Seth Godin's Guide to Finding Meaning and Purpose at Work

Seth Godin:
It's not just about me. It's about the chance each of us has to make a ruckus, to be able to look back as we get older and say, "Yah, but I did something." And we don't get tomorrow over again. So, let's figure out how to make tomorrow better.

Marie Forleo:

Hey, it's Marie Forleo and welcome to another episode of the Marie Forleo Podcast and MarieTV, the place to be create a business and life you freaking love. And I got a question for you. Imagine if you and everyone you worked with felt like you had the best job ever, like celebratory. It doesn't matter whether you're a boss or you're a member of a team. My guest today not only says that's possible, but he's here to show us the way. 

Seth Godin is the author of 21 books that have been bestsellers around the world. In addition to his work as an author and teacher, he has given five talks that have been featured by TED, created a worldwide online learning platform that's been used by students in 90 countries, and founded one of the first internet companies. His latest book, The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams is available now. Seth, I have missed you so much.

Seth Godin:

I think of you all the time.

Marie Forleo:

I cannot tell you how thrilled I was when, A) heard there was a new book coming out, B) learned that you would be willing to come to our new studio to hang out for a little bit. So, thank you. So, you had just asked me if The Smurfs are a new thing, and I was like, "The Smurfs are actually an ancient thing." I was obsessed with The Smurfs as a kid. I still have probably 80 figurines. I was a member of the official Smurf fan club, which most people don't even know there was one. So, I was into continuity before continuity was a big thing. And the blue, I was just saying, my stylist Erin, who's a genius, I was like, "Oh my God, this is elevated adult Marie Smurf outfit."

Seth Godin:

As long as you don't start changing completely, I was into Trolls when I was a kid with the hair. And when I was a book packager, I actually owned the rights to make Troll books, couldn't sell them. But on our wedding cake, Helene and I had two Trolls that the Troll people gave us. They were this tall and they were dressed in bride and groom clothes.

Marie Forleo:

Oh, how sweet. I don't think I'll ever get over my love for The Smurfs. I don't know if you'll ever get over your love for the Trolls.

Seth Godin:

No, I'm over my love for the Trolls.

Marie Forleo:

Oh, you are? Okay. So, by the way, I just want to say I got this from you. I felt so honored to have a not bound pages copy. I was getting highlights done in my hair, and I'm sitting there and baking in all the foils and all the stuff, and I'm literally flipping through, putting my pages on the floor, keeping everything in order. This book is so gorgeous, so beautiful.

Seth Godin:

Thank you.

Marie Forleo:

It's spectacular. So, you open the book with, "If you've been paying any attention at all, you  already know that work isn't working.” We've seen quiet quitting, right? We've seen The Great Resignation, and you quote the statistic that in 2022, productivity dropped by the largest amount since has been recorded in over 70 years. How do you see what's going on from your point of view, and how it relates to wanting to create this beautiful book?

Seth Godin:

Well, first, thank you. Thank you for squeezing me in. Thank you for being the person you are and showing up the way you do. It's not easy to just keep doing it, particularly because all of us, people we know, people we care about, passed away. We had a worldwide pandemic. It caused a lot of rethinking. And at the same time, industrialism, which is 100 years old, pretty much, is sputtering because you can't make the machines go any faster, and you can't make the productivity any more efficient than it already is. And so, what is happening is, big companies are turning the dial. First it was, how do we make the machines more efficient? Then it was, how do we make the people more efficient? Let's put them under surveillance. Let's count their keystrokes, let's watch them on Zoom calls and put a camera there to make sure.

And when the steam shovel came along, we didn't speak up for the ditch diggers, even though the ditch diggers couldn't dig ditches anymore. We have a steam shovel. But now it's coming for us. Us is every single person who has the freedom and privilege to watch this thing. And we're saying, "You know what? Our lives are worth more than that. Our days are worth more than that." And so, this is a really personal rant from me, a manifesto about the conversation we need to have with each other, with our boss, with our employees. Let's get real about it, or let's not play. If you want me to show up and make decisions and lead and invent and create, I'm going to need respect and dignity, possibility and meaning.

Marie Forleo:

I love that. You know, asked 10,000 people to describe the conditions at the best job they ever had, and I love that. I love that you asked. Do you want to talk through some of the characteristics that you discovered that people said that had in common?

