What I’ve Learned from Seth Godin

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Seth Godin is the most quoted person on this blog, shows up in my books, and his daily posts are one of the reasons I started writing online in the first place.

Godin has published every day for more than twenty years—building one of the most widely read blogs in the world. He’s the author of over 20 bestselling books on marketing, leadership, and change. He is the founder of the altMBA and Akimbo.

When you ask Seth what he does, he’ll say he’s a teacher. For me, he’s also a coach and a virtual mentor. When I have a harebrained idea, I’ll often dig through his blog and ask myself, “What would Seth do?”

This post is part of a series called What I’ve Learned From… where I share stories, quotes, and lessons from a single source.

The Icarus Deception: Why Flying Too Low Is Just as Dangerous

We all know the myth of Icarus—fly too close to the sun and your wings melt. But Godin points out the part we usually forget: Daedalus also warned his son not to fly too low, because the sea spray would ruin his wings just as surely as the sun’s heat.

“Industrialists have made hubris a cardinal sin but conveniently ignored a far more common failing: settling for too little…By flying too low, we shortchange not only ourselves but also those who depend on us or might benefit from our work.”

Godin’s punchline: “Being safe is risky.” Average feels safe, but it’s not. It’s invisible.

This hit me hard because invisibility—not being seen or heard—is a painful existence. You’ll spend your life working toward something. What will it be?

Walk the path, get the grades, secure the job. “Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but they’re still working in the factory.”

If they convince you that flying too high means certain death, you’ll accept your fate on the factory floor. Cranking out widgets and TPS reports for the man behind the curtain.

Or you can choose freedom. To fly where you please, with the knowledge that flying too low guarantees the same fate. But it’s a choice. As Godin says, “Freedom isn’t the ability to do whatever you want. It’s the willingness to do whatever you want.”

Most are free, but unwilling.

The Marathon Mindset

Godin points out: “Most people who enter the Boston Marathon know they are not going to win. But they enter anyway. That is what life is like.”

Can you imagine a baby deciding not to walk unless they could win? Or an author refusing to publish unless they could hit the bestseller list?

In reality, I don’t even know what it means to “win.” Many of the authors I admire spend lifetimes on airplanes and at conferences, trying to stay relevant. Sounds like hell to me, despite the plump sales numbers.

I’d love to sell more books, but I entered this race knowing I won’t “win.” My goal is just to keep running—like Forrest Gump—until I no longer want to lace them up.

If the goal is to finish, raise money, or get in shape, you win the marathon without coming in first.

Godin says, “If you need a guarantee you’re going to win before you begin, you’ll never start.”

In a competitive landscape, find ways to win without winning. You do that by running your own race.

How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess. As Godin puts it, “You can’t out-Walmart Walmart.”

“The real competition is with your own potential, not with the other runners.”

The Price of Discovery

“John Zogby, the successful pollster, was completely, utterly wrong about Al Gore in Florida. By ten points. And he was wrong about John Kerry, and wrong about his prediction for the New Hampshire primaries in 2008. But notice that I said, ‘successful pollster,’ not ‘disgraced pollster.’

“Isaac Newton was totally, fantastically wrong about alchemy, the branch of science he spent most of his career on. He was as wrong as a scientist could be. And yet, he’s widely regarded as the most successful scientist and mathematician ever.

“The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.”

“People mistakenly believe that one way to successfully avoid error is to avoid trial. We need more trial.”

When you try, when you are really willing to be wrong, almost excited to be wrong, you end up staying curious and growing.

Godin’s point is that failure isn’t fatal—it’s the toll you pay for discovery.

Two of the most powerful words in the English language are “my bad.” They’re an apology and a confession. They communicate ownership and empathy. And they clear your mind so you can move forward and try again.

So many people point the finger when things go wrong, but you don’t grow if you don’t own it.

The Cure for Writer’s Block: More Bad Ideas

“No one ever gets talker’s block.

“No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

“Why, then, is writer’s block endemic?

“The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied. We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t and, if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?

“Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure. Just write. Write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.”

Have you seen Paul McCartney write Get Back? You should.

He strums. He mumbles. He scats. Slowly, a few words take shape. Under the watchful eyes of his bandmates—who add a riff, a beat, a lyric—he keeps going until, almost out of nowhere, he’s got a song. A hit!

Watch long enough and you’ll see the difference between McCartney and George Harrison. Paul was willing to create in public, willing to subject himself to feedback from the jump. And it turbocharged his creativity.

George was self-conscious—he wanted to polish his ideas in private. So many of them never made it out.

“Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship.”

This is why I blog on a schedule. I post every Monday at 8:30 a.m., like SNL, it’s happening. Ready or not, here I come! That schedule forces me to be consistent, to notice things worth writing about, but it also forces me to remove the preciousness—if it’s the best I’ve got, it’s shipping. It’s being shared.

Godin says, “Ship creative work. On a schedule. Without attachment and without reassurance,” and you’ll break the back of resistance.

