing called Purple dospace it's an online community for 1,200 people

and people post every single day what they're going to do tomorrow and they encourage each other there's no troll there's no pitching there's nobody Hustling you and the end result of this is that people who thought they could never write a book or writing a book people who thought they could never become a coach or becoming a coach because that's all it takes it's five or 10 minutes a day of people you want to impress and please and connect with having a standard so now it's not just you living up to your standard it's the

group right and so one of the things I talking about in tribes is for 10,000 Years human beings we only in groups of 150 that dunbar's number is a real thing that we are uncomfortable if there's more than 150 people in our Rolodex there's only 150 people that match our brain's ability to really connect with well that tribe has a lot of influence on us you don't want to get kicked out of it because in the old days if you got kicked out of the village the tiger would eat you there's a lot of pressure

to fit into that Circle but now We have this freedom to either join a different Circle or even better start one and the idea of small world leadership is so powerful every big idea in our culture every single one started as a small group of people 20 30 50 people who connected with each other Amplified it and took it to the next level that's what led to Wikipedia that's what led to um any of the subreddits that you see that are super active you know there's 300,000 people In a community now that Staples bread to

trees I don't know why you would staple bread to trees but it didn't start with 300,000 people started with three and if that if that's giving them Solace and satisfaction and connection it's worth the bread I feel like any more context on the bread the bread if you if if you go on subreddits are very interesting little communities around the world and the subreddit for stapling bread trees is exactly what it sounds like and it's Become like now it's been featured on billboards in Chicago and everything else you can be very clever what is a

tree right they just made a rule no bonsai trees because people were using bonsai trees and it was hurting them because the trees are so small right what is a piece of bread is a bagel a piece of bread can I put and so it's just clever that's all it's just clever yeah yeah yeah wow I can I can definitely my own experience with this Is when I started doing M brother I have friends from you know from childhood who were telling me it's never going to work like this it's never going to work don't

think about it like that would be such a silly thing to sell your business and do this and you know those those people I don't hang around with anymore and actually wasn't a choice it just kind of happened naturally and then the people I do hang around with I I've got this crazy task I'm trying to do at the Moment this fundraising thing where I'm trying to carry a huge stone for hundreds of miles and an actual stone not a metaphysic Stone my back and I'm training for the moment it's going really well but um

before I started I'd passed the idea around a few of my friends and all of them you know my close friends are like yeah you've got this like you can if anyone can do it you can do it and just that belief from them got me into the Training and they were right like I'm I'm managing to do it but I'm I'm curious because my friendship group is very very small and I'm wondering when you talk about 150 people that you know I know that's probably like the Max Capacity but to me that bamboozles me

I can't think Beyond 10 to 15 maybe well so friends is an interesting concept M um we have an enormous number of acquaintances in the village the people you would confidently turn your back to And not worry about somebody jumping you right the people who you know their cousin the people who you could borrow a Fiverr from and they and then they would know you would pay them back in my reading of darts people who if they had a funeral you would go right and that is an interesting thing to think about because even if

you're on Twitter and you have 10,000 followers you're not going to go to the funeral of 10,000 People there is a smaller circle of people and it shifts over time right the number of people I have who I would consider my very close friends yeah it's a handful that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about our creative life our creative work there are people who are a handshake away from you two handshakes away from you who know your work and you could go to them and say I'm thinking of doing this fundraising thing

do you have any Insight for me about how I could maximize you could do that for with me and I would answer you right so I'm not going to go to the pub with you and spend all night drinking but I'm here to encourage you on that part of your journey right and so we get to pick that group and if you're just sitting there passively accepting who they are you have made a choice in doing that and it is getting in the way of you making the change you seek to make in the world

is That something that people you know if you if you're working with people in Business and Entrepreneurship is that something that people struggle with like they have a a poor group of friend friends around them you see quite here I see it with every single person I know and it's because it's culturally awkward just the word friend right I'm not choosing my friends based on how they can help me professionally when we think about the Ted conference it was only 225 People for the first 10 or 15 years and I wasn't permitted to come I

really wanted to come most people hadn't heard of it but for whatever reason Ricky didn't invite me and then the year that it shifted I was able to go to that first Ted that Chris ran and what happens when Ted is working properly is there are people in the room who are not your friends they're your colleagues and and you need in that year in between Ted conferences to do work so that when you See your colleagues again in person you're not embarrassed that you have to do work so that you can when someone says

what are you up to you have a good answer my friend Jonathan is a breakthrough uh research physician his circle of colleagues are people he can have a talk with about Parkinson's disease or heart disease that challenges each one of them to make sure they're up on the stage of the art right whereas if you're a small town Doctor there's no pressure on you whatsoever to be up on the stateof thee art that doesn't mean you're a bad doctor it just means you're a bad researcher because there isn't this peer pressure from colleagues and part

of my philosophy over the last few years is to say some people have a job you take something from your inbox and move it to your outbox you try to do it pretty well for a pretty decent pay and you're off the Hook you're not responsible you just do what your boss says but the number of people who have a job like that keeps going down and AI is replacing a lot of those jobs so what's left what's left is you're actually responsible you have agency you make choices you can decide who you're freelancing for

what kind of project you're working on what's the change you're making well if you're if that's you now you have professional responsibility and you have colleagues It's not just I'm phoning in my job because those jobs are going to get worse and worse and worse it's I am leading something here even if it's a team of one so it's on me to decide who my colleagues are it's on me to decide who am I leading and who am I following we may not want that responsibility it's not how we were raised but it's a choice

and it's available when we talk about the the circle is there a level that you Could step too high like maybe you're in business you know a small business owner and maybe with looking you know you start hanging around with a billionaire CEO or whatever like is there an issue with that well I'm not sure that's the right proxy for who doesn't belong in your circle uh the billionaire CEOs I know some of them are nut cases and some of them are some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet it's not what your

external trappings are it's what Are the challenges you are choosing to face and who do you need need as colleagues to encourage you but also to challenge you to face those things so if you hang out with Goldman Sachs investment bankers their currency is currency they're just they're not particularly deep sometimes they just want to know how much money you made well that could drive somebody to become who knows a hustling drug dealer because they just need to make more money that's Not going to help them get to where they want to go on the

other hand if there's somebody who's in the nonprofit space but they're the kind of person who sees interesting challenges you could be someone who wants to make money and get a lot of insight and advice from someone who doesn't have the same easily measured output as you it's not about easy measurement it's about how do we feel when we Face the challenges we're choosing to face those are the Colleagues that I think we should look for I I love this idea of like a self-sustaining sort of group of people it's and again it's really interesting

because I I've not done this conscious but my my good good friend at the moment one of my best friend Luke stalman he's in a very similar business to me so when I go up to Scotland to you know be in his Studios and look around the work he's doing it really is like I have I have to make sure that I'm going like You say not be embarrassed and make sure that you know I'm almost motivating him and inspiring him in the same in the same way he does the same for me um yeah

