Seth Godin on building a culture of impact

Damon Klotz: What is your definition of company culture?

Seth Godin: The first sentence is, People like us do things like this. And the second sentence is, this is the way things are around here. And the way it gets defined is what do you let people get away with when something else feels more important? If you look at any activity that captures the attention of people, Because of its excellence, That's because of enrollment. Enrollment says, I'm here on purpose. I'm here because I want to be here. We don't get tomorrow over again. So, given that you could work in a lot of different places, and you have chosen to work here, why not use that as your platform to do work you are truly proud of?

Damon Klotz: On this episode of the Culture First Podcast, I'm excited to be speaking with Seth Godin. Seth is one of the most influential voices in modern business and marketing. He's the author of over 20 international bestsellers, including his latest, This Is Strategy. He was named by Businessweek as the ultimate entrepreneur for the information age, and Seth has been inducted into both the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame and the Marketing Hall of Fame. His work continues to challenge the status quo and inspire individuals and organizations to do work that matters. And because today, how we work matters more than ever, we're going to be talking about the role of systems, culture, and story in doing significant work. Seth's work has had a tremendous impact on the way that I think about marketing, strategy, and storytelling. He's someone I've admired and looked up to for a long time, so I cannot wait to share this conversation with you. Seth, thank you for joining me.

Seth Godin: It's a pleasure. This work you're doing is really important, and I'm glad to be here.

Damon Klotz: Last time we were in conversation, I shared a bit of a long story about how your work has influenced me. you know, the way I've practically applied it in my career and the way that has sort of really resonated with me as both a person and professionally. So I won't make you listen to all that again, nor will I put our listeners through that. But I do know that this podcast lives on the internet in its own way, is its own story, with its own audience. So I did want to set the stage a little bit here. So. Your work and the internet does go hand in hand, and on the internet people will see that you're a writer, you're an author, you're a blogger, you're a podcaster, you're a community builder, just to name a few, but I want to go into my opening questions to make sure that everyone, I guess, maybe appreciates the way that you see the world. So if a really good friend of yours was at a dinner party and they were to introduce you to a stranger, how do you think they would introduce you?

Seth Godin: Well, if I had anything to say about it, they would introduce me as a teacher.every once in a while, I invent something brand new, but most of the time, I teach people ways to see things they don't see, and I do projects. And the internet has arrived just in time for project people, because you can do a project now using a trillion dollars worth of machinery that other people paid for. And if it's good, you can reach an unlimited number of people. And so, my pioneering work in marketing, in online education, in the internet, in non profit work, I think it all revolves around those two things. Do projects and teach people.

Damon Klotz: Well, your work certainly taught me a lot when I've started my HR career. And, when we spoke on the culture first stage at our conference last year, I sort of spoke about. Your work was really my entry point into thinking more around story marketing and branding. But like I said, we wax lyrical about that. So I want to make this podcast be a podcast and not be a repeat of that. We have two traditional sort of opening questions. The first one is very familiar with guests, the next question I've started to introduce this year, but the opening question that I'd like to ask guests is how do you describe what you do for work to a curious 10 year old? So. Does that answer change from that dinner party answer?

Seth Godin: When my kids were growing up, they had a ten year old friend, and if you asked him what his dad did for a living, he would say, He works with numbers. And this dad had never taken the time to explain what a statistician did, which I found stunning because 10 year olds can understand statistics, and 10 year olds can also understand numbers. What it is to make something better. That some people do their job because it's their job to do their job. Some people do their job to follow instructions. I help people make things better. And what I would say to this 10 year old is, do you see anything around you that could be better?how would we make it better? Let's figure that out.

Damon Klotz: I love that. I feel like that 10 year old has a unique perspective on how many things can get better that sometimes us as adults can miss. The other little checking question that I've got, are you very familiar with Esther Perel, the relationship therapist?

Seth Godin: I've known her for years. She's a friend. Yeah.

Damon Klotz: Lovely. So, I've been working with her the last four or five years, and she's actually now an advisor to CultureAmp. We're trying to make relationships better in the workplace. I've got some of her cards here. Do you want left, middle, right? One, two, three. How do you want to play this game?

Seth Godin: So I've been a game designer for a very long time and I saw that deck before anybody. And I have to tell you, I said, Esther, this is fantastic, but this is not a good game. So you pick whatever card you want. Because if I start getting into the game design of it, it's not going to be pretty.

