Six Words That’ll Change Your Life with Seth Godin

Susie Moore:

Mr. Seth Godin, what a treat to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for being here.

Seth Godin:

Well, the joy is mine. It's great to connect with you. And any friend of Kathy is a friend of mine.

Susie Moore:

Oh, yay. Well, one thing that I was thinking about, how do I kick off this conversation with Seth? There could be a million different angles because you've created so much, and I've consumed so much of your content over the years, so thank you. But I was wondering, Seth, if you realize how often you come up in conversation all over the world with all sorts of different types of people, even in very random moments. Are you aware of that?

Seth Godin:

I think that that is the choice that I made about how my work would work, in the sense that some people say, "I need to hustle and hype and promote to get the word out." Some people say, "I need to interrupt." Some people are trying to sell something. And I just decided, when I started writing for Fast Company a really long time ago, that success would be, could I write something for the people who care about my work that they want to talk about with someone else, not because it will help me, but because it will help them? So if people are talking about my work, it's not because I'm out promoting it, because I don't. It's because I succeeded in giving them something useful to talk about.

Susie Moore:

And the way that I'd love to structure this interview was I've collated some of my favorite Sethisms.

Seth Godin:

Okay. Some of which I might not have ever written, by the way.

Susie Moore:

Oh, well, I guess we'll find out today. Through your books, through your interviews, so many interesting things come up. And one thing that I wanted to share as we start is I was in Paris last summer, and I was meeting with a very successful, wonderful YouTuber. She's in the beauty space. We were having lunch, and I asked her about her YouTube channel. She has a lot of engagement, a lot of followers, a lot of connectivity. And I was like, "What's your secret behind that?" And she said, "Well, I read a lot of Seth Godin." And she said, "I don't drop two YouTube videos a week because I feel like it. I do it because that's what I do."

Seth Godin:

Right.

Susie Moore:

Are you nearly 10,000 blog posts yet? I know the numbers keep stacking up.

Seth Godin:

It's more than 9,000. Hopefully, I'll be around to hit 10,000. Yeah.

Susie Moore:

Yeah. So Seth, my question for you, the first one is, you've always been so consistent with your blog, and this is such a huge part of your work, but you've said that if not one person read your blog, you would still write it every day. Could you talk to us a bit about that?

Seth Godin:

Well, sure. Because noticing things, describing them, talking about how I think the world works helps me before it helps anybody else, because knowing I have to put myself on the hook to express this helps me become a useful practical observer, as opposed to just living inside whatever's going on in my head. And that posture then translates into a generous way to decode the world around us.

Susie Moore:

And as a creator, I know that you are quite militant. I wonder if this is still true, that you don't do social media, you don't watch television, and you don't go to meetings. Is this still the case for you?

Seth Godin:

I'm not... I think in our angry world, I don't want to use the word militant, but I will say that I find that boundaries help give you something to lean against. And so when Twitter came along, I saw it early enough that I could have been a bigger deal on Twitter than some. And I said, but if I spend time on Twitter, I'll have to not spend time on something else. Do I want to be less good at something else, so I can also be pretty good at Twitter? And I decided it wouldn't make my life better, so no. No Twitter, no Facebook. I have boundaries, but I adjust them. I'm on LinkedIn with the interviews that I do. In terms of meetings, I define a meeting as a group of more than two people coming together to have the person who had the power to call the meeting say things to the other people. That's different than a conversation. So if you have a real job, which I don't, you may be forced to go to meetings.

Susie Moore:

Yeah.

Seth Godin:

And part of my mantra is you should push back and say, "Send me a memo instead. If all you want to do is tell me something, we don't need to do it in real time." And so no, I don't go to meetings. And then in terms of television, two years ago, just before the pandemic, my wife got a TV for our house, and 30 minutes most nights, either Shtisel, Tokyo, Midnight Diner, usually a TV show with subtitles or wigs, or some combination of the two.

Susie Moore:

How fascinating.

Seth Godin:

Right. But only 30 minutes is enough for it to be so horrific as opposed to at times.

Susie Moore:

And when it comes to your creating, because often, some people would believe that they're inspired by what other people are doing, what they're paying attention to on social media, their content. I know that you also love listening to old tapes from Zig Ziglar and Jim Rohn. I also love doing that. Does your creativity come from mainly solitude, would you say? Or is it engaging and paying attention? Do you pay attention to other people in your space?