I'm I'm curious as if somebody stopped right now was like right I'm looking around me the people that I have around me are not who I want to be associate with or it might not be you know making me feel this way like I want to it's not self-fulfilling or self- sustaining what do they do they lit do they just go I Don't think that makes I think sudden motion is way overrated um it it can lead to all sorts of trauma it's not helpful this is this the weird one how how it sounds so

strange as an adult asking this how do we find new friends how do we go out and look consciously for new friends who fit that kind of Bill like is it you know it's it's a it feels like a very difficult thing to do it's not a difficult thing to do it's just hard emotionally to do so first Again we're talking about colleagues here and we're not talking about mentors the problem with seeking a mentor is it doesn't scale you're looking for some sort of magical person who's got all this time to spend to help

you they can't and they can't do it for everyone that so you just can't call up Oprah and say I'm starting on this video Journey will you be my mentor that's not what we're talking about what we're talking about is being able to see other People who are on a journey and contribute to them that it turns out that if we contribute to other people who work rhymes with ours reciprocity will often occur we're not hustling them we're not doing it because we want them to do something for us we're doing it because we can

so the interesting thing about books authors don't compete with each other bookstores are filled with books just like books I write right but we're not competitors Because we know that if our book was all by itself in the supermarket no one would buy it it only sells when it's next to all the other books and so I count other authors as some of my most valuable colleagues and I can reach out to them and begin by saying I read your book I Lov what you did here I really like that did you think about this

and I've had some of my best professional relationships with authors I met by reaching out to them and cheering them On asking them questions about their work inevitably when you get together they will challenge you on your work and now you have that Circle but it doesn't have to be authors my friend um Brian who makes the TV show billions Brian is one of my best most effective colleagues because he hasn't written a book but he knows what he would be confronting if he did so he can ask me questions I'm trying to hide from

and he can push me in ways that I'm not willing to push Myself and the same thing can be true if he's thinking about something about a new TV show because he can say something to me and I've never made a TV show but I can say what about this and it's this posture of not expertise but emotional connection to the way the work makes us feel that enables us to create these conditions sticking on this sort of theme um the book tribe speaks more from a perspective of being a leader of a tribe Uh

yeah can we just dive into what what's that difference because then when you talk about sort of today's modern how how long ago was the book written by the way almost 15 years ago you were you ahead of the curve with the with social media and stuff cuz it it really Rings true now with social media but we have the we could have these tribes around us especially with social media and the internet um but yeah what's the difference between sort of the leader of A tribe versus the cires okay so the thesis of the

book first of all um the word tribe has uh various sorts of baggage associated with it it's thousands of years old the tribes of Israel but in my country colonialism ended up uh dominating and uh bringing genocide to huge numbers of of first people indigenous people and sometimes the word tribe was used in a negative sense that's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about a Tribe I'm talking about a group of people who share culture who share a goal who share a way of being what are things like around here People Like Us

do things like this most people who have a project or a brand or an idea don't have a tribe they can talk to a tribe that already exists there is a tribe of people who use YouTube not just for entertainment but for inspiration for connection to help them Get to the next level you are narrating for some of those people over time how many uh things have you put on the channel so far a lot a lot yeah thousand right so now there is a tribe of people who see themselves through your lens who see

themselves through your narrative that group of people wants to be connected they want to have something to follow they want to have something to talk about they're not doing it for you you're doing it for Them and so if we can help this group of people feel less lonely feel more empowered we are offering this generative resilient thing to them and so what I'm arguing in the book and I use the example of Nathan winegrad Nathan worked at a small animal shelter then he ended up at the San Francisco SPCA and when he was there

he realized in the US they kill 4 million dogs and cats every year usually within one day that's their job at the SPCA and He said I didn't get into this business to kill dogs and cats so he started a movement just with three people then with 30 people then with 300 people and then San Francisco became the first no kill shelter in the US in a major city not one Healthy dog or cat killed since that day and then he brought it City to City Group by group creating the condition for people to do

what they wanted to do all along and he has saved the lives of Millions of dogs and cats but he's also connected people who previously were disconnected that's a tribe and they're everywhere we look now this small world Network idea says that there's only 50 or 100 people in your circle but some of those people know 50 or 100 other people and it doesn't take much for it to leap and to leap and to LEAP that's what we get I love the story by the way the uh yeah Nathan um the the idea that at

the start It might have been possibly just this thing he could do in one place but then when he went to all the different cities everything I thought it was fantastic there's a there was a question actually had personally on this um you spoke about like the difference between a tribe and a company like CNN or you know these big media companies and when we started Mulligan Brothers I we had this strap um no host just the guest and that was The whole point is that there was not there was not supposed to be some

person on the other side of the camera just the guest and we realized that the audience just didn't invest in as much um so I feel like we're leaping out of being almost like a media company and I had a question for you how would you turn something like a media company one of the big corporations into a tribe okay so I I can't help but be a little pedantic the company can't be a Tribe the company has employees now if there's a useful culture at the company the way there was at Apple during it's

Heyday you know under Steve and stuff people were getting the the logo tattooed once someone gets the logo tattooed they're part of a tribe right I think what you mean is how could a big Media Company narrate for many external tribes well what the big media companies are discovering and they're really suffering is they used to make a show And 60 million people saw it for sure it was guaranteed because it was mass media now a show on Netflix might be seen by a million people there's a huge difference between 60 million and a million

that they're not they can't do Mass anyway so what they can do is find tribes that want to feel this narration so if you you know it's March they just launched the three body problem on Netflix that is a TV show based on a book that narrated a science fiction story for Just a million people a million is enough because those people if the TV show is any good will each tell five people and now you're fine so what we're seeing is this call it narrow casting if you want I don't like that term what

we're seeing is instead of saying you have to watch something tonight and we're something they're able to say this one is for you this is worth it for you then the question is are they going to program to divide us or are they going To program to connect us and the shortcut particularly on things like Twitter is divisiveness let's just punch someone in the face because people who want an argument will come watch but the resilient long-term option is connection to put something into the world that people want to share because it makes them better

right so if um Susan Kane's Ted Talk was about shyness it's a little um ironic because a talk about being shy has been seen by 50 Million people how did that happen did she do it by yelling about it not at all she gave a tool to people who think of themselves as shy that they could easily email to their friends say see this is who I am and so it spread because it was useful for the people who watched it to share it with someone else is it's really interesting in this space you know

there's all these tiny networks or you know people with these huge tribes and it's funny now I'm starting to see With these big corporations is it's almost like Talent acquisition like trying to sign these guys and take you know a set of you know like you say like a million followers aill a million people on the tribes and then put them on their their roster or whatever it is it seems to be happening a lot at the moment well if you think about it that's really the business that they've always been in in the sense

that they don't know how to start from scratch they know How to use money to get attention yeah yeah makes perfect sense I want to go back to self-belief for a second because again it's something that's mentioned in tribes and it's a requirement almost to I think you you put it as most Endeavors or trying to achieve anything self-belief is super important and I think I've always found it hard to articulate self-belief because it almost feels like sometimes you just have to stop Doing it like and it seems like such a weird like chicken or

the eggs kind of situation yeah it's so easy to get hung up on self-belief because it seems unattainable and essential and it's neither one if you're a lifeguard and there's a dock with six lifeguards on it and someone God forbid starts struggling in the water drowning right in front of you it would be accurate to say that you are not the best lifeguard in the world maybe not even the best lifeguard on the Dock that you didn't do the best at your bronze medallion and someone could do a better job than you but you are

the one who's standing right in front of that person and if you jump in the water you will save that person's life that is a generous thing for you to do I would like to think that most people in that situation would jump in the water well this instinct to be a lifeguard is exactly what talking about when it comes to leadership there are lonely people There are uninformed people there are people who need to be activated there are people who want to be taught you are standing right here on the dock you are the

single best person to do this generous act I don't care whether you believe in yourself or not what I care about is that you can do something generous right here and right now go do that and once you do it now you will know that you can do it so you can do it again so impostor syndrome is real the Sense that you feel like you're an impostor when you're doing something new because you are an impostor the only way to do important work is to do work you haven't done before so you have no

