The Art of Leadership Network. How did you keep going amidst 800 rejections? Sonacy Man, I might have quit at 80, Seth. There were two things. The first one is the rejections kept getting better. Oh. That the first hundred rejections were no. The second hundred rejections are, "Oh, this is much better than the last one you sent me. Keep going." No. And by the time it was up to three or four hundred, I knew I was on the verge of something. That wasn't harassing people. We were both learning about each other. And the second thing was, "Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast. It's Carrie here, and I hope our time together today helps you thrive in life and leadership. So thrilled to have Seth Godin back on the podcast. He unpacked his creative process, talked strategy. He's got a brand new book called, "This is Strategy We Get Into It," and he explains how he overcame 800 rejections. I talked to so many aspiring leaders who are like, "Two people said no, so I think I'm going to quit." It's like 800? Wow. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a whole lot more. Hey, welcome to all of you who are listening, longtime listeners. First-time listener, shout out to James, who said, "I've been pastoring for a decade. Carrie covers all the topics I face in ministry. Much of this should have been taught in seminary, but I'm glad for this podcast to keep my skills growing and sharp." Thanks. Well, thank you, James. And then Jason said, "One of the best around, if you want to explore deep thinking or taking leadership and faith to the next level, this is one of the best uses of your time." So appreciate your ratings and reviews. They mean a lot. And when you leave one, hey, it gets word out. Everybody takes notice, and we get great guests like Seth Godin. Today's episode is brought to you by the Art of Leadership Academy. For a few days this week, you can get a 90-day trial membership to my Art of Leadership Academy. For just $97 that hosts all of my courses, check it out at theartofleadershipacademy.com. Be sure to join ASAP because the $97 trial will not last soon, and Convoy of Hope, regardless of the size of a disaster. Convoy is committed to helping people and mobilizing the resources the church needs to meet the needs of their community. Go to convoy.org/carry to learn more. So Seth Godin and I have a wide-ranging conversation. I'm so excited about, he is the author, as many of you know. I mean, it's cool. When you type Seth into the internet and he shows up, that shows you you've got a bit of influence. Anyway, Seth is the author of 21 International Best Sellers that have changed the way people think about work and art. They've been translated into 38, count on 38 languages. His breakthrough books include Unleashing the Idea Virus, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes, The Dip, Lynchpin, The Practice, and This Is Marketing. Now he's got this strategy. He writes one of the world's most popular daily blogs and has given five TED Talks. He's the founder of AltMBA, the former VP of direct marketing at Yahoo and the founder of the pioneering online startup, Yo-Yo Dine. So so glad to have Seth back on the show today. And man, if you have thought about joining my art of leadership academy or taking a single course that I've done, you haven't jumped in yet, I have something exciting to announce. For a few days this week, you can get a 90 day trial membership for just $97. The 90 day trial has unlimited access to all of my courses. There are eight or maybe nine now, a private online community of awesome church leaders, no junk, no spam, no trolls, real conversation, live coaching calls directly with me and more, including my flagship program, The Art of Preaching. For the last few years, over 4,000 pastors have taken the art of preaching to become more effective at writing sermons, more effective at communicating God's word on a Sunday morning. I even teach you how to speak without using notes. So why wait until January to make a change? When you join today, you can start 2025 with growth and momentum. So check it out. Go to the artofleadershipacademy.com. Be sure to join ASAP because the 90 day trial for $97 is expiring soon. That is the artofleadershipacademy.com to get unlimited access for 90 days. Would love to welcome you inside the Academy. And Convoy of Hope knows that what was meant for evil can be used for good. So time and again, Convoy has seen God use his local church in the midst of disaster. And we have a lot of disasters happening right now to show people the generous, compassionate love of Christ and draw people closer to him. Regardless of the size of a disaster, Convoy is committed to helping people and mobilizing and resourcing the church to meet the needs of their community. When you partner with Convoy, you show your community and the world that your congregation is committed to living a life of kindness, generosity and compassion in action. You can learn more and support their work at your church involved at convoy.org/carry. That's convoy.org/c-a-r-e-y. And now my conversation with the one and only, Seth Godin. Seth, I have been so excited to have another conversation with you. Thank you. Thank you, Kai. The reason I write books is so I can have conversations with you about them. Well, I'll tell you this last one. This is strategy. I'll tell you that really I spent over a day reading through it. And it's a linear book, but it's very parabolic, which is interesting. I was thinking you and Jesus have a lot in common. You know. You tell stories. No, I know. That may not be a good thing where you come from. I don't know, but I'm like, it's very parabolic and it really makes you think, right, which is sort of the point. Yeah. You know, when you sit down to write a book, it's tempting to start at A and go to Zed. But that's not how people learn things. When you're a toddler, your mom doesn't teach you the peas and then teach you about onions and then teach you about potatoes. In between, you're playing with Lego and you're doing this out of Z, and they all fit together. So there wasn't an obvious way to teach the philosophy I'm trying to teach. So I decided to be recursive and elliptical and parabolic. I'll talk about something until I've talked about it enough and then I'll talk about the thing that it relates to and around in a back because the purpose of a book is to change your mind. If all you want is information, look it up online, but I'm here to change your mind. Yeah. Yeah, I want to talk about your writing. We had the opportunity recently to sit down with Malcolm Gladwell again and dissect his writing and obviously different writers, different thinkers, different styles. You are very unique in that it's really a series of, is it 300, almost 300 riffs? It's like many blog posts if listeners are following Seth and I hope you are on your blog, subscribing to your email. It's like 300 of those and they're sequentially linked, topically linked. But again, every one of them is kind of parabolic. You're kind of like, hmm, it almost felt more like a reference book on strategy than... Well, I was with you into the last part. So... Okay. Malcolm's new book is great. I liked it. I read the galley. Yeah. I liked it very much. Malcolm will take a story and he will squeeze every bit of wisdom out of it. Yes. And he has patience to do that. My teaching approach is don't steal the revelation. And I think a lot of people in the spiritual world understand what I'm saying. If you say, "Dantanana," and the recipient in their own has this, "Dantan," learning happens. If you just take people through all the list, they're going to glaze over. So I think Malcolm's method is tell you a story and you get ahead of him. And then he confirms you were right by finishing the story the way you expected. My method is start telling a story and let you finish it. And that's what I'm trying to do. It's the opposite, I think, of a reference book. I can't imagine someone looking something up in one of my books. No, that's true. I guess I was... It's probably not the right term, but the way I was thinking of it. I turned to a sacred text on a daily basis. And every time you read it, there's another layer of meaning under it. So that is more what I was saying in that this is not, "Oh, yeah, I read the book. It was good." It's like, "I got to come back to this." So I ordered myself and my team some copies and when it actually comes out out, it's going to sit on my shelf and maybe on my desk and I'll be referencing it. I'd love to talk about your writing process. I heard you discuss this with Tim Ferriss a few months ago and I am increasingly consumed with the idea of brevity as somebody who's naturally verbose and enjoys talking too much. You're so good at being brief. Can you talk about writing in brevity? Well, first, I'm hardly a role model for anybody who's looking for a persistent, resilient, organized way to go through things because I have a short attention span. I wrote a book called "Survival is Not Enough." It took me 10 hours a day for 300 days. I had to delete 130,000 words when I was done. Your footnotes and footnotes, I did it the right way and it almost killed me but I learned a lot doing the process. What I've found as a teacher and as you know, I've been teaching up north for 50 years, 40 years is you want to present the smallest nudge possible that