Show me all your shitty drafts… “Once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”

They’re not all bangers, but some of them are. Perfect is overrated.

And the occasional stinker, just like on Saturday Night Live, is what unlocks the bangers. You can’t have one without the other, and truth be told, you don’t know which is which until you ship your work and share it with the world.

Maps vs. Wilderness

Godin has a great frame for the type of work you choose: “Where is the map? vs. Where is the wilderness?”

So many people are looking for the map. The recipe. The step-by-step. They want to be told what to do. But the wilderness is where the satisfaction is—and often, where the money is too.

When you follow the map, you’re just walking the path that others have laid. But the big wins are unmapped. They’re out there.

“We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.”

In my consulting career, I wanted the impossible client—the wilderness. That’s why they kept me around: I liked drawing maps where none existed.

Your value goes up as a direct result of your creativity. It’s not just for artists. “There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.”

You can’t use someone else’s map to find yourself. Maps are for claimed land. Fortune (financial or otherwise) belongs to those who go into the wilderness and draw the map.

Early map of the whole wide world. Of course, this map has changed as people entered the wilderness and added what they discovered. — Early map of the whole wide world

Stop Keeping Score

The truth is that scoring is easy. It’s easier to score and track than it is to think and connect. What Seth Godin would call ‘real skills’ are the ones that can’t simply be measured and can’t easily be replaced.

“If it’s never been done before, you can’t quantify it. And so, to be good at it doesn’t mean you quantify your way to it; to be good at it means you clear the decks so that all that’s left is you and the muse; you and the fear. You and the change that you want to make in the world.”

It’s good to keep score of widgets coming off the factory line, but that’s not the work that matters anymore. The work that matters—the breakthrough thinking, the creative solutions, the leadership that inspires—none of that fits neatly into a spreadsheet.

Godin once told Tim Ferriss, “I quantify almost nothing in my life.” For Ferriss, a guy obsessed with measurement, that was a shock. For me, it was permission to stop keeping score.

I’d focus on the unmeasurable. The work that actually makes a difference.

Find Your Own Egg

Godin recounts an apocryphal story about Columbus.

“After he returned from a voyage, the naysayers in the elite were giving him a hard time about his trip, pointing out that if he hadn’t done it, well, someone else would have done it anyway. It was inevitable, no big deal.

“Columbus did not respond to these words but asked for a whole egg to be brought to him. He placed it on the table and said: ‘My lords, I will lay a wager with any of you that you are unable to make this egg stand on its end like I will do without any kind of help or aid.’ They all tried without success and when the egg returned to Columbus, he tapped it gently on the table breaking it slightly and, with this, the egg stood on its end. All those present were confounded and understood what he meant: that once the feat has been done, anyone knows how to do it.”

The Fosbury flop and the four minute mile.

Touch screen interface, reusable rockets, streaming entertainment.

Jerry Jones once claimed 500 coaches could have won Super Bowls with his Cowboys roster. Maybe on game day. But Jimmy Johnson built those teams— drafting Irvin, Aikman, and Smith, hiring Turner and Davis. Afterward, the recipe looked obvious, like standing an egg on its end.

On Managing Oneself

This post woke me up. My boss wasn’t my director, nor were my clients—it was me. I had to manage myself better.

The post was also the inspiration for The World’s Biggest Bully.

“Even if you’re not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

“Odds are, you’re doing it poorly.

“If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much of your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.

“I’m amazed at how often people choose to fail when they go out on their own or when they end up in one of those rare jobs that encourages one to set an agenda and manage themselves. Faced with the freedom to excel, they falter and hesitate and stall and ultimately punt.”

What is School For?

“When the Wizard gave the Scarecrow his diploma, he didn’t give him anything that he didn’t already have.”

Seth goes much deeper on the subject in his Ted Talk (and PDF) STOP STEALING DREAMS, where he asks: What is school for? Obedience? Compliance?

You may not have kids, you may have graduated, and that’s great. But what Seth is talking about goes beyond school and into systems and incentives. What is school for? This will lead you to ask: what is government for? And what is money for? And what is home ownership for? And what is culture for?

Those answers, once unpacked, may surprise you, and you’ll learn to see them differently.

But the school one—that really sticks—and I think about it every time I listen to Kanye’s The College Dropout, which has a skit called “School Spirit 2”:

“When everyone says, ‘Hey, you’re not working, you’re not making any money,’ you say, ‘You look at my degrees, and you look at my life. Yeah, I’m fifty-two, so what? Hate all you want, but I’m smart, I’m so smart. And, and I’m in school. All these guys out here, uh, making money all these ways and I’m spending mine to be smart.’”

It’s a perfect satire of the mindset that confuses credentials with the value they represent.

Home Schooled

“Parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is indebting them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn’t want cogs anymore.