proof that you can do it the proof will come from doing it so I'm not talking about arrogance and I'm not talking about showing up insisting that you are always right I'm saying if you see someone drowning you got to jump in the water and try to save them The the idea of to take the leap of faith is that something that people are born with you know with higher risk tolerance is that a connection that leaders have even though in the book you say no there are no connections between leaders you know there's no

one commonality between leaders apart from they want to beers but is is that idea of taking the leap of faith something that you know it's not a leap it's a step no one's asking you to go give a Talk on the main stage is Davos that's not what's on offer what's on offer is can you send a constructive email to one person can you make a three minute tutorial on video with your camera and share it with four of your customers who are stuck there the number of places where we can step step by step

by step and begin to lead so the the one of the places where this happened for me I was 23 years old I was only one of youngest people at the company where I was Working and we were making educational computer games for kids it's Christmas and the office is closed there's no email hadn't been popularized yet there's no voicemail I go to work because I had nothing else to do and I answered customer service calls for eight hours I learned so much doing that I had no authorization I had no training I had no

ability to do it perfectly but it was better than not having the phone get Answered and for the next 6 months in every meeting I went to I had something to contribute cuz I could say well you know when our customers get stuck they ask about this no one else in the room knew but I knew because I had shown up and done that thing you know my mom uh was the first woman on the board of the museum the art museum in uh Buffalo where I grew up and she invented this idea which is

before the Antiques Road Show she called up sou Bees and she said said can you send a couple appraisers to our Museum and we'll say to the public if you've got candlesticks or old whiskey bottles that you want appraised these people so it would be a good way to get traffic and be part of the community and they got a little tiny article in the paper but the night before my mom was a little nervous like what if no one came and then she said well guess what if no one comes no one Will know

that no one came and the next day there were a thousand people waiting in line the fact is you couldn't get a permit to do that you couldn't prove that it was going to work you couldn't practice it before you did it if no one came no one would know no one came but once she did it something happened after that and something happened after that and something happened after that because we're not leaping we're just Taking steps this this is a great uh segue to the icara story because when never I've heard of the

icara story and like I said I've read the I've read Steven Fry's book Mythos that went into this but I read the iara story and the only thing that resonated with me and something that I remembered is don't fly too high that was it don't fly too high um and but that's not the How The Story Goes and yeah I'd love to hear you know your opinion on that and I mean just a Premise it is the I do I believe that flying too low or taking no risk at all could be the biggest stay

or the biggest risk of all anyway yeah so obviously it's a myth it's been around for thousands and thousands of years we can see how it evolved because it's been in writing and they changed it in about 1800 couple hundred years ago the myth now which every school kid knows is Icarus and his dad Deus are on the island um they're stranded there they Make wings and they put them on their back holding them along with wax and they fly away but before they fly away Deus says to icus don't fly too high don't get

arrogant don't get up if you fly too high the max will wax will melt and you'll perish and Icarus flies too high and he dies and so the lesson is obvious listen to your dad listen to the boss do what you're told fit in don't get arrogant but before the Industrial Age the story also said my son do not fly too low because if you fly too low the Mist will get in the feathers and they will weigh you down and you will perish they took that part out cuz they wanted people to fly too

low they wanted people to settle and so the argument I'm making is we have these magnificent tools that we've built at Great cost to the environment and to other people and we are wasting them wasting them doing Stupid stuff like tweeting when we could be building something important but we are flying too low and I the the idea of you know taking a risk or doing nothing meaningful is I I think that so many people are paralyzed by fear of of flying of not of flying too high or maybe not even flying at all but

failing that they don't take the risk you know they're not willing to which to me is the flying low and it is I think that's the thing that kills dreams they just Never get started in the at all they never begin because you know people are so fearful uh and you speak about dealing with fear in in the book I'm guessing it's something you speak about in all of the books it's such a crucial factor to becoming successful or wanting to sort of achieve anything um again like what's the is it something that we are

natural naturally born with so many people seem to have this bravery sort of placed in them and they can you know Take risks and do all this kind of thing but is it is it you know something we're born with we are born with fear we're born with fear for a really good reason you don't evolve as a successful species if you're not filled with fear Evolution doesn't like change external change because it's risky the Frog the wolf they want everything tomorrow to be just like yesterday no threats we have that too for good reason

That's one reason for example why many people don't like cilantro because if you don't eat cilantro until you're a teenager it tastes like soap and it's horrible because we evolve to not like strong flavors we're not used to because they might be poison fear is real the difference is fear of saber-tooth tigers fear of lightning fear of drowning is real for a good reason fear of someone not liking the talk you're giving fear of someone not wanting to watch your Video is not useful because no one is going to ever make something that everyone is

going to like that what we have to do is have the empathy to be able to say to the non-believers it's not for you to be able to say to the people who say it's not very good I didn't make it for you the people who love it if there aren't any of those people we didn't make a good thing but if there are people who love it that's who it's for so we have to reserve the Fear for where it belongs so that guy Alex who was in the movie uh free whatever it was

who climbed uh yosity without any ropes there's something broken about him he is missing some fear that's not what I'm talking about he should not be doing what he's doing he will if he does it long enough he will die doing it that's fine he's a free human he can do whatever he wants but that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about the Right fear for the right reason and when it shows up for the wrong reason it's pretending that it's warning us but it's not we're just hiding it's just a sort of primitive

brains just sending those signals on we call right and I think that trying to change it is a mistake what we can do as Steve prfi calls it resistance when we're going to do something creative something generous something powerful That voice shows up and says better not you can't make it go away you can't make impostor syndrome go away what you can do is dance with it you can say thank you you know if you want to run the marathon you can go get a coach but you can't say to the coach I would like

to be able to run a marathon without getting tired because what comes with carrying a 220 lb stone is you get tired that is the point so the difference between someone Who finishes the marathon and someone who stops at Mile 20 is simple the person who stops at Mile 20 didn't know what to do with the tired and the person who finishes did you can't make the tire go away but you can figure out what to do with it and the same thing is true with our fear when it comes to leadership when it comes

to contribution the fear is not going to go away but you can say thank you put it in a useful Place being charismatic doesn't make you A leader being a leader makes you charismatic when we say that person's really charismatic what we are really saying is that person is leading because the people we associate with Charisma don't have anything else in common so some of them have a stutter some of them are tall some of them are eloquent so what exactly made them charismatic what made them charismatic is they're inhabiting the Lial space between here

and there that we are going somewhere With them and that orur around them with that Charisma sucks us along but if they weren't going somewhere then they wouldn't be charismatic drives today the companies are being the most successful you know in the market right now they have these cult like followings the idea of tribes that has developed massively and like you say through Twitter and social media it's yeah absolutely um crazy it was it Was really interesting reading that because I was like I needed to figure out when it was it was written I can

tell that some kind of it was written a while ago but you were so ahead of the curve with it I mean did you for did you foresee sort of social media being this big and having this much impact so the thing that I missed for sure is I didn't realize how negative it would be when we gave everyone a microphone that like many Early web techno Optimist I started my first I had my first email in 76 I started my first web company in 1990 before the worldwide web it was an internet company so