is still scaffolding and anything beyond that, it's actually getting in the way of the pedagogy of learning. The key to the word nudge is you need to find the right thing and so this is, again, part of Malcolm's genius is he can take the parable of Bowdoin versus Vassar, which is a story you can tell in 90 seconds. He'll tell it for 25 minutes, which is fine, it was great, but it's still a nudge. He didn't need to describe everything in our culture. He used one example to get you to see the big picture. I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to say when you think about the story of the Purple Cow, which you might still remember all these years later, you will not remember any of the details from my book, which is fine. It's the little nudge that could get you over that. What parallels are there between teaching someone how to paddle a canoe and teaching in general? You're right. You alluded to it, but you've been doing this for 40, 50 years, going about an hour and a half north of me every summer to teach canoeing. I believe virtually all learning is self-learning. I think just about everybody is an auto-died act and the teacher's job is to create the conditions for you to, A, want to learn, and B, have enough freedom from fear that you will learn. The secret of teaching a 10-year-old or a 60-year-old how to canoe is I need to teach them to breathe, I need to teach them to sit, and then I need to teach them to understand the transfer of energy. If I get those things right, then the only thing that's left is the wrist action on the J-stroke. When I've done those four things, they do two years worth of progress in an hour. But if I go on and say, "The difference between the side draw and the inside turn is this," and I talk about Chuck Lebeau and Omar Stringer and I talk about the gunnels in the tumble home, nothing happens. I'm just amusing myself. Why do you start with breath? People don't really understand how energy and respiration works, and they don't understand what breathing actually is. If we can return to the breath, we can deal with our fear. If we can return to the breath, we can generate the energy that we need to do our work. If you watch somebody who is not good at public speaking or golf, you will find that they are holding their breath. You're right. It's interesting. I mean, I'm a very immature canoeist. We have one that we keep at the house, and then we take it across the street into the lake and have a lot of fun with it, and we've managed our way around it, and I don't have a lot of fears in life. One of my fears is swimming/drowning, and I've lived a lot of years with that fear. I took swim lessons, obviously learned nothing as a child from my swimming lessons, and my kids now that they're older are very good at coaching me on that, but I have to remind myself every time I jumped in the lake a couple of days ago off my boat, and it's like breathe, relax, don't panic. You're going to be okay. I can walk on stage and talk to 5,000 liters, no problem, but jumping into that lake off the back of a boat makes me very, very afraid. Totally get it. First of all, you should be afraid because the green leech is in your lake, and you don't want to encounter him. He's 90 feet long, but... Oh, this is a new fear. Thank you. You're welcome. New fear unlocked. They did not know that. They taught adults how to swim, and the method surprises people. You get one of those scuba masks, not the little ones that go over your eyeballs, but over your eyes and your nose, and you fill it with water from the pool, and you sit on the deck of the pool. You're not in the water, and you just put on this mask filled with water. So now your eyes and your nose are under water, but none of the rest of you is. And so all of the logic in your brain is reminding you, you are fine because you are not even in the water, but you are experiencing the sensory of being in the water. And if I can get you to sit there for five minutes and just chill with that, getting the pool is much easier because what we've done is we've tried to rewire your cognitive rational self with the self that's afraid. So one of the things I talk about in the book is everyone I have encountered in every country around the world, once they have a roof and health and food, wants three things in different measure, status, affiliation, and freedom from fear. And status is who eats lunch first, who's in the front row, who got a handshake, affiliation is am I wearing the right clothes, do I fit in, people like us do things like this. And freedom for fear is a made up story about fear. It's not freedom from risk. It's do you feel afraid? We'd rather not. And so back to this swimming pedagogy, if I can make it so you don't feel afraid when you're wearing the mask, then we are one step closer to you being comfortable in the water. A little more on your writing process, if you don't mind, before we tackle strategy. Yeah. So think about your daily posts, which can be remarkably short, two or three sentences, and sometimes a little bit longer, but literally compared to most of the stuff people would read on the on the brief side, definitely on the brief side. How do you pick topics for what you're going to write about daily? Well, I don't pick topics. I have a method, but I don't pick topics. Okay. First, I'm going to talk about why I think people are verbose. They're verbose because they're hiding. They're hiding because it lets them off the hook. If you say, and this started a year or two into my blog, I had comments because I was a supposed to have comments and a negative comment would ruin my whole day. So what I started to do was write in anticipation of the negative comments. I would start explaining myself and footnoting and doubling down on things so that people couldn't write a negative comment about that. And it was ruining it. But I realized I either had to have no comments or no blog, but there was no way I could keep knowing that I had to defend myself in my writing. How do I, what's my method? My method is, if I see something in the world that I don't understand, either because it's working and I don't think it should work, or because it's not working and I don't understand why someone's doing something that doesn't work, I need to explain it to myself. And if I can explain it to myself in a way that someone else might want to hear, that's a blog post. So it comes out of your curiosity, your desire to know, your desire to understand. Right, but I don't think I was born with curiosity. I think I have developed a practice to be curious as a professional. I think anyone can do that. Yeah, that's one of my commitments is actually to become more curious every year. And it's a discipline. And some days I do well on it, some days not so well. And now a quick word from one of our partners. Today's episode is brought to you by preaching cheat sheet. A recent study showed that 46% of pastors say one of their biggest struggles is feeling like attendees don't absorb or use what they preach. Did you hear that? 46% of pastors feel that way. Look, I get it. Okay. We've all been there. It's way more often than not, I would love to help. I have a free 10 step preaching cheat sheet that outlines you guessed at 10 simple steps to help you get the most out of your sermon prep. Each step ensures that your sermon and delivery are clear. In other words, you're ready to go before you get into the pulpit. You don't sit there at lunch going, you know, could have done this, could have done that. Get that done first. Over 30,000 pastors have downloaded copy to help with their sermon prep. That's something I still use to this day, even after decades of preaching. I love filling out each of the steps as I write my sermon. And then I sit down to review the message the night before and I can go in with reasonable confidence that this message is going to land or at least that I have done my best. So I'd love to get a copy for you for free. If you want to be more confident on Sunday mornings, visit preaching cheat sheet.com. That's preaching cheat sheet.com to download your copy for free. And now, back to the conversation. What are your disciplines in terms of fostering that curiosity? It's just a really good way to not do my work. It's like, oh, look, a puppy, it's just, I can't, once I developed, once I got rewarded for not filling out forms and instead noticing things, I didn't have to work very hard after that. Yes, I may have to notice things. I can't stop noticing. There was, we went to a cheap hotel in Jamaica about 15 years ago and there was a guy who worked there and there was a slide and he would go down the slide and then skid across the surface of the water for like 15 feet, like ducks and drinks. When I watched this guy do that like five times, I'm like, that's impossible. I may, I minored in physics. What you're doing cannot be done. So I went up to him as the pool was closing and I said, there's 20 bucks. Thank you for entertaining me. Will you teach me how to do that? Now, the number of times in my life that I would actually be able to do it was close to zero, but I needed to know. I needed to know what he was doing and how it worked because I don't understand people who can watch the any day or tease do a magic trick and go, oh yeah, without having a clue. A miracle just happened and you know, you're not interested? How could that