Seth Godin:

I think creativity is the act of solving interesting problems. And that is when I am the most creative. If I'm truly in a place of solitude, I will invent problems so that the noise in my head won't get too loud. But there are enough problems around us that we probably don't need to invent any new ones. And so what I try to do is understand why the world is working the way it is, and be able to come up with, for what some people might be a helpful way forward. And I don't spend much time at all following folks who are sort of doing what I'm doing, mostly because if they've solved an interesting problem, then I worry that my solution isn't creative. It's just an echo. And it's more fun for me to just not know. So I need to know the genre, I need to know what came before, but I don't want to say, "Me too," and I don't want to say, "Ditto."

Susie Moore:

And you say, Seth, too... And I find this fascinating because sometimes I feel like I try and strike a balance with this. You've said that you are separated from the outcome of the response to your creative work. You don't check your book sales. You don't check your blog traffic. And some of us can, we can check that multiple times a day. It can become an obsession if we allow it to be one. But do you ever feel as if sometimes the feedback is useful in terms of, "Oh, people really are connecting with this message," or "This could inspire another message"? Or are you just like, "Nope, what comes from me comes internally"?

Seth Godin:

Okay, so let's clarify a couple of things. I didn't say I was separated. I said it's more productive to be separated. And the more discipline I have, the more productive I can become. What it means to be separated is not that you are unaware. It is that you are not emotionally connected. Because if you are emotionally connected, you will change the next thing you're going to do. And if you look at the work of great jazz musicians, if they keep trying to chase the thing that came before, their work can't be what it was, right? So Paul Desmond had a massive breakthrough with Take Five, which he did. It was a bestselling jazz album of its time. And then for a couple of years afterwards, Paul Desmond kept sounding like he was playing that song again and again and again, because he was emotionally connected to getting the same response.

And what I have found is that people who talk to me about, "Well, I did this and it had a great... People loved it on Twitter," or "I did this, and look at all the likes I got," they're driving by looking in the rear view mirror. And that's not the empathy that we need. We need to imagine what the people we serve believe, what they want, what they're hoping for, where their pain is, but we can't say, "This one better work." Because if we do that, we're just going to be repeating ourselves.

Susie Moore:

In my community, we say this statement a lot, success is volume. And the reason I say this is because often, people will be like, "Oh, so I did a blog post, or I did a YouTube video or a podcast, and there are five episodes or five posts, and Good Morning America isn't calling, and Kim Kardashian isn't sharing my stuff." How do you feel about... Because I know you speak about talent versus skill, and you're very prolific, but what do you think about just volume being a play here?

Seth Godin:

Okay, so forgive me, and I'm sorry if I'm being contrary, but you're asking great questions. Success is volume is, on its face, a ridiculous statement. I think what you really mean to say is, volume creates the conditions where success is possible.

Susie Moore:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

And the way I would interpret that is half my blog posts are below average. And if I need to hold onto a blog post until I'm sure it's perfect, then it's Pressfield resistance, then I'm hiding. But if I can treat blog posts as one more chance to make a difference, but there'll be another one tomorrow, now I can be lighter on my feet. And I think that's a slogan I got from you, right? Let it be easy. Let it be light. Let it be easy means it's not trivial. It just means you're not emotionally connected to what happens after you do it. And so that opens the door for you to create a thing that looks like volume, but what it really is doing is letting you simply do the work, not just do it, but simply do it. Without drama, without second guessing, simply show up to do this generous work.

And Good Morning America's never going to call. Let's just write them off. You're not doing the work for Good Morning America. You're doing the work for the 10 people you're doing the work for. And if they spread the work, then you get to do it again tomorrow.

Susie Moore:

One of my favorite pieces actually that you wrote was the forward to Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. May I read just a couple of paragraphs a bit? Because when I first read this, I'm not joking, I called three or four of my creative friends just to read out your foreword. I was like, "This is what we need right now, and I'm not taking any nonsense from you about more delay tactics, more procrastination, more, 'I'll be ready when...'"