I've been seeing this thing evolve and I just kept saying to myself giving everyone a microphone is always going to be a good thing not taking into account that some people would run and Lead tribes to make things worse that some people would make a hobby out of being a troll and that's on Me I missed that but even if I had written about it it wouldn't have gotten any better um yes people have always connected that if we look at the growth of the telephone if we look at the growth of the telegraph if

we look at the growth of the walkie talk or the CB radio every time we give people a chance to connect they connect and it's it's called the internet inter means connect net means connect it's a connection of connections people that's what they do With it so with that I wanted to ask you we mention it briefly about AI like how do you see that sort of development over the next 20 30 years well I think it's the biggest change in our world since electricity and I don't think people really understand why it looks a

little bit like a gimmick now that it mostly understands what you say and mostly says things that make sense that's just the gimmicky part what it's going to do first of all it's always on that can't Be uh minimized what it means to be always on for example is if you're in therapy you go for an hour a week but if you have an always on therapist that's there for one minute every couple hours it's going to transform the way you interact with everything that when we have something that is persistent and always around us

it shifts how we deal deal with it the second thing is it works pretty close to for free and that means lots and lots and lots of little Tasks that we might not ordinarily assign because it's too hard to find someone to do them and too much to pay them are just going to get done and the third thing is it finds any job where we've written down the steps of how to do the job and does a mediocre job of it which means if you're mediocre at what you do now mediocre means average we're

going to get a computer to do it for free so you better be prepared for that and There's going to be plenty of room more room than ever for non- mediocre work for Extraordinary work for things that change the rules but if all you do is write pretty good copy or pretty good scripts or you're a pretty good editor or you're a pretty good sound engineer I got a computer that'll do that for free I hope you're enjoying this episode so far today's video was sponsored by hu quick affordable and nutritionally complete with everything that

your body Needs as you guys know I've been using these guys for the past two years and hu have just made an absolute game Cher their black edition is now available in their ready to drink bottles you can grab one on the go and it has higher protein than their regular ready to drinks but everything amazing about the normal fuel bottles as well so find out more with the link in the description how do you feel about sort of authoring books and making films and you know all These kind of things like what happens to

those creative artistic jobs well there are different parts of the creative artistic jobs you may recall that in the movie business there used to be someone whose only job was to have a light meter and someone whose only job was to pull focus and someone whose only job was to hold a boom there are some of people who do that now but not as many right that technology replaces things but creates new opportunities and I Think what we're going to see is we're already seeing 10 tens of thousands of books being written by AI a

day you give it the right prompt it'll write a book right write a biography of the Mulligan Brothers it knows how to do that now no one's wants to read that book but that doesn't keep it out of the bookstore so if you're going to go ahead and write a book you better have something to say that isn't mediocre that isn't something an AI could do if it doesn't surprise People or not resonate with some people or feel like it causes a challeng for some people then you shouldn't write it cuz AI can do that

without you do do you think the the shear numbers the sheer volume let's say you know books especially YouTube videos are a huge one and then coupled with marketing from these and money from these big companies do you think they pose a threat though to You Know The Talented artist well there's always a threat to the talented Artist when the camera came along the painters were freaking out when Pop came along and Andy Warhol had a team of people silk screening stuff the real painters freaked out when video I mean artists are always under threat

if you go to a wedding every single person has a camera in their pocket now what do you need a wedding photographer for right so there's all of this shift that's constantly happening YouTube as an open longtail channel is going to be way less Appealing to a typical producer of videos like a guy who makes a wood working video to teach you how to dovetail who might have been making $10,000 a month doing that he's not going to be able to do that anymore because I can just have it make 300 videos each more specific

than the next and if I'm way out on the long tail you know the last thing I read was uh half the songs on the uh iTunes Store have had less than few five listens last Year because there's just too many people making music and not enough people listening to it same thing's going to happen with videos same thing's going to happen with movie length animated stuff but still we want to watch something great we want to talk about what other people are talking about we want to be part of something none of that's going

to change what's going to change is the team you're working with some of those people are Going to be computers I've thought about this tremendously obviously the of course we're in and um for me I think what my favorite medium of all is documentary film I think it's one of the most powerful mediums for Change and impact but I also think in in going against Ai and you know having to have a physical camera at an event a moment in time of history for me I think that's the sort of way I'm leaning a little

bit more conversations like this I I guess At some point something will probably replace it or try to replace or attempt but hopefully like these real connections that's what's important to me is trying to get that on camera and translate that on camera as much as possible but yeah it's definitely something I've been thinking of yeah well so let's talk about documentaries for a second so if Kevin Kelly has the best list of the best documentary films if people haven't seen it they should um If you look at the 20 best documentaries it's because of

the editor it's not because the camera was in the right place at the right time my friend Michael is an Academy Award nominated documentary film editor the difference between what he can do with 400 hours of footage and what I can do with 400 hours of footage is enormous so getting the footage is easier than ever before but editing is a point of view it's somebody who's going To take our breath away in the way they took the thing and juxtaposed it in conversations like this you're asking questions in a way that is more insightful

and more personal than most people would ask questions that isn't something an AI is going to be able to easily do but to get to the next level you're going to have to figure out how can we start creating the conditions for interviews to happen that are even more exceptional Than that and my friend Christa tippet who has done so many interviews on NPR she was an early Pioneer in figuring out how to have a radio conversation with somebody that wasn't like a conversation they'd ever had with anybody else that's really hard that's exhausting because

you have to keep redoing it because once there's a manual the can do it too so you train into the competition all times all the time and that's true with lots of fields too Isn't it yeah yeah of course yeah if especially if you're the first yeah there'll be a next for sure and probably they'll try and be better as well yeah yeah I love that right okay there was there was a something I wanted to ask you about was um the Jamaica email I I don't I've written it down as the Jamaica emails but

you was on holiday in Jamaica and a couple people walked past you and they were like oh how sad he's answering his emails what on holiday and You thought internally like well no this is exactly what I want to be doing is that a point to doing things that you love to do and enjoy doing and how much does that impact your life in terms of you know the job that you do that you are passionate about what you do you do feel like you're doing something that's purposeful for yourself and for other people around

you all right well first I want to talk about being a workaholic cuz I'm not a workaholic okay that's Super interesting yeah because as you said it I'm like oh he's a workaholic that's must be because he's he loves what he does yeah but I Define a work ol is somebody who is working because of fear because if they're not if their hands aren't on it they're going to get caught they're something's going to get wrecked things are going to fall apart that that drive to go back to the work thing to control it that's

negative I don't see how you can see that as a Positive but earlier we talked about finding your passion and defining it by what you do so I cook dinner every night for my family it would be pretty easy to just have a bunch of stuff in my fridge that was pre-made or order in or whatever but in that hour I am cooking dinner I am doing what exactly what I want to do in that moment I am passionate about it and if I could never cook again I'd become passionate about something else to do

with my time so if I'm in Jamaica and it's 5:30 in the morning and I can't sleep well yeah I could just whine about it I could just do nothing which is in itself is something to be passionate about but in that moment the joy I got from leaning into this practice I had built of interacting I've answered 175,000 emails gave me pleasure and I wasn't doing it to make pain go away I was doing it because I have a Craft and so the reason that that's the first story in lynchpin is what I'm encouraging

people to do is stop doing your job and start doing your craft so passion comes first no deciding to be passionate about what you do comes first so and that's it I hate to use this term fake it till you make it kind of thing like do you do you have to Fain the passion and then as you start to do things that a passionate person would do about that thing you Actually start to become passionate about that thing well faking seems like it's deceptive Sor bad word for you I would say adopt the posture

of someone who is passionate explore what it would mean to be passionate about this if no one's ever been passionate about it in the history of the world then don't do that but there are people who are passionate about emptying septic tanks right how efficient can they be how clean can they Be how much can they explore on other topics in their head while their body is doing something else but what would it feel like to be the best in the world at this at least for a little bit and the Reverend Martin Luther King