be? That's why I own 150 tricks from Penguin Magic because I don't, I don't perform them, but I need to know. Oh, so you dabble the magic. Oh, yeah. I knew you juggled. I knew you juggled. Yeah, the juggling is taking a lot of my time lately, but the magic, I have like, I have it on the tricks that I do pretty well over and over again, but then I have this huge array of, because I love the craftsmanship of how did someone decide to spend months plus manufacturing to come up with something that created wonder for somebody else? That's $20 well spent. Yeah, I know kidding, but you don't perform publicly because then I get stressed and if it doesn't work, like to be, to take someone's attention and give it back when you can't put in the effort to be sure you're going to create wonder feels selfish to me. Hmm. So you do it for yourself, not for your wife or close friends or anything? Yeah, the six tricks, they always work because I've customized them, I'm good at them. I do those all the time because watching someone's expression, because here's what I do. And a char who runs Penguin has heard me talk about this. I think most modern magic tricks have a problem, which is that they are self-absorbed and make the magician look smart. So in all of my tricks, the person I'm doing the trick for actually does the trick. They perform the miracle. Wow. And then they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. And like, that's the kind of wonder I'm looking for. Not, oh, you're very cool. They're like, how did I do that? So that's something I really admire about the way you approach your work. You do make not only the reader, the person on the other end of, you know, your keyboard, do the work. They get the, right, that they're doing that, but you also make them the hero. Yeah. That's the goal. Yeah. You really, you really do a great job of that. And that is something I am committed to because that is not natural behavior for me. It would be like, I'd kind of like to be the hero. That would be a lot of fun, you know, just being totally transparent, Seth. No, I mean, part of it came from, you know, 30 years of public speaking, I saw a guy give a speech yesterday. It was terrible. It was like eyeball bleeding terrible. And it's because he just was recounting one not very interesting story after another from his life. And he felt like because they had happened to him, they were interesting. That works if, you know, if you're Beyonce, we want to hear about Beyonce's semi-interesting stories, but we don't know this guy. We just know he's telling us another non-interesting story about his boss. Why? And if I can tell a story that's not about me, where you end up imagining yourself as the hero, that was time well spent for all of us. Another thing that amazes me, and I mean, it really comes together in the book because close to 300 riffs/chapters, almost every one of them's got some kind of story or anecdote. It could be historical or it could be somebody you know from all the work you've done with all TMPA, MBA or purple space, that kind of thing. How do you collate collect that many stories? Because sometimes you read a book, Seth, and it's like, "Oh yeah, I know this story. Oh yeah, I know this story." I don't think I knew one story in this is strategy I'm pretty sure they were all new to me. And I would love to know how you curate and collect stories like that. I am narcissistic enough to momentarily imagine that the world works for me. And when I discover something, I will say that one's a good one. I'm safe in that one, and it might be 10 years later, and there it is ready for me. They did that for me. So the people who are leaders, podcasters, bakers, folks who show up in the world are doing something interesting, I'm like grabbing those stories. And I don't have an organized filing system, I just incorporate the story. So I'll give you an example, in The Icarus Deception, the entire book is hooked on the story of Daedalus and Icarus. I wrote that book 12 years ago. It's based on a myth that's thousands of years old. Four days ago, someone sent me a three-page single-based letter explaining all the facts I got wrong about Daedalus and Icarus. Oh no. I'm sorry if the Daedalus estate wants to send me a letter, I will do a settlement. I mean, I feel better because it's a make-believe story, but it was sloppy of me, but what happened was, I heard the story and I got to save that one. And it was years and years later when I turned the parable into a book, but the point is I'm not a reporter and I'm not a scientist. I'm looking for parables and anecdotes that I can hook a lesson to. And I do my best not to mislead, but your mileage will definitely vary. You're not alone in getting three-paragraph single-spaced letters critiquing something you said or did. One of the things you've done, you're very disciplined about, you turned off comments on your blog on day two, maybe not day one, but day two. And you've been going now for decades, every single day on your blog. You don't have social media and you're not really getting a lot of feedback online. No, no, careful, careful, not letting that sentence go away, but you keep going. All right. Well, from random uninvested people, you're not getting a lot of us get a lot of feedback when we get comments, when we're on social media. I can post a video. For the reason I stopped you, I stopped you because you used the word feedback. Okay. So in the book, I talk about feedback loops, negative and positive, turns out a negative feedback loop is a good thing. That's different than criticism. And there's different kinds of criticism. Criticism from professionals is priceless, hard to find. Then there is the implied criticism that we can take from eavesdropping on people who don't know they're giving us criticism. That's hugely valuable. What does that look like? So in the case of this book, I made 45 videos to build a workshop around and I then gave the workshop to the people in purple space. So 350 people worked through 45 lessons. And I got to watch them talking to each other about each lesson. That's priceless. I wouldn't trade that for anything. I rewrote big sections of the book based on what they were confused by. If I had said to somebody, please edit this, they would have done a terrible job because they would have gotten all stressed about giving quote feedback or even criticism. If I can watch. So great chefs look to see what's coming back to the kitchen uneaten. That's really useful information. Yeah, I think, okay, that's a really good point. So you're getting, maybe you could call it qualified feedback, helpful feedback. But the random critics on the internet are generally not in your brain on a right-time basis. Correct. So that's an important distinction. How does that make you a better writer, better thinker by not having that unsolicited to keeping the trolls away? Well, you know, if you think about the mess of Northern Hemisphere politics, it's largely a mess because trolls are allowed. And so if you're a politician, you're spending almost all of your day listening to trolls. And you can't help it. You're going to start changing your behavior because of trolls. Whereas the vast majority, 80, 90 percent of the population, wants you to do a thing. You don't hear from those people. And so what it's helped me the most with is the trolls who insist that, you know, I tell soul-bearing stories about myself, that I'm fully authentic, that I race after TikTok traffic, that I become an influencer for no-tropic placebos, all of that stuff. My peers, I've seen them run down those roads. And people who do that rarely come back and say, "Oh, yeah, I'm glad I wasted a year of my life hyping NFTs." Right? I have work to do. And if the trolls want me to do something else, they're entitled to want that. But I don't have to listen to them. I'm thinking about the reason I'm going down this road is I'm thinking about all the preachers who are listening in communicators, the public speakers. So 99 percent of them are going to have a social media profile. That's part of the game we play these days. And it actually is a great way of connecting your message with people. You have any advice for them, short of getting off social media, because I think what you said about the people inside Purple Space, which is a dedicated community that you are a part of and other thoughtful people are a part of, getting expert critique. That's super helpful. That's super valuable. I think the trap a lot of people fall into is that they don't get the expert help. They just get the public comments and the trolls. So I wonder what advice you would have to them about how to deal with that if they're going to stay on social media, or you might say let's get off social. It's a two part story. The first part is a bunch of years ago I went down to Atlanta and spoke to catalysts. And I wanted to be respectful. I spent three months, pretty much full time getting a totally different talk ready for that event. Wow. I was really pleased at how it went. It was in a round auditorium with 15,000 people. It's not a good venue for a speaker like me. True. I felt really good about it. And in the car and the way back to the airport, I opened my phone and I looked to see what people were saying about it on Twitter, because in Atlanta it was trending. Great. He did super. I didn't expect this. This was