Seth Godin:

This was really surprising to me because I listed 14 choices, including, "I got paid a lot, I didn't get fired, I didn't have to work that hard." But I also put in things like, "I accomplished more than I thought I could, people treated me with respect, I did work that I was proud of." And it didn't matter which of the 90 countries the responses came from. It didn't matter how old the respondents were, everyone said the same thing. What came in last was, "I didn't get fired, and I got paid a lot," which is what bosses think we want. But in fact, what people want is to matter. And when you have the best job you ever had, it's not work anymore. It's your passion. And we wouldn't trade it for anything. I was at a Volunteer Community Orchestra performance two weeks ago, and these people were even paying to be in the orchestra, to pay for the conductor and stuff.

Now, there are people who make money playing the flute or the oboe, but these people were volunteers. And I think if we talked to them, they would say, "Rehearsal is the highlight of my week." And I think we would discover they are happier than people who just go home and stream and binge at night, because they're doing something in community toward a goal. And that's what we want. And when we realize just how short life is, if you are lucky enough to have a roof over your head and a way to care for your family, what matters is the best job you ever had, not whether or not you can be senior vice president of something.

Marie Forleo:

Yes, and I loved it. These four characteristics, I surprised myself with what I could accomplish. For me, as I was just reflecting on my own work and my own career and my own journey, it was like any time that I've been challenged under pressure, set out to do something that I didn't know if I could do, those are some of the most fulfilling and gratifying milestones that I look back on. I could work independently. I feel like as someone who loves independence, and we have this incredible virtual company that we've had for a really long time, I find that I work really well with people who prize, value their independence and their ability to just go off and do great work and then we come back together and we build something good, the team built something important, right? That feeling that it actually mattered.

And people treated me with respect, which, I think reading this book, gosh, it's so heartbreaking sometimes just to watch the news or to see what goes down online, or to just to see how we humans treat each other. So, that notion of being treated with respect too, I've been flying again, after not flying for a couple years, and that also breaks my heart, just seeing what's happening in the skies, that lack of respect. So, it's these core basic things that it's so interesting too as a leader and as a CEO, that no one was like, "Oh, I got the biggest bonuses in the world, or I had the hugest paycheck,” or some of the things that I think I've been conditioned to think are the most important.

Seth Godin:

And it's very important that we pay people fairly.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah, of course.

Seth Godin:

This isn't saying that people don't need to be paid. And it's also worth noting, I'm not arguing that organizations get soft, that you just treat everybody with a kumbaya sort of situation. What I'm saying is the opposite. We need to make promises and keep them, that the way to get the agency we need to work independently, the agency we need to do work we're proud of is to solve a problem, to make a promise, and then to do extraordinary work to keep it. That is not a downside, that's an upside of what it is to have a great job.

Marie Forleo:

And it takes pausing too. I loved this that you said, "The lesson in this manifesto is simple. An organization of any size can effectively move forward by asking, what do humans need? What will create significance for those who interact with us?" And I loved this question, "What does the earth want?" And so, I pulled those two together even though those sentences weren't quite next to each other in the book, because I think it points us towards some really important questions to ask as we are designing, choosing what to work on next, how we want to grow forward, how we want to evolve what we do. And this other question too, I want to say these out loud. These are your words because first of all, I always love your words, I adore you, but I want my audience, everyone listening or watching right now, write these down.

I want you to get the book and read it, but write these questions down because they're so important to ask yourself, "What is the change we seek to make? Does it matter to the people that we work with?" These are such fundamental questions, but I'll just speak for myself. I can get into such a habit of setting visions and setting goals and being really excited about them and pushing forward, and just going. And I think I'm only more recently really practicing slowing down to ask these kinds of questions of myself. And I feel like our company has such a great opportunity. It's like, "Oh, I want to ask these of each other more.” This is a really fun discussion points. Anything you want to say?

Seth Godin:

Oh, so many things there. Let's start with the questions about what does the earth want, or what does the market want? For a long time, if you were the CEO of a big company, asking what does the stock market want, was a good way to get rich. When the internet came along, feeding the internet what it needed and wanted was a really brilliant insight, and you were one of the pioneers in doing this, in this medium, understanding that content plus production values plus connection was something that would fuel this new internet thing. As we are finally paying attention to our climate problem, organizations are starting to understand, oh, we can succeed just by doing what the earth wants, just by showing up to help fuel that going forward. And what we do if we are going to create significance is, we make a change happen.