said so many brilliant things but one of the things he said is not everyone's going to be able to you know go do that dunk of basketball at the NBA Finals maybe you're a street sweeper but if you're a street sweeper be the best street Sweeper I met a street sweeper in um Hyderabad at 4:00 in the morning because I'm terrible at jet lag and this person got as much satisfaction from what they were doing in that spot that day as I got from going to the meetings I was going to that I flown across

the world for cuz they decide Ed to inhabit what it would be like to be passionate about that job I had this when I was uh before I started M brothers and I I was running a business at the time but I Also worked as a laborer and we would clean roofs and at the end of the day we'd shovel all the Moss into these bags and you know bag them up and I we I would call it passion like I was so like particular how I wanted to do it how I wanted to do

it how I how many bags I could do how quick I could do it how efficiently I could do it and I genuinely was passionate about that thing um and I would say the only thing I've not really been passionate about Apart from starting the business was the the gym that I owned because it was purely profit based I there was no passion there whatsoever it's it's one of the things that I probably failed at in life you know that I would I would say I could look at objectively and say I failed that cuz

you know the great opportunity there was no passion there though um but is it something that again I I I keep coming back to this because I feel like when people come to me asking For advice sometimes I feel a struggle to say you have you need this about you to be able to become successful to achieve the thing you said you want to achieve and one of those things is to be passionate about all aspects of life or to be able to be passionate about aspects of Life uh is again is that something that

as I'm saying this I'm thinking everybody's passionate about something whether it's playing on game I don't know if I'd say everybody but Here's a few weeks ago I was charging my car at a a convenience store and it's like for people in the US they know what I'm talking about they sell snacks and beef jerky and drinks and everything else and the woman behind the counter greeted every single person who came in by name these were regulars who came in you want your coffee mic blah blah blah and then I stood there for 10 minutes

watching this woman light up the lives of 15 Other people and I got to talking to her and she'd been working there for a few years and she was the Cornerstone of this transient Community these people she was the only person they would recognize all day as they went about their other businesses and she was passionate about it because she wanted to be passionate about it it turns out if I came to you and said you've got to shoot 500 free throws for an hour and I'm going to pay you $20 to do it you

Might be into it for 5 minutes but after a while it would be a grind and yet there are people who are passionate about playing basketball because they choose to play basketball it's not their job it's their craft so I believe we have the ability to choose there's too much Injustice there's too many people getting the short end and the stick but whatever stick we have then we get to make a choice and it turns out if we can bring this passion to it our days get Better and we're more likely to have a good

outcome so we can choose to do something else there's a lot of people who are in this sort of mindset to be able to you know probably hear this and you know have that awareness but then I feel like there's some people who you know maybe are in a sort of a survival mode paycheck to paycheck uh living in fear and they they it's a struggle to get that awareness and usually what happens is there needs to be some kind Of inflection point you know death uh illness you know Lo a relationship ending um um

is that the case for a lot of people that that has to happen or is there a way to find it without needing that even when you living in sort of a thir prot set yeah I don't think it has to be something that rips your life apart I know people and it you know I've had moments like that in my life where you can say I have all these tools in front of Me yeah it's not you know there's too much social injustice and I shouldn't have to work two shifts and and I'm treated

with disrespect but I still have an hour a day with my smartphone am I spending the hour a day with my smartphone watching other people have an argument or am I spending that hour moderating a community in Reddit am I spending that hour sharing my poetry am I spending that hour building something because if you can find Something to be passionate about with a community of people doors will begin to open that doesn't mean you're going to get some fancy executive high-paid job but doors in your soul will begin to open because you've discovered it's

not up to the outside world for you to light up you can light up even for 5 minutes a day by connecting with someone who feels Alone by saying something that needs to be said and then when we get in it we're More likely to encounter a flow State and it's a flow state that makes us get to the next level right and when we feel like we are playing we feel more alive so what what would you need to do to find a moment in your day where you could play Maybe It's not at

your day job maybe it is but where is the the chance to play at some level because you don't get today over again I'm guilty of this the I will I will do do the play inside of things I'll have the fun and the passion and the enjoyability but I do it or have done it in the past a lot by myself and I I do recognize you know thinking about it that Community element is extremely important but how how much emphasis would you put on the community side of that well so that's where we

started you know my my last book is called the song of significance and what I talk about in it is I asked 10,000 people around the world in 90 countries Tell me about the best job you ever had and I gave them 14 choices about what made it the best job they ever had and I included among the 14 choices things that bosses would pick like I got paid a lot uh I got to tell other people what to do Etc but I then listed things that almost every single person picked almost every single person

for the best job they ever had in their whole life I accomplished more than I thought I could I was surrounded by people who Encouraged me to do even more right and I did something that was difficult when we have those three things in a job we look forward to doing it again tomorrow and different people need different things some people want to be completely alone on a desert island but other people really benefit from having two or three people standing to their left and to their right that the the Hong Kong Cavaliers the group

of people the 14 of us who are on this journey together this Cadri this tribe that gets me through the hard days because some days I'm going to help push them forward some days they're going to help push me forward and when we think about how lonely s billion people on Earth are there's almost no one who says I'm fully connected I don't need any more encouragement I don't need any more people who are rooting for me I'm good very few people could say that so be one of those people and they will then Engage

you in your circle and their Circle and it keeps becoming iterative this is possible significance is real to be in a place where we are respected treated with dignity where we make a change happen that we're proud of you might even get paid for that work but that I think is the purpose of our days and as an artist when you hand over you know that work that V ability of work especially as an author how how do you feel or deal with the idea of having That shared with Community because I think that's for

me where that uh wanting to be alone in that all yeah well the smallest viable audience which is a concept I talk about in this is marketing is real which is if someone doesn't get it it's not for them I have not read a review on Amazon in 10 years it it wasn't it was making me sad and it wasn't making my writing better I've never met someone who said I read all my one star reviews and now I'm a better Writer right do you read the comments I try not to don't read the comments

NE don't let him read the comments there's no point in the comments if someone writes a negative comment all they're saying is this one wasn't for me right if everyone has a negative comment you could learn from that but if there's a division all you're learning is who are these people not what was the video so when we expose ourselves and imagine that we're Vulnerable that's not an asset right the vulnerable is I think like authenticity way overrated I think what we want to be able to say is here I made this and my work

is not me it's something I made I made this and if someone says it's not for me we can say thank you thanks for even considering it I made them and if no one wants it we should make something better but that cycle is the opposite of resistance resistance is I'm never going to work again everyone hates everything I do I'm a fraud I'm an impostor I better shut up that for me that's the when you said about cooking the meal at night that's what I like to do like I like to sit like last

night we had we had dinner and I like to cook it all and I like to spend my time and you know that's my thing I'm passionate about it and then I like to serve it and give it up to people and it's like I I don't need the comments but I like to see you know if They smile if they ask for more like I have that there's like a little bit of satisfaction with that for me as well so when when with the bul avoiding the the reviews the are you avoiding the positive

reviews as well y yeah if someone you can't have it both ways yeah about to say if if someone I trust if someone I admire gives me useful feedback it's a gift right it's magic and that's it that's it I will do Anything to get that but I hated the book and you're ugly too I don't know what to do with that yeah makes sense so then without the external feedback from anybody let's even people you really respect how are you going back to your books and you know reviewing whether you had a success in