terrific. This person was like really cruel. And it ruined my day. It just ruined my day. And I said to myself, I'm never doing that again. That was the first story. Second story. The other thing that's really hard for me are convention centers and simultaneous translation. Because convention centers aren't good for talk and simultaneous translation means the audience already feels you're disrespectful because you don't speak their language. And anything you say it's funny doesn't get a response for five seconds. So it's all very right. So I'm in Mexico City, simultaneous translation in a convention center. This is 15 years ago, so it's early days for the phone. And there's 2,500 people there. And in the third row, there's a woman on her cell phone, but she's not listening. She's talking in Spanish while I'm giving my talk. So I don't have a script, I have slides and while I'm doing my thing, I am aiming every story and all my energy at this woman. I'm going to get her to hang up the phone and pay attention. I turn every story into a story about cell phones and all of it. And after about four minutes, Zig Ziglar's voice came into my head. And Zig said, Hey Seth, there's 2,900 people who came here for you. And one person who's talking on the phone, why can't you just forgive her and be here for the people who came for you? And it absolutely changed my life. And so what I would say to somebody who's on social media, who's doing this kind of leadership spiritual work is first of all, are you clear about the proxies? What are you measuring? If your goal is to have more bigger numbers, then keep doing things that are controversial and current because that's what the method is. If your goal is to make a change happen, then stop paying attention to false proxies because the false proxies are confusing you, right? The same way the collection plate is a false proxy because if you want to make the money in the collection plate go up, just tell people the roof is going to fall down and the fire inspector is going to shut you down, right? You can't get away with that very often, but you can raise a lot of money. That's not a proxy for whether you're good at your job, it's a proxy for are you good at raising money? Those are different things. So if you're on social media, are there 300 people who when they have a comment, they're the kind of person you're trying to reach. When they have a comment, their comment tells you the truth about a group of people. You're trying to reach, you should obsess about those people. But if a fly by person shows up and you're never going to see them again, and they have something to say, their comment is a false proxy, and maybe you have to hire an admin to filter them all out, but don't tell me you can ignore it. I don't think you can, not if you're a human. I think that as soon as a proxy shows up, that's easy to measure, we start to measure. I'd love to. I love reading acknowledgments in books. It's a lot of fun and I read your acknowledgments and I thought, wow, that's a good lineup. Like when you look at some of the people who were able to give you feedback, you had Tim Ferris, you had Will Gidera, who's going to be on this podcast again shortly. I mean, those are just a couple of names that popped out. If you're talking to a leader who doesn't have perhaps the connections that you do or even that I have the privilege of having at this point in my life, and they're starting out again, I'm thinking to myself when I'm 31, all right, I'm just starting out in a little tiny church in Oromodonti. How do I get expert opinions on that that can make me, you know, I get this question all the time from communicators. It's like, how do I get proper feedback on my sermon? And I'm like, well, don't trust your congregation because all they can tell you is it was good or it wasn't very good and they'll probably be overly polite. And I said, it's not helpful even with your staff because you're like, okay, well, why was it good? And they're like, I don't know. It was just good. Why was it bad? I don't know. It was just bad. The person to deconstruct your talk is another communicator because the other communicator can say, okay, when you opened with this, you lost people and here's why you lost people. Or when you told this story, everybody leaned in. It was just fantastic. So I'm wondering how they could get, you know, any advice for them on how to get that kind of helpful feedback early on. Okay, so let's break this into a little pieces. First of all, I gave Will advice on his book and it wasn't very good. So the advice of the book, the advice you gave Will, the book is great. The advice wasn't in sync with where he was going. And he was a really good support about it. Well-known people aren't the people you needed advice from. And there's this imagination that at the green room at TED, all these people behind the scenes are sharing secrets. And if you could only hear that, you'd do fine. This is not true. The people who actually read my book in the acknowledgments, I mentioned who they are. You never heard of any of them. Will didn't read my book. Tim didn't read my book. Now yet, I was thanking them for putting up with me and the thing is that what you want is first to learn how to be good at listening to the feedback about what you're doing. Because most people don't, including me. So you're going to constantly be wasting people's time asking them for feedback without understanding the concepts that they're trying to teach you. And I can remember there have been a dozen times when someone, again, someone you've never heard of, different people, has said something to me at a moment when I was ready to hear them. So when I was a book packager, I saw my first book the first day for $5,000, Chip Connolly and I split the money. And I thought, wow, if I could do that once a week, I could make a living at this. And then I got 800 rejection letters in a row, 800 times someone in book publishing bought a stamp, put it on an envelope, mailed me a letter that said, we don't like your work at all. Go away. That's a lot of negative feedback. And I met this guy named John Boswell, Boswell did a OJ's legal pad, French for Cats, a bunch of cash register type clever books. I had a really good idea for a book and I made him half owner so I could learn how he sold stuff. And he looked at my proposal, which was typeset and beautiful and had a spreadsheet. And using a lot of profanity, he ripped it into shreds and threw it in the garbage and he said, he's not in a book publishing people, they don't care that you have an MBA. And he called in his admin who he called his secretary. She used carbon paper and typed the proposal on carbon paper, three pages, just a bunch of wild assertions, that was the entire proposal. He said, because we're trying to sell them something they want to buy, not something that's true, not something that's right. And he sold it the next day. And the lesson for me was that I had been arrogant. I had been saying, if I were you, this is what I would publish. As opposed to saying, you are you. And based on who you are, I think this is what you want to publish. And if I hadn't failed 800 times in a row, there's no way I would have listened to Boswell. I was ready to hear that. And I can give people, I think, incisive feedback on structure of their book or how to give a talk. And if they're not ready to hear it, we just wasted everybody's time. How did you keep going amidst 800 rejectances? It's not easy, man, I might have quit at 80, Seth. There were two things. The first one is the rejections kept getting better, that the first 100 rejections were no. The second 100 rejections are, oh, this is much better than the last one you sent me. Keep going. No. And by the time it was up to 300 or 400, I knew I was on the verge of something. I wasn't harassing people. We were both learning about each other. And the second thing was, if I didn't succeed at that, I was going to have to get a job as a bank teller. And just reminding myself of how bad that would be kept me going. It's not like now where I could find out 300 ways for someone with no money to become an entrepreneur. This was the only thing I could do. I don't know why it was the only thing I could do, but I didn't have a plan B. Like I paid the bills by building a spreadsheet for a chain of nursing homes that was acquiring another chain of nursing homes, because I have an MBA, I knew how to do it, but I hated it. But those $20,000 paid the mortgage for the year, so I could keep going. My wife and I used to do a window shopping at restaurants, and then go home and have macaroni and cheese. One of the things I did not know about you, and it's just a line or two in the book, but you produced a record or two early on, three records. So you and Brian Koppelman, fascinating, I mean, Tracy Chapman's fast car, right? And can you talk about why record producing some of the lessons you learned in that excursion and more? It's just fascinating. Let's talk about this through the lens of the book. I will make the story a little bit shorter, but you can look up some of the details. Phillips made cassettes till the patent ran out, and then Sony and Phillips made CDs. It was extremely profitable. Every CD sold, every CD player sold, they made money. Patent ran out, so Sony came out with SACD, which was MP3 proof, rip proof, four times the