This is what you say, Seth. "Right there in your driveway is a really fast car, not one of those stupid Hampton style rich guy, showy cars like a Ferrari, an honest fast car, perhaps a Subaru WRX. And here are the keys. Now, go drive it. Right there on the runway is a private jet, ready to fly you wherever you want to go. Here's the pilot standing by. Go. Leave. Right there in your hand is a Chicago Pneumatics 065 hammer. You can drive a nail through just about anything with it, again and again if you choose. Time to use it. And here's a keyboard connected to the entire world. Here's a publishing platform you can use to interact with just about anyone, just about any time for free. You wanted a level playing field, one way you have just as good a shot as anyone else. Here it is. Do the work. That's all we are waiting for you to do, to do the work."

I mean, I could weep hearing this, Seth. Truly, to me, this is your core message. This is what I keep coming back to. It's such a no excuses mindset. And oh, this leads me to one of my favorite Sethisms. "How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable." And probably when you said that and when you wrote this, it was even harder. It wasn't even as easy as it is in 2022. Could you speak to that for a moment? Because I feel like it's so permission giving, and also a bit of a nice kick in the butt.

Seth Godin:

Well, first, thank you. I had no recollection of writing that, but it sounds like me. And when Steve agreed to let me publish that book, it was a stellar moment in my career. He has made such a difference for so many people. Resistance is this fascinating thing that only exists in modern times, that for a hundred thousand years, if you didn't do the farming and the hunting, you didn't eat. And for thousands of years, if you didn't do the heavy work, you didn't get paid. And now, we get to work indoors with unlimited coffee flown in from far away and a keyboard to type on, and yet we feel the burden of emotional labor. And emotional labor is difficult because we're imagining what will happen after we do the work.

Susie Moore:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

That's what's holding us back. That's resistance. And what Steve is saying, what I'm trying to amplify is you don't have to do any of this work. You could go dig a ditch, and you could go tend a garden. But if you're going to do the work, don't whine about it. Just do the work. Simply do the work. And good things, bad things, they happen regardless of whether you are attached to the outcome. Being attached to the outcome does not increase the chances it will be good. So it's our attachment that is making us unhappy. And the people who are afraid to get into their WRX, or who are afraid to use the hammer, or who are afraid to type are simply afraid because of what might happen after that.

Susie Moore:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

And if the fear is so big, then just walk away. But if it's not, then stop marinating in it and realize you're here to do something generous. Go do something generous for other people without regard for whether Good Morning America's going to call you or not.

Susie Moore:

And isn't that true, Seth, too, just for our own longevity, like that disconnection from it, just our ability to remain curious? I love how you always use the word generous. And I feel as if we are constantly in the driving seat, taking action no matter what the aftermath or outcome or response is, we become like these unstoppable creatives. And here's another one of my favorite Sethisms. Look, it's actually on a post on my computer. Can you read this?

Seth Godin:

Nobody is coming to save you.

Susie Moore:

Can we please speak about this? Because this is a big one. It sounds depressing, but it's actually the happiest news ever.

Seth Godin:

It's so freeing, right? Because-

Susie Moore:

Yes.

Seth Godin:

... there is no saving.

Susie Moore:

That

Seth Godin:

Reassurance is futile. And even if someone comes to save you in this moment, they won't be here tomorrow. And once we accept that if we're on this path to turn on lights and to connect people and to lead, we don't have to wait to be picked. We don't have to wait to be saved. We don't have to be wait to be approved of. Thank you. Thanks for letting me know that I get to go forward now. And going forward is so much more satisfying than waiting to be saved.

Susie Moore:

Do you think that we have a belief that somehow, somewhere there is going to be a savior, or there's going to be a moment where the tide just turns or there's going to be a change and we don't have to do anything?

Seth Godin:

Well, we've been indoctrinated to believe that forever. First of all, public school and where you're from, I don't know what public school used to be called, but the school that everyone goes to because they have to was built by industrialists because they wanted us to grow up to get a job, to go to the placement office to get picked, to do what our boss tells us to do. And if we look at the movies, particularly women, oh, I have to get Saved by the hero, right? The Bechdel test makes it really clear that pop culture says someone bigger, stronger, more powerful is supposed to come save you. And then politics has become not, "Let's all chip in and figure out how to make things better." It's, "Don't worry. I've got this." And so all of these things are amplified and manipulated by people who want to have power over you. And you're sitting there trying to guess what Twitter would like, or what Google would like, or what Facebook would like. But there's no one at those institutions, and even knows you exist.