your own head if you if you achieve what you want to to achieve is it at the point of release or do you take a process afterwards what you would you I Two things one is small one is Big the small one is every five or 10 years I will relist to a book on audio and if it gives if I learn something from myself based on who I was then I'm glad I made it but the bigger thing is I would like to be measured by what the people I taught taught other people so

if I meet someone who hasn't read the book who says somebody taught me about what you said in purple cow and it really made a Difference that means I did something right that's cool just just on the point of teaching people that so you call yourself a teacher there's a I I'm not going to try and um repeat the quote because I'll butcher it up but there's an idea that once you get to the point of teaching somebody something then you're really embedding those those that knowledge or learnings in yourself more is that is that

something that you subscribe to or Believe in well most people don't want to be a hypocrite uh we're all hypocrite when it comes to climate but in general most people don't like being hypocrite so if I've written something my behavior gets better because I tend to write about right action right thought so I don't want to do the opposite of what I said I should think people ought to do I am not a master of marketing like If you hired me at Nike or high at hotels I couldn't Fix everything I know how to highlight

parts of it I know how to do diagnosis I can brainstorm ideas but there are definitely people who are better at mastering the craft of doing it than me what I find is useful is you can crack something wide open with a couple stories by noticing a couple factors and well I'll give you an example so one of the things that human beings care about is status who's up Who's down who's more powerful who's not And like you get a huge unfair Advantage compared to Neeve cuz you're taller and because you're a guy and that

gives you more status in certain circles than somebody else if you watch how politicians shake hands you will see this demonstration of status some politicians need to have their Palm on top and crush the other person in a handshake once you start to notice it you can you'll just see it in every video when politicians Meet when I say that to somebody a light goes on it just did for you right that is part of teaching is being able to find a little trivial thing that the other person says oh yeah and now they can't

unsee it that's different than being good at handshaking yeah I I'm just I am just seeing that as well in my head right now so okay I can see that for sure okay wow um there's a few talking points I wanted to go over um but we we' mentioned a few Times Ted and we've spoken about fear and when people talk about fear I think this image that comes up for a lot of people is standing on stage in front of a bunch of people yeah so I'm curious as to did you step into that

with fear was it was it nervous for you what was the first experience like and how did you deal with it so yeah when they rank fears people rank public speaking and snakes ahead of death they in terms of things that they're afraid of um I had I've given more than a thousand paid speeches and and way more than that unpaid before I was a paid speaker um and the fear is different over time with practice Ice uh because once it's a th000 people or 5,000 people I once did a place with 22,000 people it

it feels exactly the same as when it was six in the sense that it doesn't get more fearful and now the fear is about not that a a rock is Going to fall on my head while I'm speaking but just that I won't do the job the way I want to do it if the fear doesn't show up it means I'm not trying hard enough it means I haven't set my standards High Enough one of the challenges of certain kinds of public speaking is that the people who are organizing it believe erroneously that making you

afraid will help you do a better job right so the Green Room isn't actually caling and That you're on in two minutes you're on in one minute you're on in 30 seconds and all that stuff that they add to it doesn't help and so trying to just not mean into that is important and then the biggest thing was um understanding that even in public speaking you can't please everyone so I gave a talk in Mexico City to 2,000 people and there were three strikes two two or three strikes before I started one I don't speak

Spanish so it's Simultaneous translation which makes it harder because you say something and everyone hears it in their language six seconds later so it's much harder to be funny and things like second it was in an a Convention Center which is the worst place to speak and third there was jet leg but I show up I'm doing the thing and and there's 2,000 people and in the third row there's a woman on her cell phone but she's not listening she's talking she's actively having a Conversation while I'm giving my speech and I'm only 10 feet

away from her so I decide I'm going to show her I'm going to win her over so I'm angling all my energy at her and even talking about talking on the phone like making changing the Arc of what I'm doing for and after about three minutes I said what am I doing there are 1,999 people who are here for me and there's her why am I sacrificing their experience when it's not making any difference for her So she became invisible to me and the rest of the talk was for everyone except her and once we

can make that shift and say I have to give this talk but there's three people I want to give it to go give the talk to them and everyone else wants to watch they can watch public speaking something I've want to do for a long time but absolutely strikes a yeah a lot of fear into me um the skills required like what would you be the steps you'd advise Somebody To You Know Acquire the skills um is it is it something you'd study before you know stepping on stage for the first time so most people

have exactly the wrong plan they think the plan is memorize your talk rewrite it rewrite it practice it practice it practice it and then go give it the perfect talk it's boring and it it's it's flat go tell me a story are you capable of telling me one story for two minutes that I will remember is there a story Something that happened to you right you you know you told me about your cage for women franchise that you know I got a lot of insight into you and it's interesting to hear about your gym for

women that's a story most people can tell a two-minute story that res with somebody else can you do it twice can you tell me six stories if you could tell me six stories that resonate with me that's your whole talk you don't need to memorize anything You just need to write down what are the names of the six stories and look me in the eye and tell me a story and it's much easier to do that than you think how did the first T talk go did you shake the nerves off and so okay so

they weren't on video at the time there was no ted.com and um nobody at Ted knew that Ted talks would be seen by millions of people you were only talking to 250 people that was good it was bad because the vice President of the United States was there so were five billionaires so was the Supreme Court Justice and so were some of my dearest friends in the whole world and I really didn't want to mess up uh what I remember about the first one was the audience really wanted you to succeed that was what the

me the early teds were about out there were 250 people there who wanted you to give a great talk so if you gave them even a Hint that something good was coming you got back all this energy and once the first little bit of energy got back to me I was fine because I'd done enough talks every talk I've ever given is different but i' given enough talks and then I was fun the second one was harder because hery Hancock The Pianist was on stage before me and they forgot to move his piano so his

piano was right there second I knew about the videos third I had brought a gimmick with me which I Didn't need but I thought the gimmick would help me get started and the gimmick didn't work so there were all this stuff in my head that obviously was there because I was trying to be nervous and I told my first story and then I was fine because I was there to tell stories the thing about not being able to please everybody I think this is something in in all of us that we want to be able

to please everybody I would say really for I'm a people pleaser for sure and having A different opinion or opinion that can match everybody is just not you know not the way it's not it's not possible but it's also not the way I I believe we should go and especially with like when we have social media we have direct feedback if somebody disagrees you know straight away and when there's thousands and thousands of people you you know really quickly and by quite a few people how how do you get over that and how important is

it because I think you Spoke about this again is that you'd said it's it's also good to clearly identify the group of people who are not you know supposed to be part of the tribe yeah I mean let's be clear you're being respectful when you give other people agency so let's say you're a standup comic and you're doing a thing and there are people there who aren't laughing well maybe they only speak Italian right is it their fault they don't speak English is it your fault they don't speak English they speak Italian they don't have

to laugh that's obvious right well if somebody's life experience is such that they are dimetric diametrically opposed to the thing you just said the empathic thing to say is based on who you are what you know where you've been you're are right you are right to not like what I just said because your experience is totally different than mine good luck to you not You must change your mind because that's not what leaving room here so if I'm talking about darwinian Evolution and someone says the Earth's only 5,000 years old and there were no dinosaurs

or the dinosaur bones were planted whatever whatever whatever I could argue all day long about the scientific and theoretical obviousness of evolution it's not going to make any difference what useful is to Say based on your experience and what you were taught you are absolutely right and I'm sorry this isn't helpful for you but this is what I'm teaching right now if what I'm teaching right now is going to help you get to where you want to go come along and if you don't want to go there I get it do you think it's important