information density sounded dramatically better, dramatically better. And SACD cost 30 bucks, and you needed a $4,000 player to listen to it. So if you had a high-end stereo, you knew about this, nobody else did. I aspired to have a high-end stereo. I had a subscription to stereo file magazine, and so I understood with empathy the community. Sony forgot to make the device that you needed to record SACDs. They had a few handmade ones that they were using in their studio, but no one else really could. So there was a shortage of SACDs. I found a guy in London, I don't know who had one, who built one, and I bought it for $3,000. So now I could make SACDs. So I decided to do this experiment, which is rent a church, live the two track, no compression, acoustic groups that I admired, who no one had ever heard of. I will teach myself how to produce, I got large format, Neumann microphones, and then I ran a full-page ad in stereo file magazine, and it said, "Here's the deal, I'm starting a record label, there's only going to be five records a year. And instead of charging $30 a record, I'm going to charge you $15. But you don't get to pick, they just come by subscription because you love great music, you have a great stereo, you don't have enough SACDs, here you go. First one's five bucks, postage and handling, it's free. And let me know if you're interested. It's the most successful ad I ever wrote, I got $3,005 bills in the mail. Now I got to make these records and turn these people into subscribers. So one of the records I made is actually great, and you can listen to it on Spotify, I'm proud of the other two, but the one that's on Spotify is great. And so I launched this record, I sent it to these 3,000 people with a form, here's how you subscribe, I got four subscriptions, I get failed, right? My deal with the musicians was you get to keep all the money from your record, I'm not going to make money for records and records down the road. Right now that you're guinea pigs, you're going first, you keep all the money. So now I write a letter by hand, the 50 of these people, I'm not trying to change your mind, I'm not trying to upside you, okay, you just tell me why you didn't subscribe, and I gave them some choices. And almost all of them wrote back. And some said too many covers, not enough covers, too raucous, not raucous enough, too much, right? They all disagreed with you. So clearly they didn't know how to give me criticism, because they didn't know what they were. So now back to systems thinking. They responded to the end in the first place, because I created tension of I have something and you don't know what it is, but you can find out for $5. And if you own a $30,000 stereo, why not, right? But subscribing would mean lowering their status by A, giving me the right to pick the music, and B, risking their status and affiliation, because if you have a high-end stereo, you're playing it for your friends. And if you play Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young, or one of the great Canadian artists, you're very confident that no one's going to say that's lousy music. But if you're playing this unknown music, you're taking a risk. And so I didn't understand strategy at the time. I was selling them what I wanted to buy instead of selling them what they needed, which is a new, new, new remastering of blonde on blonde that they could show off in front of their friends. Oh, wow. Wow. You know, some people just get more and more complexly interesting as you get to know them. That's fascinating. I had no idea. There's just a couple of lines in the book. And I'm like, I got to ask that's fascinating. Are you still like a stereo file? You have a listening room or anything? So if we could talk about stereo for just a minute. Yeah. Okay. So until 1950, the way you amplified music was with tubes. Tubes are sort of unreliable, they're sort of inefficient, but we got very good at making tubes. And the amount of power that comes out of a single ended amplifier using 2A3 or 300B tubes is about three watts per channel. So in order for that to work, you need a speaker that's really efficient, that can turn a few watts into good sound. Then they invented the transistor. The transistor is incredibly cheap and reliable that the stereo in your car, this transistor cost about a dollar and it's putting out 60, 80 watts, 20 times as much as a tube amp in your car for a dollar. Well, once transistors showed up, the speaker company said, we don't have to make efficient speakers anymore. So they started making and almost every speaker you can buy now is very inefficient. It needs a lot of power to work. So I have over there three different hand made not by me speakers, some 2A3, some 300B's that only put out three watts per channel. And they're hooked up to speakers I made that are incredibly efficient. And I will tell you that when you come over for dinner, Carrie, I'm going to play it for you. It will make your eyes fall out of your head. It's unbelievable. I'm not expensive like the stuff in stereo file anymore, but it's just like, I'm going to go listen, because I can't wait to go listen again. That's fascinating. I was saying with a good friend of mine, we were out with good friends last night and I'm like, you know, I don't have a lot of hobbies left on the list. I'm doing a lot of things I really enjoy, but maybe one day a listening room, like maybe one day, was there a peak era for audio in your mind? I was arguing it was the 70s, that was probably, you know, you look at Marantz or Harman Karman. You mean for produced for the system itself, the system itself? The worst there has been in the history since Edison was the 70s. The 70s was the worst. The 70s was the worst. Like I have a fairly encyclopedic understanding of this because I've been reading stereo file now for 40 years. Okay. That was the worst because it was the peak of the transistor and when they were stereo stores everywhere, so they were all racing to make the cheapest junkiest stereos they could. That there are two peaks. There is the peak of the 1950s, which was the end of the two bara and the high efficiency speakers. There are stuff from that era that's still magic. There's a company in Japan called Shindo, Ken Shindo, still makes brand new at reasonable scale that kind of amplification equipment. And then the second golden era is right now and that's because rich people have made it so you can actually sell a $100,000 pair of speakers and a $75,000 amplifier. I've heard these items. I've sat with the reviewers from stereo file and they're stunning. They're almost as good as my stereo, but they're stunning because they are crisp and perfect and precise. If you go to my friend Paul's company, PS Audio, he has an entire line of modern stereo equipment that's not stupidly overpriced. That is peak value for your money magic in the current era, but it took us a long time to get through the '70s and the '80s because that's tough. It's probably because it's my childhood and so it's very nostalgic for me. Well, I know who I'm going to talk to if I pursue that hobby for sure. I do want to talk about strategy. The book is fantastic. How would you define strategy just so we know exactly what we're talking about? So let me say it in the words that I hope your listeners will resonate the most with. When the person you're hoping to be meets the person you are becoming, how's that meeting going to go? Because we have choices to make and we could just do what we're told and be a cog in the system. We could indulge our short-term emergencies or we could invest in a future seeing the systems around us, doing it with empathy that produces something we're proud we built. We have to choose and I think strategy is the philosophy of becoming and I don't think it pays for it to be intuitive and unspoken. I think there's no way you would get in a car and say, "I'm driving up to Algonquin Park but have no map and no idea how to get there." You would ask, you would follow a map and you would go and yet we're going to show up at work tomorrow with no strategy and that's because we're afraid to talk about it. But that's my mission. What are some common pitfalls you saw leaders fall into when maybe they thought they had a strategy but not really, what do you see there? Well, most of the time it's when they act like managers instead of leaders. Roger Martin has said, companies love to have a strategic plan. I'm guessing churches do too. A strategic plan is not strategy, it's a checklist that a manager can enforce with the understanding that if they do all the things on the list, they will succeed. So it's about control and being certain and being in charge. That's management. Strategy says the future is an unknown city but we can see it from a distance and we can make some assertions about what might happen and they're not guarantees that we don't make good decisions because we are promised that a good decision leads to the perfect outcome. We make good decisions because based on the information right here in front of us, our assertions lead us in this direction. So we have to be willing to say, this might not work. So when Howard Schultz built Starbucks, he regularly had to say, this might not work. He had a strategy that John Scully, when he ran Apple, had tactics but he didn't have a strategy and you didn't have to like Steve Jobs but you had to admire the