If there is no change, then you're a cog in the system doing what you did yesterday. So, nothing against bank tellers, but most bank tellers make a different kind of change, but they're just doing a transaction over and over again. What we are looking for in a great job is, something wasn't there, and now it is. You made a change happen. And being clear about what change we seek to make, who are we seeking to change? How do we create value for others, not simply demand something for ourselves? This shift is critical because any job where I can tell someone exactly what to do, I can find a computer cheaper than you to do it.

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

So, if you're just looking for a script and a manual, it's going to be tough.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah, yeah. Real tough. So, I want to highlight a section. Again, this is another one where y'all, when you get this book, which you need to get this book for yourself and your team, this is the area where I'm like, "Yeah, let's copy this. Let's put it up on my little billboard. Let's share it around, distribute it in our team." So, they're questions worth asking, things that we can begin with every time we set out to do work together. And you said, "Yes, they're worth asking out loud, they're worth answering in writing, and they're worth committing to the answer." So, I'm just going to read them, bear with me, and then we can dive into one or two. "What's the specific change this team is going to make? What's my personal role in making that change happen? What do I need to learn to support or lead this change? Who needs to help me and who needs my help? What's the risk for us, for me, the people we serve? What's the timing of this project, the budget? What am I afraid of and what's the benefit to each party involved?"

I was like, "Ooh, that is a meal.” That is a full on meal. That's like a multi-hour conversation, really, really worthy of it. Is this the kind of thing that you have seen work, because you've had so many beautiful projects over the years, and that's one of the things I admire and respect about you so much. Is this the kind of thing that you'll sit with, depending on what project it is, with folks that you're working with on a team?

Seth Godin:

As you were reading the list, I'm sure people are saying to themselves, "Well, yeah, but it's too awkward to say this out loud. It's too awkward to create a Google Doc, share it, and have people fill it in." Well, if it's too awkward to do that, then why are you going to spend the next month or year of your life working on the project? It's too awkward to spend an hour to be really clear about mutual understanding, and you'd rather just wing your way through it? And it's not just what did you do at work. It's planning a wedding. It's the same thing. What is the purpose of the $80,000 we're about to spend on this party? What change are we seeking to make in the guests? Are we trying to show status by how much money we can spend? Or are we trying to create connection or joy?

Because if it's about connection and joy, why is the day so over-programmed that no one can talk to anybody else? Let's figure out what it's about. And so, I spent the last year and a half organizing the Carbon Almanac as a volunteer with 300 other people. Now it's 1,900 in 90 countries. And it was life-changing. But one of the things about coordinating that many volunteers is, you can't just sort of use winks and nods to get your point across. We never had one meeting and we never met in person, and yet we made a 97,000-word book that was a bestseller in multiple countries and has no errors in it. How did we do that?

We did it by being clear and specific. We got real. We said, "The purpose of this page is, what?" And so, one of the things that we're arguing for is to build a sense of mutual respect so that you can criticize the work and never criticize the worker. That standards need to go up in this world, not down. And the way we make standards go up is, we can look at the work and say, "But what if we did this? Would it come closer to achieving our goal?" And we can say that without saying, "Bob made this and Bob's a bad person."

Marie Forleo:

Right.

Seth Godin:

That part of what it is to be in this significant relationship is to be clear about what our standards are.

Marie Forleo:

And so, that particular project, because I know it is very, very important. Let's talk about that for a second. Was there one leader, multiple leaders? How did that go down? Because I think what you said is so extraordinary. I've never heard of anything like that before, and I can only imagine people listening and watching it right now going, "How cool is that?" Do you know what I mean? That this extraordinary project, that's so important on so many levels came to life and there was never one meeting. And at the time, was it 300 volunteers? That's now-

Seth Godin:

Yeah, the core group was 300 people in Discourse, not Discord, which is noisy, Discourse, which is organized. There's a difference between a manager and a leader.