to say stuff like you might not agree you know to to acknowledge them or is it better to just you know teach your teaching and that's it well So again teaching is storytelling and creating the conditions for other people to the phrase I use is don't steal the Revelation what we are trying to do is get people to have in their own head ahaa so what do I have to say what do I have to do for you to have that aha in your head not lecture you that I am right but simply say have

you noticed this and noticed this so I'll give you an example um one of the three great frauds of Climate change is that plastic is recyclable that the plastic water bottles that you throw into the blue bin are somehow magically turned into new plastic water bottles in the county where I live they are collected and burned because the physics of it are such that when plastic gets comingled there isn't one process that you could use to turn it into much of anything so when we see that plastic recycling as it's practiced in most Places in

the world is a fraud what should we do about it well if I tell you the story Through The Eyes of the people at the Plastics industry who invented the fraud what they were trying to accomplish how they trying to manipulate our need for affiliation and status and not feeling like a hypocrite do you want to be manipulated like that if someone says oh and then they come to their own conclusion bringing in their own stories about when they've Been manipulated in the past they can make a new decision about whether they want to buy

plastic bottles or not I'm not here to say you're a bad person for buying a plastic bottle I'm here to say based on what you know now what decision do you want to make how' you implement the a moment is there a trick to it well I think it mostly comes from practice I don't have a method that I could teach an AI how to do it but I'm always looking for it if I you know I've Written 8,700 blog posts 9,000 half of them have a revelation buried in them somewhere that's a good blog

post and maybe a thousand of them really hit home so that's what I do I'll day long look for where is that thing that if you knew that little piece you would on your own come to a conclusion that would change the way you see the world I I don't know if you've watched the documentary cpy it's a no it's it's a do documentary About agriculture and its effects on climate change and um it was I watched it like eight or nine years ago now and halfway through I said if half of this is true

I would go vegan overnight and and I did I did the research it was and um in that there was so many aall moments yeah just completely like to me because I said that I was an environmentalist like I wanted to make sure that I was I was doing these things but I was also lying to myself in so Many different aspects of the way I'm curious on the environmental thing just uh slightly off off subject I guess but it's it is something that's really interesting to me because all of my families all six siblings

are vegan now so one still one brother who's not vegan but all of us are vegan and um mostly down to sort of the envir environmental reasons obviously for us now like ethics are involved in that as well I'm curious as to what is um your sort of connection With that that side of thing that envir environment and how can people have an impact on you know well big imp part we'll talk about the impact first so I um I wrote my first blog post about climate change 18 years ago uh it's a really good

blog post and it didn't solve the problem amazingly uh and I realized I hadn't been blogging about it a lot and I hadn't been blogging about a lot because I felt like a hypocrite and I felt Uninformed so because I'm in the book business everything looks like a book to me I organized the the carbon Almanac and it's been translated around the world and been a bestseller and won awards and I did as a volunteer took a year and a half of my life with 300 other people in 90 countries 40 countries now 1900 people

in 90 countries and we all built this thing to explain it to each other and to the world what is actually Happening so what to do about it well the first thing is as I said we're all Hypocrites that everybody no matter what we say is doing something that's putting carbon into the air but the second thing is one person becoming a vegan is fine and admirable but it's not going to solve the problem what's going to solve the problem is organizing people changing cultural expectations causing Community to action to happen so that it becomes

widespread so if your family got The local High School to stop serving meat on Mondays that has a multiplier effect if you organize five other people to be able to make it so there no meet on Tuesdays that has a multiplier effect that when we figure out how to charge a fair price for carbon the market will solve an enormous part of this problem that you're right beef for example is 25% of our problem with climate 25% that means if we just killed all the Cows in the world today just kill them we'd eliminate one

quarter of the climate change problem in one day that's not going to happen but we can start changing the cultural expectation can you have a wedding without serving meat can you be a wedding organizer who encourages people not to serve meat how do we multiply and multiply can we stop spending the billions of dollars we spend subsidizing the beef industry how many people would have to call how many Congress people before that law would change so the town my town has banned gas leaf blowers 6 months a year the town next to us all year

round a leaf blower in one hour puts out as much carbon uh climate causing gas as driving a pickup truck from New York to Los Angeles and they're annoying and the poor folks who have to use them because they're work for landscapers are vibrating all day and it's bad for their health so there's no One who's against it except for the people who don't want anything to change how many people does it take to ban leaf blowers in a village 20 that's all and yet we don't want to do it we want to just say

I don't have a leaf blower and that is throughout all my writing which I didn't realize until recently that's what I'm trying to tell people to do it's fine thank you for being a vegan but can you organize 10 more people please yeah I mean we're we're lucky We're a big family so it was one brother and now there's six so it kind of it was beneficial but it's this is something that um the the idea of the grand gesture I think stops people so often because it's like I can't change I can't kill all

cows great example I can't kill all cows that's never going to happen so what's the point I can go vegan but that's not going to have that much impact you know that kind of idea um and you speak about this a lot the idea that Actually one person can change a whole industry I love that I the not just on the environmental side of which I want to pick up again in a second but the idea of you can go into a business and have changed the whole industry by yourself having that as a belief

like how important is that and again the examples I think you gave the example of U was it Jim might not be the right name but someone at McDonald's developed the Big Mac and like you know change the whole thing yeah the idea that you could change a whole company a whole industry that's just uh really interesting to me yeah so the Big Mac story he didn't work at their headquarters in Illinois he had a franchise in Pennsylvania and in those days the rules were more flexible and you could just he invented a new sandwich

and then he other franchises copied it and copied it and then went to headquarters right um I wrote a book Called permission marketing and I built a 20 now it's a $50 billion doll a year business in email marketing which I invented but I never ran one of the like MailChimp or anything I just here's the blueprint here's how you could spread this idea but it's it doesn't have to be a business and it doesn't have to be a book what we're talking about is creating Circles of people who have an idea that's contagious so

I decided partly out of covid partly out Of this book not to fly anymore for work like I used to go to Paris give a speech and fly home without sleeping over and it was wearing me out and also has a huge impact but me not flying isn't going to change anything but me giving really good talks via Zoom has changed the way conferences are booking other speakers which is changing the way conferences are being run they're saying well why do we even need to rent the theater anymore let's just have all our Attendees show

up online so now me not flying not by myself but me not flying leads to 20 people 50 people a thousand people we are living in contagious times and Co almost killed us but ideas are also contagious which ideas are we spreading and how much time are we spending spreading them so again with just with that documentary conspiracy to me like how many people went veg just because of one documentary that's why I think documentary film is so powerful Yeah um just on that so you built a $50 billion industry industry okay credit you spoke

about credit in the book do you want credit for that do you deserve credit I have I'm happily taking credit for it now and then and interview cuz I don't want people to forget that it was really hard in those days to do what we did but no I'm delighted if things get better and I don't get credit because that's not why I'm doing it I'm doing it to make things better and if me not Being associated with it makes it more likely it's going to spread that's fantastic as long as it's so let's say

you have a goal and you're in a in a business or you maybe you're working in a corporation and you invent the next Big Mac getting hung up on credit is that is that something that's like should be a non-issue so like should we be focused on the tus so for people who work in an organization the best advice I have is This give away credit take blame take responsibility if you were willing to do those two things no one's going to get in your way because when you keep giving away credit to your boss