fact that he very clearly had a strategy. If you had to describe your take on Steve Jobs because it's a very commonly known example, what would you say his strategy was and to the extent that it was successful? Their unstated strategy is make well designed digital luxury goods that give people better taste about how they interact with technology. So they're the most successful luxury goods company in history. They have no good social network, no good internet tools. They didn't try to build any of those things. When the Apple is at its best, what they're doing is making something so that when people see it, they say, this makes me look good in front of my friends, raises my status. It affiliates me with people I want to be like and it ruins me for user experiences that aren't as beautifully crafted. Once you know that, running any division of Apple is pretty easy. It's very true, very true. One of the things I think people in the non-profit sector might struggle with is the idea of status and we might say, well, everybody's equal, but I mean, you come back to it again and again. Can you unpack? We're all suckers for status, right? Also, come on, even if I go to a Buddhist Sangha, there's some people in a special uniform. There's some people in the front of the room. There's some people who are on the drinks committee. Every institution of spiritual whatever that has lasted more than a week built a hierarchy, right? And the biggest, most successful one in history, the pope gets to talk to God. I mean, there's a real hierarchy here. You can take a vow of poverty if it will give you more status, because it does, right? The monks who are in silent meditation have more status than the villagers. The people in Cambodia who walk around with their begging bowls, why are people giving them money? Because the monks have more status than they do. Status isn't an Hermes bag, status is simply who gets to eat lunch first. This is who has a thing that I don't have that I might aspire to. And you do that every single time, you know, you put someone in charge of the sisterhood or the who gets to walk around with the plate or whatever it is, these are all status things you're offering people. How do you, how does someone who interacts with you find status in your work, in your work? You know, somebody read your book. Somebody somebody read your blog, somebody, when you had a Kimbo, listens to the podcast. Okay. So how do I offer people scaffolding to help them achieve status? Yes. Okay. So when I published Purple Cow in a milk carton, there were only 5,000 of them. The people who bought it and put it on their desk didn't do it because they were trying to support me. They did it because having it gave them a platform to tell the uninformed something that would make their organization work the way they wanted to, it gave them status that if I invent a term like idea virus or Purple Cow and you use it, I'm not doing it so you'll buy the book. I just did you a service, which is I gave you insider lingo because you wanted to be an insider that some people subscribe to my blog, some people get it when someone else forwards it to them, which person is more of an insider, right? So I'm constantly adjudicating status roles because that's what people want. And then I offer people affiliation, right? People like us do things like this. So when I started talking about email marketing, the direct marketing association kicked me out of the association because I was anti spam, anti spam, anti spam. I said, you guys are making a mistake. They said, we hear you go away. And so I could coalesce a group of anti spam people and that affiliation among people who wanted respect from that was worth it because they could talk to each other. That led to Mailchimp and that led to all these other things that I didn't touch, but I built the kernel of that because people wanted to be in the room with each other. And even little things like this, like on your launch for your last book, I ordered some copies and I got this beautiful mug for song of significance. Is that like a status thing that says culture insider? I just love the mug. I'm glad you love the mug. I am now significantly less disciplined and having more fun. So the ask a nosy chocolate bar that I spent an enormous amount of time on has no strategy to it. I just always wanted to make a chocolate bar. When we get together, I'll have some of that delicious chocolate, the border stands in the way. Yeah. Oh, that's fun. So if you think about status in the context of a nonprofit, what might be some strategies around status that would be helpful to a nonprofit that wants to have an impact, make a difference? Well, I need to ask, what would success look like? Are you trying to raise more money? Are you trying to change more minds? What are you trying to do? I think we're trying to impact lives. We're trying to change lives. So in a spiritual context at a church, we want to see people, you know, have a realization that they are loved, come to a saving faith. We want to see their lives transformed to go from despair to hope. That's sort of the overarching mission of a church. And then ultimately, we want to see them engage in the mission that this new life that came to you also goes to others in that can be through serving, that can be through giving, that can be through serving on the board. It can be in a variety of different ways, but that's, that's where I would. Okay. So I read two days ago, there are only two shakers left on the planet. Really? Did not not quakers, but shakers. Yeah. Well, that's because they relentlessly took away every single tool of status that was available, no evangelizing, no children, no buildings. I mean, other than the furniture, there's just not a lot that they could use, right? And if I want, if I'm a Buddhist teacher and I want people to get really in touch with their mindfulness, perhaps I believe that a 10 day silent retreat is a good way to leap forward compared to showing up for an hour. Right? How can I help you develop a better practice? Well, so what I do is for the larger group, I talk about the 10 day retreat and I talk about how the people who've been through it have more status, they have more status because I look at them differently, they have more status because they're more comfortable in the building, they have more status in lots of ways. So now other people who are looking for affiliation are more inclined to go on the 10 day retreat because it's scaffolding the path to help to get to where they want to go that if built into the word evangelical is the idea that you're going to tell somebody else, okay? What are you going to tell somebody else? Why are you going to tell somebody else, right? So there's some very complicated stuff that goes on with Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses about why you need to tell somebody else we're going to leave that aside for a minute and instead say in the community where we live when we're not in the spiritual institution, my status goes up when I talk about quote my faith. I am partly talking about quote my faith because deep down I believe it's generous that I'm going to offer you whatever I think of as salvation. But another part of it is it makes it easier for me to fit in in this town if other people see me as somebody who has that going on, right? And so if you show up in another country in another culture, it's much harder for you to be evangelical in your faith because for you to start speaking up about being a Zoroastrian, your status didn't go up at the dinner party when you did that, right? So again, it's all about people like us do things like this, the creation of culture, the adjudication. And so I got the thing about status from Keith John Stone. He died last year, 1963, the book is called Impro, I never met Keith. And Impro is about theater. And what he says is any good movie or play, any movie or play. And I would argue even books that you can find in a hotel room are about the exchange of status roles. That's it. Every scene, who's moving up and who's moving down. That when the undertaker goes to see the godfather in the first scene, the undertaker is low status, godfather is high status, he's offering an exchange, right? That when Princess Leia is trying to adjudicate something with Han Solo, it's status roles, right, there's sexual tension, but there's also status roles. So we need to realize that we can walk away from that and have no impact, or we can embrace that and use it as a force for good. Yeah. And I like that redemption of status roles. Youth pastor, I hired once, now our lead pastor said high school is all about status. That's all it is, right? And life is to a certain extent, the way we dress, the way we do this podcast, it's all it is. Let's really look at it. Now you do mention people like us do things like this, which is your definition. I think of culture comes up a lot in your work on strategy. How do culture and strategy interrelate? Systems invented culture to maintain the status quo. So the wedding industrial complex invented the idea that you should spend enough for your wedding to cost as much as your best friend, but a little more. That is the culture of weddings, right? It was invented by the wedding industrial complex so that no one would show up and just have six flowers and a crackerjack ring and be done with it. And strategy