And so we just need to accept that there's the laws of physics, which you cannot change. There's the keyboard in front of us or the camera in front of us, and there's the chance, the opportunity to do this work. And if you volunteer to do the work, then it comes with all the things it comes with. And accepting those things makes it so much easier to spend your day than if you are wishing for those things to be different than they are.

Susie Moore:

Yes. And the way that I define... Because a lot of people who are part of my community definitely want to create more, they definitely feel the resistance, and they think that the fear or the moment that something's going to change outside of them that is worth some emphasis, or that their fear is somehow intuitively guiding them to wait for something else to happen. But I always say, I'd love to hear what you think about this, that confidence, sincere confidence is your willingness to be uncomfortable, constantly just... And anyone can be willing. You don't have to be special. You don't have to be educated, you don't have to be connected. You don't have to be good looking. You just have to be willing. Even think about it in a romantic sense, if you're willing to be the person who asked someone to go on a date, you are going to be lucky eventually. Do you agree with a statement about confidence and willingness?

Seth Godin:

Oh, so much. And I think that semantics matter here. Confidence does not mean hubris. Hubris is not only have I done my best, but I'm confident it will cause the change in the world that I wish I am confident I'm going to hit a home run when I get up to bat. Well, no, you shouldn't be because the odds are against you. But you could be confident that you've worked out appropriately and confident that you've trained appropriately, and confident that you're going to do your best. What else can anyone ask for? And so to be in the world with right thinking and right care, to be able to say, "I made this for you, and I am confident that that sentence is true," now the other person can say, "It's not for me." And you can say, "Thank you. Thank you for giving me a clue as to what you do want. Thank you for even considering it."

But you're not a bad person because they said it's not for them. You've just learned one more thing. Now if you go back with the same thing to tomorrow, now you're not getting the job. But if you learn about who the people you're serving, what they want, who they are, you're going to get better at it tomorrow.

Susie Moore:

If you're willing.

Seth Godin:

If you're willing.

Susie Moore:

If you're willing. Here's another statement that I love from you. You say, "Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance." Could you speak to us a bit about that? Because I think that it's so easy to go around in our lifetimes with a low level anxiety all the time. And to me, that's not acceptable. In my life, I won't live that way. I'm unwilling to live that way. But I think that we're constantly anticipating what could go wrong. And I love how you phrase that. So could you talk to us a bit about how you define anxiety?

Seth Godin:

Okay, so let me be really clear. There is a capital A anxiety I am not talking about. There are people who have a brain blood chemistry issue that medical professionals are dealing with. I'm not minimizing that in any way. But there is a modern form of small a anxiety that is a habit, that is a hobby, that is giving people a place to hide. And this anxiety is, imagining in very specific terms, a bad thing that might happen one day in the future, so specific that you're feeling it right now. And the problem with that is for every actual failure, you're living a thousand failures that didn't happen. The problem with that is that you're spending a lot of your brain time living in a future that probably won't occur. And if this is keeping you from doing generous work and you can see it as such, then you are making a choice, which is that rather than doing generous work, you would rather live in a unlikely but possible future. That's not going to work out very well.

And what I am helping people do is say that's a choice. And if it arises in your head, don't try to make it go away, because that will make it worse. Simply acknowledge it. "Thank you. Thanks for letting me know that that might happen. Now, I'll go back to work. Oh, that could happen. Now, I'll go back to work." This is the essence of resistance that when resistance arises, it is a clue that you are onto something. But the answer to resistance is not to fight the resistance. The answer to resistance is to name it, invite it in for tea, and then get back to work.

Susie Moore:

And is that still something that you have to do even at this stage

Seth Godin:

All the time. Every day

Susie Moore:

And you push through because we see content from you every... You don't miss a day. And how many years now, nearly 10,000 blog posts?

Seth Godin:

It's a lot of years.

Susie Moore:

A lot of years.

Seth Godin:

I can make it go away if I'm not doing something important. And so that's the same way, if you talk to an athlete, a runner, and you say, "Do you still get tired?" If they say no, then they're not actually trying very hard. For mem if the resistance doesn't arise, it means I'm not trying very hard.

