17 Lessons From Seth Godin On The James Altucher Podcast

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“If you get one idea out of a $20 book that changes your life then it’s a bargain.” — Seth Godin

You will get at least one idea that changes your life out of these 17 lessons from Seth Godin. So this 14-minute read is a bargain.

Seth Godin joined the James Altucher Podcast to talk about making your turn, writing, publishing, failure, overcoming fear, what holds us back, marketing, and a lot more.

There are 17 lessons from the discussion:

• On His New Book
• On Seth’s Upbringing
• On The Traditional Path
• On What Holds Us Back
• On Seth’s Calling
• On His Writing Style Evolution
• On Writing Every Day
• On Books
• On Failure
• On Overcoming Fear
• On Making Your Turn
• On Giving Your Boss Credit
• On Adding Value
• On Legacy
• On Seth’s Company Being Sold To Yahoo
• On Seth’s Company Squidoo
• On Google

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1) On Seth’s New Book

Seth just had a new book come out,“What To Do When It’s Your Turn (And It’s Always Your Turn).”

• He released it in an innovative way: people can find it at yourturn.link. This may be the first book being sold using a “.link” domain, and you can’t even get it on Amazon.

The book is the most direct testament Seth could come up with about what’s holding us back. It’s not tools, or access to audience anymore; what holds us back is the voice in our head. It pushes us to be mediocre or to hide.

He waited a couple of years and thought he was done writing books, because people would rather read a blog post or listen to a podcast, but he couldn’t let go of the idea.

The new format for the book was not very friendly in a bookstores because they don’t know where to put it.

• It doesn’t work in an on-line store because you need to see it in full color, like a magazine.
• How then to bring it to the world?

Seth decided to invest everything in “horizontal publishing” to make sure people heard about it. Not from a podcast for example but from word of mouth — friend talking to friend, the way information naturally spreads.

• The book has its own site because if you order one he may ‘accidently’ ship you 2 or 3 because you’ll share the extra books.

Seth hears from people who say, “I didn’t know you had a new book, but my friend told me about it.”

• As an author, getting that word of mouth is much more gratifying than having a big Barnes and Noble promotion.

2) On Seth’s Upbringing

Seth won the parent lottery because “they raised free-range children.” They encouraged their children to do things that other parents wouldn’t.

When Seth was 14, his dad put him on a boat with a guy that was going from Buffalo to Detroit. At midnight one night, the guy abandoned Seth in downtown Cleveland.

Seth was seasick and had no money for a subway (this was in 1974). All by himself, Seth got to the airport and called his parents.

His mom eventually picked him up, took him home, and the next day told him he was going to school because he wasn’t sick; he’d just had an adventure.

He’d been taught through his mom’s ideas that life is an adventure. He grew up with the safety and comfort to be able to figure things out.

• Many kids are not raised to figure things out — they’re taught to freeze and to ask for help.

Seth didn’t have a great number of friends in high school because he didn’t fit in. He mentioned that it is lucky that he lives in the post-industrial Internet age.

• Growing up he was often told that he’d be more successful if he fit in more, rather than stood out more.

3) On The Traditional Path

Seth wrote a free manifesto called “Stop Stealing Dreams” about the traditional hierarchical path.

The Industrial Age in the 1800s was the most profound change to happen to this planet.

• It changed what we own, what we consume, how we work, and it made billions of people rich.

It was an engine of productivity and technology that mechanized and paved the earth. But it required a hierarchy — someone who owned the factory or institution, and others who did what they were told.

That 50 year project taught many people to do what they were told. It had never been tried before and it was an enormous success.

We invented public school to teach children to sit still long enough to work in a factory. That was its function.

Now, in the post-industrial age, these things are left over. We don’t say, “Give that person a raise, he’s the most obedient person to ever work here.”

4) On What Holds Us Back

James mentioned that the Internet can make it seem like now is the perfect time to start something, but Isaac Asimov wrote 400 books on the typewriter — it just seems like it’s always our own voice holding us back before anything else.

There are 4 billion people on Earth held back by structural or cultural barriers. They are prevented from achieving their goals.

When Seth was coming up, if he wanted to get published he would send work to publishers in New York who would have to pick him. He got 800 rejection letters. Today he’d get zero rejections from middlemen, because there are none.

In the 1850s or 1950s, if you didn’t live in the right city with businesses hiring for your craft, you couldn’t do your craft.

Today if you want to be a craftsperson, writer, photographer, whatever — you can do that from anywhere. The geographical constraints are falling away.

For example 80 million people have started a blog. But almost nobody has finished one — in other words, kept it going for months or years at a time.

There are no financial barriers to blogging, so the question is why not keep at it when there are psychological and commercial benefits to it, such as being seen and respected as someone who speaks up and shares.

James Altucher’s career has been going on for decades, and one of the consistent points is that he continues to share what he knows.

There are other people not succeeding who are afraid to share what they know. There are no structural barriers to keep them from that.

5) On Seth’s Calling

Seth knew, based on his “brushes with jobs”, that he should be self-employed. Unless he had a special boss, traditional work would make him very unhappy.