“Parents get to decide. I send my kids to public school. I think everyone should go to public school because it’s a great mix master of our world. But from 3:00 to 10:00, those kids are getting home schooled. And they’re either getting home schooled watching The Flintstones, or they’re getting home schooled and learning something useful.

We need to teach kids two things:

How to lead; and

How to solve interesting problems.

“There are plenty of countries where people are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people.

“The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve.

“And then don’t criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren’t stupid. If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they’ll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what’s in the textbook.”

At the Flynn family home school, we learn about math and science and reading. We learn about nature and farming and football. We practice sports, we talk about the clouds, and lay in the grass and eat apples, pick berries, and crack jokes.

We cry sometimes. When things are hard. And then we work to reframe how hard things make us feel.

When we went camping, an obvious question needed our attention: How do we make a fire? Why does it work? What is needed for a fire (heat, fuel, air)? And then the last question, late in the summer, in the woods, when we’ve seen Super Scoopers patrolling, should we start one?

Simple things too—having them make their own meals, having them navigate around town on bike rides, having them entertain themselves without devices.

Godin says, “The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.”

This quote was in my team’s playbook for 10 years. Go first, initiate contact, get curious, and start solving.

Let’s develop kids and teams and boards that will initiate, that will start, will try, will go first.

That is the same expectation we have around our home school.

Winning the Halloween Contest (Now vs. Later)

The hardest part of leadership is resisting the urge to grab the brush yourself.

“In my town every year, there’s a treasured family event. Parents and their young kids are given some tempera paint and challenged to paint a storefront’s window. The best two-foot-by-three-foot window mural wins a prize.

“The easy way to win is to tell your kid what to do and merely fool the judges (and your kid) into thinking that the painting is the work of a youngster.

“The easy way to have your kid lose is to sit there, not speaking, not painting, waiting for your child to pick up the brush and paint something.

“The easy way may be the best plan in the short run, but it certainly doesn’t work for the long haul. In the short run, playing your strongest player, following the playbook, rewarding someone who has done it before—these are all great ways to win. In the long run, though, all you’ve done is taught conformity and punished initiation.”

It’s hard not to jump in. Not to grab the paint brush, the measuring cup, or the homework assignment. But doing nothing in that moment is the most productive thing you can do. For the kids to wander and bump and fail and struggle.

And learn.

Something to Say

“I think that it’s a privilege to be able to look a trusting, energetic, smart 11-year-old in the eye and tell him the truth. And what we can say to that 11-year-old is: I really don’t care how you did on your vocabulary test; I care about whether you have something to say.”

I know he is talking about kids, but those kids grow up, and they work jobs, and they start blogs.

It’s not penmanship and spelling; it’s something to say.

“The gold rush spread across the continent like a wildfire in the Sacramento heat.”

That is how my essay started. And I thought it was pretty solid at the age of 16. It was the last paper I’d write for AP History before dropping the class. The feedback was pointed and painful. Without another mark on the entire piece, Mr. Czuben wrote “THIS SAYS NOTHING” across the top.

Apparently, he wanted facts and dates and names.

I didn’t learn much about history in his class with all the sleeping through it, but I did learn something about writing. No matter how beautiful, and it was beautiful, you can’t hide behind flowery language. You need to say something.

Practical Wisdom

“Take responsibility and give away credit.” Simple, terrific advice for leadership.

“The danger is in using someone else’s ruler to measure your art.” I’ve shortened this to “Don’t measure yourself with someone else’s ruler,” art or otherwise.

Maybe you’ve heard, but I retired a few years ago. Some would say that makes me successful. Others think it makes me an idiot. But wait, it gets better—I’ve decided to spend my time writing on the internet. Some think that makes me successful, others think it makes me an idiot.

What does my ruler say? Success to me is spending my days how I choose. Based on that measurement, I’m at the top of the heap.

It does require you to have a ruler, though. And sometimes that is where the hard work begins.

“No one learns to ride a bike from a manual.” Some things just require that you give it a go.

“People like us do things like this.” Oprah tells the story of a fat girl; Lance tells the story of a cancer survivor. They connect on common ground. This is the north star for leadership, teaching, coaching, sales, all of it. Alignment. What Godin calls enrollment. Get yourself on the same side of the table and build a tribe.

“Attitudes are skills.” In the military, a hard skill meant that you had your hands on the machinery. The guns and the tanks. Soft skills were everything else, the skills that did not involve working with these machines.

In a world that is pushing more hard skills to hard machines, those soft skills might be all we have left. And to make the most of it, your attitude skills will be imperative.

“If you’re not drowning, you’re a lifeguard.” I’ve used this in boardrooms and baseball fields. It means that we all need to look out for each other, help each other, support each other. And do it before the crisis occurs.

“What could you do today that will matter a year from now?” Think big. Think long term. If you spend the day scrolling, putting out fires, or talking behind people’s backs, the way to get back on the path is to ask yourself this question.

Godin’s work gave me permission to think differently about work, creativity, and what it means to live a meaningful life.

The cage door is open. Will you walk through?