Susie Moore:

Which leads me to another Sethism right here saying, if you are experiencing imposter syndrome, it means that you are onto something. Imposter syndrome is so spoken about now. It's hashtags. All the imposter syndrome content is out there. I agree with you. I always think, if I don't have imposter syndrome, am I going for it? Am I coasting a little over here, really comfortable? So could you talk to us a bit about that, how you identify it as something that it could be positive?

Seth Godin:

Yeah, so I wrote about this in the practice. It begins with this. Of course you're feeling it because you're an imposter, and so am I. Denying that you are an imposter is a way of you claiming that you know everything and that you're sure it's going to work. Well, if you're leading, that can't possibly be true. If you're getting up to give a talk to people you've never given this talk to, who are you to say the talk is going to work for sure. You don't know. You're an imposter pretending, acting as if that this is the thing that they need to hear right now. So when the feeling arises, it teaches us that we're not sociopaths. Because in that moment, we're saying, "I can't guarantee that this is going to work, but I can guarantee that I'm going to do my best, which includes having done the meeting, having done my homework, having developed empathy. But if I can bring all of those things to the table better me than no one. So here I am. I'm an imposter, and I'm dancing with it."

Susie Moore:

One thing that always soothes me if I feel imposter vibrations in my body is looking at history, and kind of like we touched on earlier, I love people who are dead now. I have many dead mentors active in my life for authors, specifically like David J. Schwartz, who I love, we mentioned Zig and Jim. I love to look at.. No one's reading... Well, some people are obviously, but people aren't really reading their books anymore. It's a rarity, probably, to be consuming that content now. So I think that's going to be us, right in a short period of time. And that just makes me feel really calm. I'm like... That's why I love watching old movies too. I'm like, everyone in this black and white movie is dead, and that'll be me in a matter of time, so why can't I just enjoy my experience? Why can't I make my contribution in my temporary lifetime? It soothes me. Do you ever feel that way too, and you just look at history and you realize the temporary nature of our own existence here as creatives?

Seth Godin:

That's a new one for me, the movie one. I like that very much. And I confess, I haven't read David's book in a couple years, but I'll go reread it. The thing that I would like to amplify is something in a slightly different direction, which is that to go back to a Zig thing, many of the people who are listening to this want a certain sort of broad, shallow appeal to a large number of people. They would like to be a wandering generality, that if you describe to them who their heroes are and how big their podcasts are, how many people are following them on Insta or whatever, they tend to be fairly big numbers.

And when you were talking about movies, I was thinking about the fact that George Clooney hasn't been in a movie in a while. And the movie industry soldiers on because there's always another George Clooney in the wings. And the opportunity to be George Clooney or your version of George Clooney is so tiny, so one in a million, it is not worth... Whereas to be a character actor, a specific one, someone who is living in a very specific way that in the casting room they say, "Get me this person, and there is no substitute." Those slots are all wide open And it's so much easier to do this work if, instead of trying to be the next blank, the next Susie Moore, the next Zig Ziglar, or the next Seth, be even, first, you, a specific one who is...

The Kardashian slot is filled. They're not going anywhere. So we don't need another Kardashian, we need another you, the first you. And to be specific at it means to be on the hook. Not say, "Well, what do you need me to be today?" Instead to say, "I promise to be this," and then be whatever it is you just said.

Susie Moore:

And often I think people, and I learned this from you, they're like, "Well, the Kardashians or Clooney, or whoever it may be, they're really talented." They're great marketers, or maybe he's just got this special charisma that's just, you cannot duplicate it. So I think we love to just almost abdicate our responsibility, our power, because also, that means we don't have to do much, right? It means like, oh, if George's got it, then well, poor me over here, there's no hope. And this kind of comes into what you say about talent versus skill. Could we speak about that for a moment?

Seth Godin:

Yeah, I could talk about this all day.

Susie Moore:

Me too.