is how do I change the culture? Strategy is how do I use the dominant currents in the culture to make things better by causing a change to happen? So I find people who want a thing, and I help them get that thing by doing something else. So for example, most of the companies in Ontario do not actually want the world to end in a giant melting cloud of gray dust. They just want to buy cheap electricity so that they can make a profit. That's what they're actually paying attention to. So if I go to them and say here's solar electricity and it's a penny less, don't buy it. Because they haven't had to change what they want, I've just given them a way to change what they get. And so strategy is built into that, that I will begin by talking to people who can't sleep at night because they feel culpable on all the damage we're doing. So those people will buy solar when it costs more. But I better drive down the cost of solar or create the conditions for cold to cost more so that people who don't care but who care about something else will switch that strategy. And that's how that impacts culture. You talk a lot about systems. One of my mentors has said if it's a recurrent thing, it's a systems thing. And your current system is perfectly calculated to produce the results you're getting now. Can you talk a little bit about, because it comes up a lot in the book, a little bit about systems and maybe even the unseen systems that we're in. I think we've done a good job of servicing one or two things like status. It's like when you look, when you know what it is, it's like, oh my gosh, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. I ordered organic, not regular. I'm not doing this, I'm doing this instead, right? So tell me a little bit about systems and how that works. They're almost all invisible and they're incredibly resilient. Any system that's sticking around is sticking around because it's good at sticking around. So the wedding industrial complex is a system. The idea that we measure this false proxy is part of a system of status, that the phone system is a system and if you came up with a better way to connect people via audio, you would have a very hard time making it succeed that you and I are talking on a video call. It took years and years and years and years for people to stop doing one thing to do another because so many things built into our culture supported a certain kind of interaction. Walking hands is part of a social system and even when it was literally actually killing people, we couldn't stop doing it because it was just too awkward to say, I'm not going to shake your hand because I don't trust you because I think you might kill me. We just said, I'll take the risk and shake someone's hand. So what we're looking for in a big, a huge one is how we've indoctrinated people about their work. So bosses have the mindset of how much can I get for how little can I pay? And so employees have responded by saying how little can I do and how much can I get paid because if they don't, they're going to get completely ripped off. So when you show up with a new way of running something like our friend Ari Wineswag does at Zingerman, people don't trust you because you're doing something that doesn't match the system that they expect, they think there's some sort of catch. And you know, the funeral industrial complex is the system. Try to change that in a hurry. You will not succeed. We need to see these things and not give up, but try to understand why are they the way they are and how do we use what they've got going for them to alter how they do things. Hmm. I want to read a couple of quotes to you that I just really leapt off the page for me. Home Improvement TV shows led to the popularity of the McMansion. Birth Control transformed the workforce and led to the rise of convenience foods. Never made that connection. Birth Control pill, women at work, convenience foods. Yeah. I mean, that's a single sentence, but it's like, of course, the smartphone, continuing with the quote, "Surfaced information about travelers and drivers enabling Uber to transform the taxi industry." Just really, really good connections there. For those who change agents, change agents are unseen until they're seen and then we're like, well, of course, right? And so the opportunity is to say, so for example, AI is going to make it so that the cost of having a receptionist answer the phone will be zero because it's not a real person. Okay. We get that. But what will that lead to, which will lead to, which will lead to, which will lead to? The change agent ripples and we have to be alert to that because when it starts to happen, we don't realize it. Hmm. I was going to say, what other than we can talk about AI, if you want, what other technology or change agents are going to upend things that most of us aren't even paying attention to or aware of? Yeah. I think the two biggest ones are the climate and AI. There's probably going to be a significant generational upheaval that I don't know how to predict. That's going to be the third one when people like me die off and people who are 20 take over because we skipped the last two, that there's been sort of a Gemini of what is it to be in power from 1972 till now, same music, same goals, same cultural approach. That's a really long time for it to have stuck around and it's going to be replaced. Yeah. That's really interesting, you know, because it is the songs in my childhood that are still playing in grocery stores, et cetera, et cetera. You listen to radio, it's sort of my era from when I was a teenager to when I was in my mid 30s, early 40s that dominates the culture. I mean, you look at the Billboard Hot 100 and don't recognize most of the top 10 these days unless Taylor Swift's on or something like that. But yeah, you're right. We have kind of skipped a generation. The boomers have held court for their entire lives and you think as boomers start to pass on, it's going to all flip to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Yeah. And they have something else in mind. They're not sure what it is yet. Yeah. Yeah. It's fundamentally different. Like Gen X is a take off on boomers, you know, boomers but different, millennials take off on Gen X but different Gen Z seems different. Yeah. And again, I don't want to be a broken record, but I need to say these things out loud because I can't. Ten years from now, there's going to be a hundred million climate refugees. Yeah. They're going to be in the newspaper every single day. They're going to be showing up on boats. They're going to be the only thing people talk about. Yeah. How can that not change so many things in our world? Yeah. Yeah. Right now we're hearing about really hot summers in Europe and Africa and, you know, read a piece on the island of Sicily and just, I was there and it was hot five years ago but now they can't even grow anything anymore and, and a decade from now, like literally in the 2030s, we're going to have a hundred million people looking to relocate. Well, they'll have no trust there. Their land will be gone. Yeah. Yeah. Bangladesh, Bangladesh alone has 10 million people who live within 10 feet of sea level. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. What about AI? You actually wrote the book, this is your book, but you did it in dialogue with Clod, which is interesting. Clod. Okay. We pronounce it. Yeah. I say Clod. It's very important that I, for my ego to say, I wrote every word in this book. Yes, you did. Yeah. What I use Clod to do is I will give it, the thing it's best at in my experience is give it a list of six things and ask for six more. And in terms of writing sermons, what a gift, right? So it's, it's, of this six, it will give you at least three or home runs. And then I will say, Oh, thanks for reminding me. And then I'll write something about that. Mm hmm. The other thing I use it for is when someone else sends me writing, that's dense or too long or whatever, I'll just give the document to Clod and say, please summarize this for me. And then sometimes I'll say, please summarize this for me in the style of Seth Godin. And it does, which is really cool. But I don't think that's the big shift that AI leads to. That's just for people who do what I do for a living. I think the big shift is when you have something that is always on persistent with a perfect memory that knows everyone and everything, it opens these frontiers that we're not even imagining. And you know, just to pick a tiny trivial example, you're about to throw out that canoe in your backyard and get a cedar strip chestnut instead, which you should do anyway. And as you go to throw it out, it says, wait a minute, Carrie, there's a guy seven blocks from here who wants that. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You're right, all knowing, all seeing, kind of big brother. It's interesting, you know, do you think, because there's a certain level of technology, like, you know, you're tech forward, I'm tech forward relatively for my age and stage, but like we got a new washer and dryer a couple of years ago, and you know, it's got a QR code and it has an app setting and the same with my fridge, Seth, and I'm like, you know, I just want my fridge to plug in. I don't need to know when I need to reorder sparkling water, like I just don't need to know that. Yeah. I'm not. I don't think that's the case. I think you are the victim of lazy, bad user experience design and if they did it right, you wouldn't feel that way that every time I walk into a real life bookstore, I get impatient because I can understand why they don't reorganize the store in the order I like it and only show me books I don't already own because that's what the bookstore I use does, right? So the refrigerator, I've written a bunch and I actually wrote three pages in the book about refrigerators and took it out and your refrigerator also should know what everyone in your neighborhood has in their refrigerator and I should know what the farmers in a real yeah have extra of and it should connect you and it's not, oh, please go back and order more self sir, it's, hey, Carrie, I found 62 people who really love organic strawberries. I hooked you up with the local organic strawberry guy, so you don't have to buy California strawberries anymore, I have solved your supply problem, his demand problem and your life just got way better. Okay, now that would be interesting. That would be interesting and the laundry machine, you can do a custom downloadable cycle. If you want has this little like app cycle thing, I'm like, you've got 17 cycles. I don't need an 18th. I can't figure that out. Some people, I'm not going to mention any names who are obsessed with dishwashers and washing machines. Okay. And this is their hobby. So let them have it. Okay. Let them, let them go for it. We're just trying to figure that out. Any other advice you would have to, because we have a lot of writers, creative speakers listening about really helpful uses of AI, I find it amazing at titling, amazing at finishing lists. It is good at critique sometimes to the point where it hurts. I'm like, I thought I did a good job. What else would you recommend using AI as it sits right now for this is, you can do a transition for the next year where AI ghost rights and helps you a bit. But after that, it's a trap. If you can't begin writing in a way that you and only you could write that an AI couldn't do, then we don't need you anymore. Yeah. So if you don't love it, stop writing and just let Claude write all your sermons for you. Fine. It's going to be mediocre. All mixed together. Gray goo. Fine. There's already a lot of gray goo in the world. But the opportunity is to say, I refuse to write 1% different than an AI. I'm going to write stuff that's stunning or scary or too long or too brief or something that doesn't get through its filters and people will know it came from me. And I'll give you the simple examples of this. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of stand up comics in North America. And you've only heard of 20 of them. And the 20 you've heard of are the ones who do things that other stand up comics don't have the guts to do. The other thing I think with AI, I agree with you wholeheartedly as a writer myself, is I find that you can get lazy if you don't write on a regular basis. Like you don't use that muscle. So in 2023, I realized my phone has reshaped my brain to the point where I was losing attention span. So I taught myself to read again, not the alphabet, but just to sit there for long periods of time and read and I started with three or four pages without a break and got up to the point by the end of the year where I was reading 600 page tomes of really historical stuff. I can't do that. Good for you. Oh, I'll tell you. It was hard work, but I'm like, I used to be able to do this. I'm going to refocus my brain. I'm going to re-engage it. And I agree, starting from scratch, getting your point of view, using it as a supplement or a checker or a, you know, whatever, but if you lose that muscle, and I get, you know, we've done a whole series on AI and I don't want to belabor it, but there's like, I can get, I can do the, in the style of Seth Godin prompts and sound like Seth, but you would say, yeah, that's not me, right? Like there is, there is a certain point at which I think the artist has to paint. The artist has to play. The artist has to write. Do you think that agency will ever get lost or AI will be able to replicate that? I know that's kind of a hard to say question, but like, what is it about humanness? It definitely will be able to, it will be able to replicate faster and faster and faster until it looks like it's originating. I think what makes something human is we took a risk that we would fail and an AI doesn't understand them. But you know, what Andy Warhol did was brave, but not difficult. And once you knew what he did, copying Andy Warhol's method, any art student could do it, right? So that's going to happen over and over and over again, whatever that is. Any artist that could have a team, the way Rembrandt did, an AI is going to do that. The hard part is still going to be risking our status to do an innovation. And I think when we think about productivity and breakthroughs just a few years from now, we're going to think about now is this weird time. Because the breakthroughs that people are going to have are just going to be totally different because there's so many other things that the AI can just do. Bring our status to bring an innovation. Yeah. I'm going to put that in my pipe and smoke that one for a little while. That's a really, that is what leadership is. That is what creatives do is we risk our status. If you're actually doing meaningful work, it might fail. Yeah. Okay. So one more question. Just a quote from the book, "Every successful organization will fail unless it becomes something different before it does." Are there any opportunities or warnings you see for churches? Well, I think it speaks for itself, right? And it would be naive and arrogant to think that every other institution is covered by this rule, but yours isn't, right? And the function of a church has changed dramatically in the last 200 years, 100 years, 50 years. And yet the buildings haven't changed that much and its place in our culture hasn't changed that much, but it clearly has a different function. There are very few people walking around who think that lightning bolts mean that someone is angry, whereas that was really common not too long ago. So your function keeps changing, your infrastructure, maybe not so much. All of that's going to be accelerated by the generational shift. So what do we know? We know that humans still want solace and reassurance. They want connection. They want status. They want those things from other people. That is the opportunity. That is how to be of service. Walk away from the sunk costs of, yeah, but we have a 300 year old building here. Fine, but that's not the point. Don't defend the building. Defend the mission and the mission is to offer connection in the service of humanity. Well, the book is called This Is Strategy. Loved it. It's going to sit on my shelf, but multiple copies, highly recommend it. Seth, are there any special offers for listeners? We're going to put this out, I think, around launch day, but anything in particular you want to draw people's attention to? So at Seth.blog/tis, I will list the chocolate bar, the strategy deck, there's excerpts, there's videos, I've had so much fun building all this stuff. It's fantastic. Well, Seth, I want to thank you so much for everything you do, and until next time, thank you. Thank you, sir. What a treat. Man, Seth is such a delight. If you want show notes, we've got them for you. Just head on over to karaenohoff.com/episodes68, for you'll find everything there, including, well, transcript, show notes, links to everything Seth and I talked about. And I can't wait for the next conversation with Seth. He's just one of the most fascinating people I have ever run into and love bringing you my chats with Seth. So if you haven't yet done it for just a few more days, you can get in on a 90-day trial membership in my Art of Leadership Academy for $97. This gives you, this is not a partial thing. It gives you unlimited access to all my courses, a private online community of church leaders, no trolls, no, you know, people who make things difficult, just great, awesome leaders you want to connect with, live coaching calls with me and more, check it out at theartofleadershipacademy.com. Be sure to join ASAP because a 90-day trial will not last for long. And regardless of the size of a disaster, Convoy is there and they want to make your church the hero in helping people meet their needs when they're in difficult circumstances. So if you want to partner with Convoy, check out my page at convoy.org/carry, that's convoy.org/c-a-r-e-y. Next episode, I'm going to talk about five ways to scale your personal leadership capacity. Do you know, 85 percent of churches never grow beyond a particular size and only 9 percent of businesses scale beyond a million dollars in revenue? Why is that? I show you why in the next episode. So you can learn that. It's going to be a lot of fun. I am so excited for that thing to drop. We also have coming up, Chuck Gugrott, Henry Cloud, Pete Scazero, Al Gordon, Tim Ross upset the gram and a whole lot more. Don't forget, for a few days this week, last chance, 90-day trial membership to the Art of Leadership Academy for just $97, go to theartofleadershipacademy.com and get started today. Thank you so much for listening, everyone, and I hope our time together has helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing. [MUSIC]