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

Managers use power and authority to tell people what to do and get them to do what they did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. So, airlines, fast food restaurants, they need managers. They need to just deliver the stuff on time. Leaders, that's voluntary, that can work in sync, that can work horizontally. So, did we have a managing editor? We had a couple, but mostly we had about 100 leaders. Someone said, "I'm going to lead this work to make sure we got 20 graphs and charts in this section. I'm going to lead what our graphs and charts look like." And that person didn't get to tell anybody else what to do. What they got to do is invite others on to the journey, be clear about what success looked like, create the conditions for people to have the conversation, make a promise about when it was going to get done and organize so that it would, but there was no hierarchy.

And people came and went because we were all volunteers. Some people stayed for an hour. Some people thought they were going to stay for an hour and stayed for 30 weeks. And so, it was intentionally flexible like that. But that's the way humanity has always been, until industrialism said, "No, you have to sit in this cube and fill this box on the org chart, and you're not allowed to talk to that person because they're not in your department." That's recent.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. It's still mind-blowing to me, and it's so cool. That's why I wanted to ask you more about it. I also want to highlight these two documents that you share that we need before we begin. Can you tell us what those two are? Or I can-

Seth Godin:

You should tell me.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. So, the pre-mortem and then the rave. And I love that, because again, we've done beautiful things and I'm so proud of it. And myself and my team, we're always looking for ways, "Okay, how can we do this better? How can we be better? Where did we miss the mark last time? And what can we do both from a process perspective in our teams, but also most importantly, from our customers and our user perspective? Okay, how can we make it better?" So, walk us through the pre-mortem and the rave and I just want to lay you up with another thing that you wrote, "Intention gives us the power to describe and name possible futures." I was like, "Oh, so good."

Seth Godin:

Okay, so here's this beautiful, magical book. We have trepidation when we start out on a project that's going to be in public. Well, here are two ways to deal with it. The first thing is, before you begin, write down in detail a tragic, horrible failure that the project led to, that it didn't ship, we were late, people hated it, it didn't sell, in specifics, all the things that went wrong. And then, right next to it, write single best review you could ever hope for. Specifics. What does that review say? And hold the two of them next to each other and say, "All right, now when I'm dealing with this pre-mortem, this disaster in advance, how likely is it? Can I live with that if it happens? And how can I organize this project to make the chances of that happening very low?"

So, at the Aravind Eye Hospital in India, which I'm a huge fan of, if we add up the number of people in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in total, Aravind has restored the eyesight of more people than that. And when you go to Aravind, you have a choice. You can pay $130 or zero, up to you, and you get the same surgery. It's just a different recovery room. And I can tell you what the pre-mortem is. People got infections and went blind, right? "Oh, okay. So, let's organize the conditions so that will never happen." And in fact, the rate of infection at Aravind in India is less than at a fancy hospital in London, because they organize to make that not happen. And it's easy to describe what the raves are when you restore the eyesight to millions of people, and that becomes your guiding light as you're going to figure out, is this even worth the effort to make this change happen?

Marie Forleo:

Yes. And that's such a big question, isn't it? Is this even worth the effort? Some of us are getting tired of it, but we are asking, especially as we've been putting together this new space and making all these decisions, is the juice worth the squeeze? Is that investment of time, money, energy, human life force, worth, whatever thing, we're like... And I love asking those questions because it's easy when you're ambitious and creative to just go, and just want to kind of move fast and dive in and get messy and say, "Oh, it's all going to work itself out." But I think-

Seth Godin:

I'm going to interrupt you for a second-

Marie Forleo:

Yeah, please.

Seth Godin:

... and say that it's entirely possible that beauty is its own reward. And I think that the P&L CFO analysis of that little part of your office is probably not going to pay off in cash, but this place was worth whatever juice, whatever, squeeze.

Marie Forleo:

Oh, thank you.

Seth Godin:

It's inspiring. It is a testament to the extraordinary crew you have here and to you, and your work's going to get better because of it. Beauty matters.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. Thank you. We feel that way too. I'm excited to show you some other things that haven't been publicized because I think you're going to get excited about them. Okay. Another story that I was like, "Oh, I love this," and I wanted to share this one with my team and everybody. The story about Kinko's and Sleepy's, and about Paul's best technique for growing what would become more than a $2 billion business. Do you want me to lay it up or-

Seth Godin:

Oh, no.

Marie Forleo:

Great.