Seth Godin:

I have a couple of friends that I argue about this all the time, and they're wrong and I'm right. So talent is something that you are born with. If you are seven foot two inches tall, you are talented. If you have a perfectly symmetrical face with really clear skin, you are talented. You can't take credit for those things. On the other hand, particularly when we're talking about any technology that's been invented since the year, I don't know, two, you aren't good at it you weren't born good at it. You just weren't. And if we look at famous actresses, very few of the meet classical definitions of beauty. If we think about the "charisma" of Orion Reynolds or George Clooney, you've had lunch with someone with at least as much charisma as they have in the last week. This is not talent. This is skill. And it's the skill of figuring out what the genre is, of figuring out what the reading is, of doing the work, of showing up, of doing the emotional labor, of leaning in, getting better at it and better at it.

So we don't say a surgeon is talented, A surgeon is skilled because she learned how to cut people open successfully. And the same thing is true for people who write or sing or take photos. And if you want to be really good at it, own it. And if you want to be doing it as a hobby, own that. But don't say that your competition is talented and you're not. That's baloney.

Susie Moore:

It's a little bit of a cop out sometimes, isn't it? It's like, oh [inaudible 00:30:57].

Seth Godin:

What a great place to hide.

Susie Moore:

Let me protect myself over here because I haven't been given the talent. It's interesting too, because when you observe successful people... And I love to read autobiographies for this reason, Seth. I'm obsessed with learning about their failures, their insecurities, the inside of their mind. When everyone sees... Often, you'll see with a celebrity, they're at the top of their game externally, and then they will say that they had suicidal thoughts, or that they were feeling extremely unsure of themselves, or they were having all sorts of family problems. We just don't know. But the people who I think we admire, they also never stop with their skills. Have you ever noticed that too, Seth? Sometimes when someone's at the top of their game, they get a bit lazy too. They're like, "Well, I've done it." But that's when the [inaudible 00:31:41] sets, and it's like, "Oh, I'm good here." But those who just continue growing, expanding, having these decades long careers, the skill, there's a humility there.

Seth Godin:

Yeah. I know Spike Lee a little bit. And if you look at Spike's early movies, and then you compare him to the movies where Spike made a ton of money, and then you compare him to spike's later movies, he's a different filmmaker than he was at the beginning. And I'm totally a different writer. If you believe in talent, tell me where my talent was until I was 35 years old, because for the first 35 years, I didn't write anything anyone wanted to read. Right? How did that happen?

Susie Moore:

Yeah.

Seth Godin:

You just keep showing up.

Susie Moore:

You keep showing up. Yeah. It's so interesting because you also say, and I've noticed this too, of my own writing, but you used to use four sentences when one would do because you work up your nerve to say the thing. I used to always preface my sentences, "Well, one could believe," or I'd buffer everything. And now, I say it.

Seth Godin:

Yeah.

Susie Moore:

But I always felt... But that never ends too. And isn't that why we're all here, to make life easier for each other and to just keep skilling up? Isn't-

Seth Godin:

What a treat. What an opportunity. It's so much cheaper to learn things today in time and money than it was 25 years ago. There's no secrets left. If you want to learn how to use a table saw to cut thin curf pieces of wood out of cherry, three clicks, now you know. That was impossible 20 years ago. Any skill that you can describe is learnable. The bad news is it means there are very few secrets, which means you have more competition. The good news is you can assemble those skills in new ways.

Susie Moore:

I also feel... Do you ever feel this way, that it's almost my obligation, given... So my mom, for example, she's Polish. She grew up in Nazi occupied Poland, born in 1942, extremely poor family. She moved to the UK. I grew up on welfare. The upbringing we had was quite unconventional. My dad had an addiction, died of addiction. And I think that everything that my parents went through, everything their parents went through, kind of like you're saying, in our lifetime, it's the first time we've been able to even think, have these options. They were just subsistence, subsistence. And so I feel like for me to be alive now, it's my job to maximize what I think given because it didn't just arrive.

Seth Godin:

Right. Exactly. Exactly. The number of people who would trade spots with you is infinite, and don't waste your spot.

Susie Moore:

And this is what you speak about in the book, It's Your Turn and It's Always Your Turn. My gosh, another great book. Could you just speak to that for a moment? Because I think if someone just heard that out of the blue, "What to do when it's your turn, and it's always your turn," they might not know what it means.