He leapt into making things for the book industry as a fun, and somewhat lucrative, way to make a living.

• He discovered five years in that he was hiding from big or risky projects.

When he sold the “Business Almanac” (essentially a directory to the World Wide Web), it was a massive project requiring seven full-time people.

• The whole time there was no certainty of it working. That feeling, and later that success, became associated with doing great work.

6) On Seth’s Writing Style Evolution

Several things have changed. When Seth wrote his marketing bestseller in 1999, gurus needed to spend a lot of time talking about techniques.

• He would talk about how everything is marketing and do presentations.

Inevitably people would not ask, “How do I increase the open rate of my emails?”, but they’d ask, “I want to build a purple cow but my boss won’t let me.”

• The answer is that marketing and business are personal. They are stuck because they’re afraid.

The most important thing Seth could do was not to teach a tactic, but to make people thirsty enough to find their own tactics.

“Unleashing the Ideavirus” was a book Seth gave away for free, and it had three million downloads in the first few months.

• He talked about making books free — that was a tactic.

It worked so well for Seth’s career but almost no one copied him for five years.

• It’s not that they didn’t know how — Seth showed them! But they were afraid.
• It’s easier to go back to Random House and get picked. It was easier to ride out the book-publishing thing than to change.

7) On Writing Every Day

Seth doesn’t write books because it’s what he does; he does it because he has no choice.

It’s a huge hurdle to acknowledge that you’re creating a permanent record of something you’ve thought. People don’t want to do that.

• Since we were five years old, we’ve been resisting the idea of being on the hook.

Seth is encouraging people to get back on the hook. That’s when we do our best work.

• Opportunities come from being on the hook.

8) On Books

Seth spends a lot of time trying to figure out his next project, and the question is– why books?

• Books have a magic power of being self-contained and being lasting. He loves books.

The second question is: why do any of it? Why not retire to Tahiti?

• It’s never been about profit. He wants to keep doing the work, and first and foremost helping people to change for the better.

“The War of Art” is a key book to read. “The Gift” by Louis Hyde is a breakthrough book, as is “The Republic of Tea” (the authors also founded Banana Republic).

It’s also important to read science fiction — “Dune”, “Snow Crash”, and “The Diamond Age”.

• They teach what happens when one rule in the universe is changed, and that is what entrepreneurs do.

The Tom Peters seminars, and the “Pursuit of Wow!” are really important books for everyone. Pam Slims “Escape from Cubicle Nation,” and Amanda Palmer’s book on the “Art of Asking” are also really important.

People act like they’re doing the world a favor when they read a book. One good idea out of a $20 book is a bargain.

• People need to read books — even if it’s not the whole thing.

9) On Failure

Seth has failed many times and doesn’t like to say he was ‘ashamed’ because that has a moral component, but when he was running Yoyodyne, (inventor of commercial email) there were two big clients, AOL, and Carter-Wallace (a personal care company).

Yoyodyne had a technical error that sent AOL users a deodorant promotion and Carter-Wallace users an AOL promotion.

• It felt like this happened three weeks in a row. It became clear that Yoyodyne had to buckle down and not be reckless in their growth.

AOL not only fired Seth, they threatened to have him arrested. It took about nine months to get back in sync with AOL.

At that point Yoyodyne had grown to 50 people. They had a contract to build a chat room feature for AOL to make chat rooms more profitable.

• Yoyodyne negotiated a deal for $0.75 an hour for time people spent in their chat rooms.

The software worked and tested beautifully. Right before launch, AOL changed to a flat-rate pricing structure, which meant no royalties. That meant Seth had to look 50 people in the eye and tell them the project had failed.

• That lead to an epiphany about making promises to people you are working with or delivering to and not being able to deliver, even if it’s out of your control.

It was about taking responsibility, looking each person in the eye, and having as much compassion as possible.

• Hiding behind bureaucracy, using indeterminate pronouns does no one any good.

The question is, after absorbing this, what do you do with these lessons? One answer for Seth himself, is to take a very long walk where he tries to put failure into perspective.

• There are only two choices going forward: a path where it will never happen again (where you will never do anything important), or to find a path to deliver as much value as possible tomorrow, and make up for the fact that you couldn’t deliver today.

Seth is thrilled to say that no one was laid off from that project, but it was a very close thing. They were often a week away from making payroll.

10) On Overcoming Fear

Here’s the conceptual way to think of it. If you believe that your job is to avoid fear, then you should stay in your comfort zone.

• But, if you believe the thing you’ll get paid for is exposing yourself to fear, then putting yourself and others in places where you’re afraid is the best strategy.

You can’t ask how to get out of your comfort zone without feeling fear — it’s like asking how to run the Boston Marathon without getting tired. No one asks that question.

For fear, he suggests this — next time you’re in a train station, walk up to someone and say, “Hi. Here’s a five-dollar bill. Would you like to buy it for one dollar?”

• There’s zero risk here — it’ll cost you only four dollars, and you won’t lose anything important, but it’s very intimidating.

Or, what if you go to a soup kitchen, and not only spend an hour serving lunch, but also agree to sit down for an hour afterward, look the people there in the eye and ask them to tell their story.