Seth Godin:

Years ago, shortly after I got the rights to the Trolls, I worked with Paul and had the rights to do the Kinko's book, which I also didn't sell. I had a lot of books that didn't sell, but it was great to spend time with Paul. So, it was called Kinko's because Paul had really wild, crazy hair. He has a haircut like mine now, but at the time... And he has profound dyslexia and isn't shy about it. Basically, not a reader. When he opened the first Kinko's on a college campus, the office they were in was so small that they had to roll the Xerox machine outside to open for the day. And if it was raining, they were closed. And it grew to this huge chain that they sold to FedEx for a lot of money.

I'm like, "Well, Paul, we're writing a book about this. What's the secret?" He said, "The secret's simple. I walk into stores for a living. That's all I do. I go to stores and I say to the person behind the counter, "What's working?" And if they can't tell me something new that they've done that is working, they're in trouble. So, they're all ready for me when I'm going to walk in. They don't know when I'm going to walk in. 'Oh, we tried this, we put this over here, we changed this.' And then all I do is tell all the other stores about what I learned from that store."

Fast-forward 20 years, I'm in a mattress store back when there were mattress stores, called Sleepy's. And the salesperson hears the phone ring and turns white as a sheet, runs over and answers the phone. Apparently, the only person who ever calls is Mr. Sleepy. And there were 80 stores at the time. Mr. Sleepy, I think was in his 70s or his 80s. And the guy picks up the phone and Mr. Sleepy says, "What's wrong?" That's all he would say when he would call stores, "What's wrong?" And if you couldn't tell him something that was wrong, you were in trouble. And all Mr. Sleepy did all day was call stores, find out what's wrong and fix it. And so, the combination of the two, what's working, what's wrong is about saying to the frontline folks, "Your job here is to make things better. Your job is not to ask me for a script. Your job is not to follow instructions. Your job is to make things better."

Well, it works. It works for companies, it works for nonprofits, it works for spiritual institutions. This idea that there's only one smart person and everyone else has to follow their instructions, that doesn't really work.

Marie Forleo:

No, it doesn't really work. There's so many times too, I'll say very frankly, "Guys, I've got an idea. I have no idea how to do it. I know it's figureoutable, but this brain is not wired to solve that. But you guys are probably way smarter at me and could figure this out. Let's see if we can make some magic happen." There's another place, and this was something that I'm super curious to hear your take on. This notion you talk about in the book, that we need stability that the day-to-day consistency can bring, and then the significance comes in the projects large and small. And I've seen that to be true for myself.

Here's what I'm pondering, and I'm curious if you have a take on it. And I know it's not a cut and dry answer necessarily, but I'm super curious, because one of the things that we've often talked about on our team, and we've explored different ideas for how to tackle this, but your book is making me think differently about it. So, in our company, for example, there are many things that are keep the ship running type of activities. So, the actual post-production of this show, all of the things that happen in order to make the email and the Instagram and the YouTube and the... all the things that-

Seth Godin:

Way more work than people think.

Marie Forleo:

Right, to keep that going and to have the consistency that we've had for so long. And then there's the programs and there's the Time Genius and the B-School and then this, that, and the other thing. And then there are Marie's new ideas, the new projects, so to speak, if it's an Everything is Figureoutable or some other things that I've got in my little cooker. And having that balance and striving for me, both for myself as an individual contributor and creative, of going, "Okay, these are the keep the ship running stuff." And then of course for the team, of going, "Okay, well there's certain things that we all need to do as part of our roles and our jobs that keep the lights on." And trying to find that balance of not overstretching myself or my team so they feel overburdened. Do you know what I mean? There's actually too much for the capacity. So, again, not that there has to be any perfect answer, but I'm curious if you have a viewpoint on how to start to dance in there, and if you've seen anything either work or not work.

Seth Godin:

So, not every job is going to be significant, and that's where the management and the meeting standards thing comes in. But the word mediocre seems pejorative, but it just means average. It just means it's fine. So, the electricity that comes into this building, you have nothing to do with it. You're not hiring people to somehow purify the electricity and make better electricity. Electricity's fine.

Marie Forleo:

Right.