Seth Godin:

So on the cover of the book, I designed it and wrote it because I wanted to do something that was illustrated that would capture some of the energy you and I are having right now. On the cover of the book is a woman named Annie Kenny. And when Annie Kenny was 19, 20 years old, she went to a meeting where her member of Parliament and Winston Churchill came to explain to the crowd why women should not have the right to vote. And Annie Kenny stood up and asked a question, and they shut her up. And she did that three times, and then they arrested her. And she went to jail for two or three days and sparked the suffragette movement in the UK, which led to the suffragette movement in the United States, which led to women around the world having the right to vote, because one person who was 21 years old stood up and said, "Why can't I be heard?" And if Annie had waited until it was her turn, it never would've occurred. So she picked herself.

And if you can pick yourself in moments when it's generous, when you're not hustling somebody, then you are onto something. And what I am arguing in the book is tomorrow is going to be a day later than today. So you might as well pick today and do this thing that you want to do, because it's worth it.

Susie Moore:

Seth, I could keep you for days to talk, truly, as you can probably [inaudible 00:36:19]. I have so many more Sethisms here. I should send you my list. You just go, "Oh, interesting. Did I say that? Don't even remember." But I love to wrap my interviews with a quick fire rapid Susie seven questions.

Seth Godin:

I'm going to do my best.

Susie Moore:

If you're up for it. But before we get into them, I would love just to drive... Where's the best place for people to find you? I know you have your amazing Akimbo podcast, your blog. Where should people go right now? Where's the best place to discover you?

Seth Godin:

If you type Seth into your favorite search engine there, you'll find me, I hope. The blog's all free, Seth's Blog. My new book is called The Carbon Almanac. It's not my book, it's our book. And that'll come out on June 21st

Susie Moore:

So soon. How exciting. Okay, Seth. Susie seven rapid fire let it be easy questions. Number one, if you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Seth Godin:

So, because I'm a science fiction nerd, this is something that I've thought about a lot, flight versus invisibility, for example. But I read a science fiction novel that I thought was fascinating about a guy who was able to go to the molecular level of any person and fix things that were sort of broken. And it ends up driving him insane because after he's fixed his shoulder that doesn't work and his knees that creak, he realized you can do it for other people. Once you can start doing it for other people, you realize you have to do it for every person who is sick, who is being held back. And that's just too much to bear. So I think the superpower I would settle on is the one I have right now, which is this life, this moment, this chance to use the leverage I've got to make a difference.

Susie Moore:

Oh, the superpower is already here. Okay, number two, what's a piece of advice that's impacted your life?

Seth Godin:

Don't listen to short bits of advice.

Susie Moore:

Oh, love. Number three, what would you eat for your last meal?

Seth Godin:

It would probably be what I eat almost every day. It would be 100% buckwheat soba noodles with a almond protein shake, maybe a dosa.

Susie Moore:

And 3.5, quickly, are you a dessert person?

Seth Godin:

No. My wife owns one of the biggest gluten-free bakeries in the world.

Susie Moore:

And you don't take advantage?

Seth Godin:

It doesn't really... The notes of sugar don't work on me like they did when I was a kid. There are other flavor notes that I'm more hooked on.

Susie Moore:

And you've got your routine. Okay. Oh, number four, they say you teach what you most need to learn. What do you teach that you needed to learn?

Seth Godin:

Empathy.

Susie Moore:

Empathy. Number five, what one word would you use to describe yourself as a child?

Seth Godin:

Obnoxious.

Susie Moore:

Obnoxious. Really? That's a good one.

Seth Godin:

That's what I was told by my aunt.

Susie Moore:

Asking questions all the time, is that what it was?

Seth Godin:

It was partly asking questions, and it was partly speaking up when I was sure I knew something that I probably should have spent more time thinking through.

Susie Moore:

Number six, when people think of you, what do you most want them to feel?

Seth Godin:

That I saw them.

Susie Moore:

To be seen. And then finally, number seven, what's exciting you most in your life right now?

Seth Godin:

In the face of profit-driven intentional division, I am reassured and thrilled by what's happening with human beings coming together because they want to make things better.

Susie Moore:

Seth Godin, thank you so much. What a way to end the interview. My gosh, I hope you'll come back one day because I've got plenty of more questions for you.

Seth Godin:

This was thrilling. I will come back. Thank you for this work you're doing. Thank you for leading. I know it's not easy to show up and show up and show up, and you're doing it, and I appreciate you.

Susie Moore:

Thank you, Seth.