• There are a lot of rational reasons to not want to do that.

Seth has a mantra that everyone should have a blog and should blog everyday.

• That’s because forcing yourself into speaking a truth every day on schedule, will enable you to dance with fear and no longer fear writing.

James doesn’t publish a blog post unless he’s scared to hit “Publish”. He finds that the more scared he is, the more meaningful the post is.

It’s not fun to overcome fear, but it is fun to see the outcomes of overcoming fear.

If you’ve been skiing or to an amusement park, you’ve paid money to experience something that seems frightening.

• As people get better at skiing or other activities, they up the stakes. Culturally we’ve created a box for these things — adventure sports, or similar.
• It’s possible to do something from an office that creates the same adrenaline but is more impactful.

11) On Making Your Turn

To get really tactical, instead of going home tonight to watch TV, think about what your passions are.

Let’s say it’s the sport of curling. Go home, start your blog on curling. Begin curating and bringing together a community on curling.

• Start a curling association and a discussion board. Put out some ideas on improving curling.

Give up three hours of TV a week to do this. In three months, you’ll have found a community of people who are supportive and you’ll have found that you know how to write.

• The next thing is, maybe you’ve decided to sell vintage curling jerseys on Etsy, and build a larger following that way.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with curling now. Maybe the next time you’re sitting in a corporate meeting, now you’ve practiced speaking up and taking responsibility for something.

• So do that four times. Next thing you know, you’re invited to better meetings. Your corporation is desperate for people who will step up. Sooner or later you’re leveraging your new reputation in many ways — maybe a new job offer.

Not everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder, but everyone should climb the ladder of meaningfulness.

• More people should be able to say, ‘follow me’ instead of waiting for instructions or permission.

12) On Giving Your Boss Credit

You’re going to your boss and suggesting a radical new thing. If it works, the employee gets credit, but if it fails the boss gets the blame. The boss will say no in this case.

There has to be willingness to give the boss credit for success, but take the blame if it fails.

• That way, you won’t be fired and there will be huge demand for your work and ideas.

What people are actually saying is, “I want to do this, but my boss won’t let me off the hook.” That’s a totally different sentence.

13) On Adding Value

We see people who are out there just so they can be seen, and they aren’t really adding value.

Value means contributing to a community that one cares about.

Milton Friedman may look at this podcast and say, “James, you’re an idiot, there is no value here.” But James could say, “This is an inexpensive way for me to feed the community.”

14) On Legacy

Seth wants to be judged by how people who have learned from him teach other people.

• At this point he feels he’s reached enough people and he’s off the hook.

Another thing is that he’s studied people such as Tom Peters, Zig Ziglar, and Jay Levinson. It doesn’t take too long once you’re gone to fade from the conversation.

• Not too many people are still listening to Ziglar’s audio.

Ziglar did 72 hours of tapes on motivation, goal-setting, etc.

• These tapes kept Seth from quitting, and he highly recommends them.

As a culture, people have a very short half-life. He has a picture on his office door of Miles Davis and others, and many people don’t even know who that is.

• The chance of cultural immortality is very low.

15) On Seth’s Company Being Sold To Yahoo

Yoyodyne was sold to Yahoo in the late 90s, and Seth became Director of Marketing at Yahoo.

Yoyodyne was raising a new round of money and someone offered to buy them instead.

Yahoo heard about a competitor offering to buy and that was enough for them to invite Seth to California to discuss an acquisition.

Seth remembers seeing only four articles on the CEO’s bulletin board; one being Seth’s own article predicting that Yahoo’s banner sales were over-priced and in danger. It was very controversial at the time to speak up as an insider.

• That taught Seth a lesson about speaking truth even when it was uncomfortable. Having a point of view, rather than fitting in, was what got him onto Yahoo’s radar.
• Yahoo ultimately wasn’t the right fit for Seth, but he gave it a try, and it allowed many Yoyodyne employees a good landing.

16) On Seth’s Company Squidoo

With Squidoo, Seth desperately wanted people to leave the site. He understood that when people came and left, they left breadcrumbs, and those created value.

Squidoo’s game was to contribute generously to the community. The challenge was that they had three million users creating pages and they had to get them all in sync.

17) On Google

Previously the secret to Google’s success was measured by how quickly people left their website with the information they need, but this is not the case anymore.

Google has been cursed by being a public company. Being the center of the community does not require being the entire community.

The ecosystem they’ve built is so complete between search, Gmail, maps, etc. There’s not a lot of danger of people quitting Google because they can’t quit Google.

• That means that Google has to act like a statesman and say, “We win when all of this works better, not when we get more clicks.”

If you look at Google Search results from six years ago, you might see eight or ten organic links.

Now for many topics there are none. They are all either paid-for or go to another Google page.

• That’s a huge shift. They think the only way to make stock value go up, and the way to get more value from the user is to get the user to stay in Google.

So if you look up a restaurant or a hotel, you see the Google map and the Google review, and so on.

• That may work when done perfectly, but in reality when you have a monolith, things rarely work perfectly.

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