Seth Godin:

When it's time for a certain editing process to go on video, it may be that you have a standard and you don't want it to get better. So, you should outsource that to somebody who is signing up for work to be outsourced to them. Because soon a computer will do that. But then there are jobs where you can say to somebody, "Look, we've edited things 40 episodes in a row, but we'd like it to get a little better every single time." That is where that person can find their craft. So, that 80% of the time there is a method, but 20% of the time, it's how do I make this even better? So, it's possible for a barista to have a significant job. They still have to serve exactly the right cup of espresso, but they can interact with the customer in a way that only they could. That's significant.

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

And when we strip away that part of it, when we say to a third grade teacher, "This is the curriculum, this is the script, you may not change it." What we have done is stripped away from that person the reason they became a teacher in the first place. So, we have to be aware of why we are even dealing with a human, not an AI, and why we haven't outsourced it to a mediocre, cheap supplier. If you're going to hand it to a human, figure out which parts of it are able for the person to actually contribute.

Marie Forleo:

Are you loving this conversation with Seth? It's amazing. We're going to get back to it in just a minute. But no matter who you are, what your life situation is, we all got stress from time to time, right? Of course we do. Well, I have a free tool that will help you radically reduce any stress in your life in five minutes flat. Not kidding, it's 100% free. You can download it now at marielovesyou.com/stresslog.

Actually, I'm really excited to ask you about something we haven't had a chance to talk about because we haven't been together in a little bit. AI, ChatGPT, all this stuff, talking about this notion of significance, the notion also as a writer, as a creative, and we're starting to field questions. I've played with it. I’ve had… We rebuilt B-School from the ground up and that was a huge-

Seth Godin:

I'm sure it was.

Marie Forleo:

... thing last year. And so, as we were about to launch it earlier this year, we kind of rebuilt all of the marketing on the front end. And it was a really fun, really cool challenge. And it was the time when all the articles were coming out and I was like, "Oh my God, ChatGPT and all the copy you're... forget about it." And my team, we have some amazing, incredible writers on it, and I was like, "Guys, we should just play with it. Let's have fun. Let's put our ideas in. Let's see what it comes up with." It was hilarious because we didn't wind up using anything because honestly, we loved our own stuff better.

Seth Godin:

It makes it better. Yeah.

Marie Forleo:

That felt better. But I'm curious, have you been playing with it? What are your views? What have you been seeing or thinking or feeling about all of the AI, especially when it comes to writing and creativity?

Seth Godin:

We could do a whole podcast about it. I've been playing with it for a very long time. I also been playing with something called ElevenLabs that does voice, and they trained a custom voice for me based on one of my audiobooks, seven hours of me talking. When it generates my voice, my wife cannot tell the difference.

Marie Forleo:

Ah. Wait, Seth, so sidebar, and then I want to keep hearing. Literally, this morning when I woke up and had my coffee, I was looking and there was this article, Drake is one of my favorite artists ever. I'm obsessed. And just last freaking week it was like, "Oh my God, there's this huge Drake hit that wasn't Drake, and now it's down. I couldn't even hear it, but then I clicked on something else that was Rihanna singing a Beyonce song and Kanye singing... I was just like, "What?" So, okay, please keep going.

Seth Godin:

Louise listened to my podcast a couple weeks ago and I did an entire podcast and didn't reveal till the end that it wasn't me.

Marie Forleo:

Come on, Seth Godin. How did you... you wrote it?

Seth Godin:

No, ChatGPT wrote it.

Marie Forleo:

What?

Seth Godin:

I asked ChatGPT five questions about the future of ChatGPT, and then I had ElevenLabs read it in my voice. So, I made a 20-minute podcast in 15 minutes, and it's not quite me, and I'm thrilled that ChatGPT doesn't sound exactly like me, but now there's about to be a ChatGPT on my blog where you can ask me any question based on my last 8,000 blog posts. And again, it's not me, but it's getting closer. 

So, what does that mean to the typical person? The first thing is, you really need to start playing with this. You can't just say, "It's going to happen and I'll ignore it." You need to go play with it. Number two, you need to realize it is an illusion. It is a trick. And our brains are very susceptible to this kind of trick. Starts with a dog. When you see a dog, you are imagining that that dog has a voice in its head, like you have a voice in your head. It doesn't. Dogs don't speak English.