your boss wants you to do it again and if when something doesn't work you take responsibility they're off the hook so they let you do it again and if we do those two things over and over and over again soon there will be a line out the door of people who want you to give them Credit who want you to have resources so that they can take credit for the fact that you were about to go do something if you flip it and you're constantly blaming other people for the things that don't work and taking

credit for the things that do don't be surprised that no one wants to help you and that just on that point then in when you're in a big Corporation and you you know you're working your your ass off you're doing all this work and you're doing you know I and I think that is the right thing to do you know give away credit take blame but when it beats you down and you feel like you're underappreciated undervalued how would you deal with that well I think part of the challenge is when you're working in a

big Corporation it's easy to just do your job and what the bosses want what the bosses bosses want sooner or later it's going to burn you out because what they want isn't what you Want my my encouragement is to figure out how to do things Beyond just doing your job the simplest example is start a book club once a week six other people at work meet and you talk about a book no one's going to fire you for doing that if you did that you now have a new network inside the organization you're now in

charge of this no one can tell you how to run the book group you now have put in the first peg in the path of you having Agency and it's that cycle is the opposite of saying my boss won't let me I want to do really cool creative stuff but they won't let me well let you means you're asking them to take responsibility not what we're looking for we want you to take responsibility for the smallest unit of change that you can get excited about that's yours I know you're work in a big company but

there's something like that a friend of mine uh when the uh low carb thing Started to happen the whole grain thing worked at one of the biggest breakfast cereal companies in America and he initiated a 90-day program to turn every one of their breakfast cereals into a whole grain product in 90 days in a company that took a 100 years to do this and he pulled it off and after that his career was on fire because step by step he didn't announce the 90-day thing on the first day he just said how can I meet

with three people how can I get six More people how can I get 12 more people they're not doing it because I told them to because they're all volunteers they don't report to me how do I build these horizontal Network that's a craft and you could learn to love that would he have had the idea of achieving what he achieved on day one though do you think well the plan on day one was I think I'll sit with Bob and Tony and ask if this is even possible and now that I've got this this this

gonna be hard but It's possible now I can go talk to Felicia and Susan and then right like that and so how yeah the the idea of pushing against the Norms you know especially in these big I think of corporate America this like big you know huge thing like pushing against the Norms especially when you're a small fry in that industry or in that in that well so here's an example if you work at a decent size company do you have slack Right if there's slack where you work I guarantee you slack was not installed

by the head of Information Technology slack showed up cuz someone really low down said to three other people on their team let's talk about this on slack and then it spread and it was one of the fastest growing pieces of commercial software in history because they didn't have to meet with any CEOs they didn't have to meet with any purchasing departments they just had little tiny small networks of People and then it scaled from there I think that's the thing of um this being a small fry is is the over analyzation of of change yeah

like I'm going to this is what's going to happen to me or how again how do you over how would you overcome that like is it small small steps and yeah I mean here's the deal you might get fired has anyone in your company ever gotten fired for something like this you might get fired is it worth it I'm not here to reassure you I'm not here to tell you it's guaranteed to work the reason it's rare is because it's not guaranteed to work but if it makes you passionate just start the book club if

it makes you passionate to run an AI seminar to teach other people what you know about it if it makes you P then do it and find out if you get fired but I don't think you will I agree I don't think they would but also the reward if if there is a smaller risk of that I guess the reward is even outweigh the Risk anyway I think what is important about compromise is to understand that it is extremely unlikely that you are right it is very likely that you are interesting but how can you

be right about the future that isn't here yet that what change is is about inventing a new kind of future that if the right brothers were still around and they didn't compromise no one would be flying anywhere because you Can't fly in a right brother's plane it only goes a couple hundred yards they compromise with nature they compromised with Engineers they compromised etc etc to get to a thing that worked so there is a core change we seek to make but we can't make that change without compromising with reality when it arises that doesn't mean

we're here to please everybody if some people want to take us somewhere and others don't we can just work with the people who want To go where we want to go but reality demands that we recognize it reality says I don't care how much you want something thing it violates the laws of thermodynamics you can't have it so you have to be willing you have to be willing to change I think that that's part of the deal is that is that about bringing other people in you know when you talk about having the community around

you bringing other people in how how open are you having to be to other People's opinions and ideas well why does someone else have an opinion part of it is because they want for them to have agency they want to be passionate they want to be there for their contribution this is why CEOs should never have any say about the logo cuz everyone's good at logos let somebody else pick the logo let somebody else pick the other parts of it that aren't at the core of the change you seek to make because now they're getting

Ownership over that part and we can't do these things by ourselves but we can invite people along and as long as we're getting to where we seek to go it doesn't matter that we didn't do all of it it's better that we didn't do all of it how how do people drop the ego in when it's especially small business but even even big business as well how do you drop the ego of like even a small change like a logo change like how how what's the work Throughs of that oh it's hard I I mean

it's really hard the same way a little kid doesn't want their mom to get them dressed in the morning because it's it's our face it's what we look like but right now visualize uh a great logo can you visualize one yeah no one ever picks a horrible organization's logo right somebody who lost the world war or whatever it is no one ever picks that Even though that happens to be a great logo because they associate it with a cause they don't agree with the logos we tend to pick are for Brands we like Nike Starbucks

whatever it is they're not great logos they're just the flags that organizations we like fly so it doesn't matter what your flag is let somebody else pick the logo that doesn't mean it's easy it hurts cuz part of the beauty of being the boss is you get to pick trivial stuff like the logo Let It Go embrace the things that aren't coure of the mission so that other people are as invested in it as you are in terms of having agency as a CEO or director you know businessman entrepreneur whatever it is what are the

things that you should be focusing on the people you seek to serve and the change you seek to make if you have those two things nailed down everything else is flexible and and the mission is that is that flexible the you Know the idea of this is the impacts I want to have these are the people's lives I want to change the change I seek to make and the people I seek to serve that's it right so if the change I seek to make is to decrease the amount of beef that people are eating and

the people I seek to serve are busy uh uh business folks who are going out for lunch and it turns out that Dosa is much easier to sell then uh chickpea doll sell Dosa because You told me what the change you seek to make is get people to eat some that's not me you told me that people your Che can deserve like this better you just figured it out the like it's like a great filter like you put every decision for it um the idea of uh I don't know if you heard the Steve Jobs

speech where he talks about connecting ad dos going backwards and I think when you talk about teaching people to canoe and you're here Today did you see any of this going forward or is it all looking backwards you can see where it's connected well I'm glad you brought up the dots thing one of my riffs that I like a lot is most people collect dots they don't connect dots and we spend a lot of time collecting all these dots watching another video reading another thing but we're not connecting them and finding our aha moment so

I just wanted to say that because you're reminding me of it Um I decided it would be great to be a speaker of something when I was 20 something years old I don't think I could have imagined being able to spend an hour with you but yeah but I don't think that that informed my journey my journey has always been informed by who am I seeking right now to serve what is the change I'm trying to make and for yourself the change is um I am looking forward to meeting that Person who I am hoping

to become who is maybe a little wiser a lot more generous uh calmer insightful and brave and if I can avoid shortcuts and help me get there that's the day I want to spend Seth this has been absolutely wonderful conversation I think what I need to do is dive in sh new Bor and uh we can R run this back at some point cuz I could speak to you for hour about this oh thank you super fun thank you thanks the thing I hate the Most is people going oh You' got to be gentle with

yourself take an ey off darling you've done too much already you've already earned your place no no I don't need time off no I haven't earned my place no I haven't done enough already I sympathize and I have compassion for a lot of people who are struggling I really do you know that's the reason reason why I do all of the stuff that I do