What a treat to have Seth Godin back on the podcast, his third CNFin’ rodeo. He’s here this time around to talk about his latest (as of 2024) book This is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Author’s Equity).
It’ll make you think. Like … it’ll MAKE you think, if you follow me.
Seth is the author of, at last count, 6,449 books, including The Dip, The Practice, This is Marketing, and The Song of Significance. In our conversation, we talk about embracing constraints, figuring out what a trend is vs. a true change agent, when Seth first became aware of the systems around us, and a whole lot more. Great stuff.
Though he doesn’t post new episodes as often, he still re-ups his Akimbo Podcast, which always is a good listen. A new one where Seth coaches a chef is pretty great, The Strategy Sessions. There will be more.
TLDL: Of Trends and Change Agents; Constraints
Brendan: And you talk about change agents, and a great example that you used was Western Union sticking with telegrams in the face of the telephone rising. And I think it raises a question of how best to choose what might be a trend versus a true change agent that you’ll be ignoring at your own risk.
Seth: Well, one way to know it’s change agent is when the dominant forces in the system are stressed out by it, when they are fighting tooth and nail against it, when they are pretending it’s not important. Something that’s a trend doesn’t usually disrupt the system.
So a trend is bell bottoms. The companies that made pants could easily make bell bottoms. The stores that sold pants could easily sell bell bottoms. That’s not a change agent. A real change agent is casual Friday, which led to the death of the suit and the tie in most of the world, right? Because that means that the typical company that made that sort of fashion is really in trouble, and the stores that sold it are really in trouble because you can’t pay the rent of a store like that if all you’re selling is khakis.
Brendan: A great part about this strategy is this notion of constraints as well.
Seth: Constraints are beautiful, and we can celebrate them. You can whine all you want about how many characters can go in a tweet, but that’s how many characters a haiku has to be a haiku. It has boundaries to it. If your startup runs out of money, you’re out of business. You can’t whine for more time or more money. You don’t get either one. So given the constraints, what will you leverage against? What will you lean against? And my explorations in media have always been around, celebrate the constraints I can’t change, and experiment with the constraints.
Parting Shot: On Status Roles
I’ve been really working on my interviewing skills and it’s like a golfer fixing his swing. A lot of shanks off the tee as I look to rewire my muscle memory.
That’s all in service of making the show tighter and better. Making it better instead of seeking more, as in more audience share. If I make it better, the audience share will take care of itself.
If I continue to follow only my taste, that’s not in service of the audience and what matters to them. That said, a recent guest, Brooke Champagne, awesome by the way, fucking awesome, said my taste has made for a good hang. …. So I guess I’ll just keep on keepin’ on?
I like peeking — metaphorically — into a writer’s satchel for their notebooks and recorders and information gathering tools. That’s good fun to me. Also looking into the rotten, moldy cesspool that is our brains … especially my own.
But the morning routine stuff, that’s fallen out of favor with me. I just don’t find it the least bit interesting. I will always love the mind games we have to play with ourselves, dealing with imposter syndrome, focus, discipline, the practice of doing the work, seeing younger people get more success than us and wanting to punch them in the face, LOLs, but also not glorifying the hustle of it. Feel free to shoot me an email with things you want to hear from guests and things that maybe I’m already doing that you want me to stay the course.
So this idea of status roles … I’ve riffed on this in the past, who knows where, I don’t have a good record of what episode I may or may not have talked about this stuff. A recent guest of the podcast — a few actually — their publicist wanted all the links, even the audio file of the show to syndicate, that way this person, who has a significant following on social could share it. I’m like, cool.
…
It hasn’t happened.
Meanwhile, I often keep tabs on my guests and what they promote like a creep. I’m a stalker, OK, get off my shit. They have been promoting like HELL all the high-profile, status-elevating shows they’ve been on. Same with another guest. I’ve seen links and things shared to stories from other podcasts but … surprise! … not this one.
The omission is so glaring. If I promote my appearance on this show, it gives me this level of gravitas. I’m up. But if I promote my appearance on CNF Pod, it doesn’t do anything for me. In fact, if I promote that show, Brendan gets more of a bump and I’m not having that.
Fact is, my audience might be smaller, but my audience is 100% readers and you buy books. It might not vault such and such onto the NYT best seller list, but you guys buy books for yourselves and others.
Oh, yes, I keep receipts. I find it rude. It’d be one thing if guests didn’t promote any show they’re on. I can live with that. I put a lot of effort into celebrating the work. Editing the show to further spotlight them, highlight the strong points of the book even when I don’t like it, which is more often than I admit.
But when you’re hip to this idea of status roles, who’s up and who’s down, you can’t unsee it. People will do backflips on Instagram if they appear on The Rich Eisen Show or Rick Roll or whatever. But I’ll be sitting in my little studio wondering if they’re ever going to get around to recognizing CNF Pod. And I suspect there are other “little podcasters” like myself who are similarly shunned despite the effort we put in. We just don’t see them. It’s a kind of rejection, and there’s nothing we writers love more than rejection.
For me, I don’t care what show I do, it’ll always get a mention either on the podcast or in my newsletter. As you know, I don’t post to Instagram much at and since I don’t have it on my phone, I can’t post to stories, or repost to stories.
It’s just a bummer and it always makes me feel crummy. You’re hosting a party and you go to all these lengths to stock the fridge, vacuum, scrub the toilets, and not just the bowl, like the the nasty-ass area near the floor and pipe and it never gets fully clean, mop the floors, pick the perfect playlist set to the perfect volume, they leave … and you come to find out how great the other parties they went to were.
I wish I didn’t feel this way, but I can’t shake it, it’s who I am. I can note it, see it, try to swat it away, but there are times when it subsumes me. These past few weeks, it has subsumed me.