And yet, we keep doing it. It's mad at you. Well, no, it doesn't have that word in its head. Right? The way ChatGPT works is it only generates one word at a time. It doesn't know what it's doing, but we compute in our head a story about what it means and thinks, right? It's going to keep getting better at that. What that means is, if you are doing mediocre writing for a living, it can already do your job, and soon it will be able to do the job of slightly better than mediocre writing. When middle school teachers are upset because kids are using CHATGPT to write mediocre essays, well, they should view that as a good thing because now they don't have to teach people to write mediocre essays anymore. It's no longer a useful skill. What we need to do is, instead of having kids do homework to prove that they read the book, they need to come to class and talk about it in real time, which is a little bit harder for the command and control mindset of the industrial educational complex, but it will actually teach people more stuff.

So many things in our life are about to be upended. The kind of spam you're going to get in the next nine months is going to be off the chart because it's going to be customized to you based on what it knows about you. Millions of people are going to be fooled and ripped off, and their hearts are going to be broken. You cannot trust what you're hearing or seeing. When you see a video, if the video was made after 2022, you can no longer believe anything you see in the video.

Marie Forleo:

That's frightening.

Seth Godin:

But it's true. Electricity was frightening as well.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you see this, especially as it relates to folks like us? You know what I mean? I remember when we just started reading about ChatGPT and then the deep fakes and this, that, and the other thing. I was like, "Oh, boy, I can see a time where it's like, 'Marie, I see a video of you saying this or you didn't...'" I'd be like, "Honey, that wasn't me." But just reality for anyone out there, any public official, any leader in health or the sciences or entertainment or whatever, even your neighbor, Josie, it can happen. Wow. I wonder how that's going to relate though to people craving, perhaps to your point, more in-person experiences, where you're with flesh and... human being, you know what I mean? In the flesh.

Seth Godin:

The disruption is going to be very significant. And the culture we've built in the last 10 years of somehow thinking that trolls and people who pick fights online are wise or insightful, even if they're billionaires. It's bizarre. So, I think the standard's going to shift, and it's going to be, if you're tearing down things and you are doing this as a jester and a jackal, I don't want to have anything to do with you. So, we're going to see our circles are going to get smaller. They're going to get smaller in the sense that we're not going to be open to hearing from every single person in the world, whatever crosses their mind. And the move to Mastodon is an example of this, that Twitter was all about this giant endless public square. Whereas Mastodon says, "Build a circle of people you actually want to engage with, and ignore the trolls."

But the other part that we each have to decide is, where are you going to add significance going forward? And it's extremely likely there's going to be another pandemic. It's extremely likely that flying all over the world is probably not going to be our future. The idea that we can transcend time and space using Zoom, using better versions of conferencing, means that you can find your people. And when you find your people, you can find a space, whether it's in real life or online, and you can say, "In this space, we're not welcoming this other sort of behavior."

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

In terms of making a living, I think the golden age of someone like you or me saying, "I have a microphone, who wants to listen to me," might be fading because there are people who are already working at creating very inexpensive, endlessly energetic voices that aren't actual real people who could, for example, you could write a pretty straightforward script that could take the entire New York Times, turn it into the most important stories of the day, read them in a mellifluous voice and make a podcast every hour of that.

Marie Forleo:

Wow.

Seth Godin:

And no person is going to touch it going forward. Not just that, but it could be a different podcast for every listener because the computer doesn't get tired.

Marie Forleo:

Right.

Seth Godin:

So, I think that's right around the corner, and we didn't freak out when we went from three TV channels to cable or from cable to the... This is just the next step of that.

Marie Forleo:

Right, right, right.

Seth Godin:

But yes, we should freak out about the fact that our lives are finite. We get a chance to do significant work, but we better pick which significant work we want to do.

Marie Forleo:

I love that. You say tension and stress are not the same thing. What's the difference and why is it important for us to not only understand that distinction, but really live into it?

Seth Godin:

This really resonates for me with a lot of your work, and where you have shown up for people and helped them understand, what even it means for someone to be figureoutable. Stress is generally not a good thing. Stress is when we want two things at the same time, to flee and to stay, to be home and to be there. It's unresolvable and it leads to trauma, that when you're, for example, in a relationship that's not fulfilling you, but you can't leave, that's trauma. Tension is a good thing. Tension is, here's one that my friend Gabe told me last week. So, Marie, I have something for you in this hand and I have a dollar for you in this hand. Which would you prefer?

Marie Forleo:

The something in that hand.

Seth Godin:

So, in the moments before I open it, there's tension.

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

Because maybe it's worth $1,000, or maybe I'm tricking you, but there's good tension. Nothing bad could happen, it's just tension. And Gabe's point is, keeping your hand closed for a while is better than opening it right away. And when we think about significant work, it's the tension of, this might not work.

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

It's the tension of, we are racing to finish this almanac and it's got to be done by the end of February, and we just hit a speed bump. Oh, we fixed that. That feels good, not bad. Going to the gym is a form of tension, right? Because I don't know if I can make it this far on the treadmill. I did. And so, we can create safe, generous, additive ways to use tension to fill our days with better.

Marie Forleo:

Let's talk about page 19.

Seth Godin:

Yes.

Marie Forleo:

I love that. And I loved the notion when I read about it in the book. Can you explain what that principle is?

Seth Godin:

Yeah. This is one of the best ideas in a long time. So, the Almanac is almost 300 pages long, and it has a page 19. And I said to the team, working with a couple people who were helping me at the beginning, "Look, there's not one person here who is qualified to write page 19, who knows how to do typesetting, editing, page creation, design, layout, charts, graphs, all of it. There is going to be a page 19, but there's not one person here who can do it."

So, page 19 thinking says, "Write a paragraph, come up with a notion, pitch an idea and put it on the table and say, 'Here, I made this.' And then somebody else says, 'Here's how it gets better. Here's how it gets better. Here's how it gets better. Oh, I know how to do this part. Here's how it gets better.'" And you keep adding on until page 19 is done. And this isn't a new idea. If you are driving an electric car now, it's not because the Benz people in Germany invented the electric car in 1887, right? It's because it kept getting better and better and better and better and better. Every organization, every project has benefited from page 19 thinking. It's just what story can we tell ourselves? Which is, this needs to happen. I can't make it happen, but I can start it. I can improve it. And this notion of contributing to the better frees us up because you don't ship junk, but you ship your best intent and let other people make the work better.

Marie Forleo:

There's so much wisdom in this book, so much fun, as in all of your books. Is there anything else that we didn't talk about, whether it's in the book or even anything happening in your life that you want to roll with, explore, say out loud?

Seth Godin:

Well, I guess I would have one tactical thing and one bigger thing. The tactical thing is, you can't do this by yourself, but your boss can't do it for you. It has to be a conversation. It has to be a conversation about, how do you take responsibility for the smallest possible contribution? Do that and then do it again, and then do it again. No one is going to say, "We've just changed the whole organization and these are the new rules." But you might have five minutes today where you could have a conversation with a customer and make a difference in their life, or six minutes to start a company book group. No one's going to fire you for starting a book group, right?

Step-by-step, we have this conversation, and that's why I had to make a book because as you know, a book is a lot of work. It doesn't reach as many people as a blog post, and it's exhausting, but it creates an artifact that people can talk about. And then the second half is, as I said at the beginning, this is really personal, but it's not just about me. It's about the chance each of us has to make a ruckus, to be able to look back as we get older and say, "Yah, but I did something." And we don't get tomorrow over again. So, let's figure out how to make tomorrow better.

Marie Forleo:

I love you so much, Seth Godin. Thank you for continuing to put out such incredible work. You are such an inspiration to me. I appreciate you, and I've probably said this before, I'm just so happy that I get to be on the planet at the same time that you are.

Seth Godin:

What a treat. Thank you, Marie.

Marie Forleo:

Oh, my God. Isn't Seth Godin amazing? I love him so much. So, we are both curious. What's your biggest insight or aha that you're taking away from this awesome conversation? And most importantly, how can you put it into practice starting right now? Leave a comment below, let us know if you like this, like it, and please subscribe. It helps us reach so many more people in our community. And of course it makes sures that you never miss a thing. And yes, I said, "Make sures."

So, until next time, stay on your game and keep going for your big dreams, because the world really does need that very special gift that only you have. Thanks so much for tuning in. Love you so much. See you next time. So, if you dug this conversation and you want to go even deeper into how to be a great leader, you have to watch this conversation with my friend Simon Sinek right now. It is amazing. Click and watch.

Simon Sinek:

I know many people who sit at the highest levels of organizations who aren’t leaders. They have authority. We do as they tell us because they have authority over us, but we wouldn’t follow them, we wouldn’t work to keep them safe and advance their vision.