Damon Klotz: Okay. So if I could whisper something in the ear of my younger self, I would say,

Okay. So this one is, A trap. And the reason it's a trap is because all of my failures are what made me, me. I failed more than most people. And if I whispered something into that person's ear and told him how to avoid those, the worst of the failures, I wouldn't be me. And I'm pretty happy being me. So the only thing I would say is everything's going to be okay. Carry on.I like that. Yeah. You will experience failure, but that will not define you. If anything, it might make you, which I feel like is similar for me as well. So.Thanks for playing along. we will not dive into the mechanics of this. And I've certainly played this game with Esther and some friends over dinner before. And, and I was like, Oh, you know, it's just about vulnerability. She's like, no, Damon, remember it's about story. It's about story. It's not about being

totally about story. It's fantastic. Everyone should have a deck. It's just not a game. It's just fantastic.So I did mention the event that we spoke at last year, which was our culture first virtual conference, which is sort of the live version of this sort of podcast in many ways. And I wanted to touch on some of the subjects that we last spoke on, which was the importance of doing significant work, sort of chief human resource officers versus chief people officers.

Seth Godin: Mm hmm.

Damon Klotz: And managers and what HR can learn from marketers. And when I was reflecting back on that conversation, there was a moment which really struck a chord of our live audience that did spark quite a few conversations after that event. And we were talking about all of the different ways that the modern world of work has changed. And you spoke about a bus and your analogy was that if the bus is going to Melbourne, but you have people on it who want to go to Sydney or maybe even Paris, Or maybe they think that the strategy should actually be that it should go to Paris, then it leads to tension and this tension needs to be addressed. And that you said that turnover is not actually a bad thing. So I wanted to frame that up because I think it was something that struck a chord and I want to see about your current observations about what's going on in the world of work. Do we still have this bus problem?

Seth Godin: Oh, we have the bus problem more than ever. I mean, I use the word tension very intentionally and I don't use it in this case. I think that in this case, You either have the confidence to say to people, it's not for you, or you sign up to be mediocre. Those are the only two options. And if you look at any activity that captures the attention of people, Because of its excellence, whether it's a chef, or the Olympics, or a writer, or a software company that is running rings around everything.That's because of enrollment. Enrollment says, I'm here on purpose. I'm not here because I need a job. I'm not here because this was the best option. I'm here because I want to be here. I want to go where this bus is going. Well, what comes with that is the confidence to say, with grace, and humility, and generosity, You should get off this bus right now, because this bus is going over there, not over there. But I know someone who can help you get on the bus you want to get on. Instead, what we do, and I've been inside of lots of organizations, we spend most of our time trying to mollify and appease people who are on the wrong bus. And the thing is, people can change. And often, in my experience of managing thousands of people, when we say to somebody, I'm not sure this is the best for you, they often choose to change their behavior. They often choose to say, Oh, no one's ever asked me to enroll before. Thanks, sign me up.

Damon Klotz: Yeah, it's a, I think it's a real human approach to having adult conversations about our experience at work and life. And, I think one of the ways that you certainly, your writing has inspired me and others is this whole idea of seeing yourself as part of this story, as part of someone who has the ability to say, is this what I want to do, or did I just sign up for something? And I'm not sure if I'm still the same person or how do I do critical work and having that more important conversation.we won't spend the entire time just doing analogies about buses. I wanted to maybe As a foundational element, which this might sound like a basic question, but actually feel like it might be important for the audience to hear. We talk a lot about company culture here. I think you even joked last time I said culture about 19 times in the first 10 sentences. So what is your definition of company culture right now?

Seth Godin: It's super easy. it's two sentences that combine. The first sentence is, People like us do things like this. And the second sentence is, this is the way things are around here.if I go to a rental car agency in Topeka, Kansas, and I talk to eight different people who work there, they're all going to talk to me about what things are like around here. And it's not going to feel the same as if I talk to people at the same pay grade at the Ritz Carlton, or people at the same pay grade at a fast growing, important non profit. What are things like around here? And people like us do things like this. And the way it gets defined. is what do you let people get away with when something else feels more important? So, the story I'll give, when I was building one of the first internet companies,second or most valuable employee, turns out, was a yeller. And if something wasn't going the way he wanted, he would yell about it. And the second time it happened, there were only five people in the company at the time,took him aside privately and I said, here's the deal, this is a small company, but it's not going to be small forever, and if I tolerate this because you are such an extraordinary contributor, I've defined what things are like around here. So I said, the deal is simple, the next time you yell, it doesn't matter why, you're fired.And you can stay or not stay, but this is where we're going and this is the kind of place this is going to be.And he sent me a note thanking me about five years later. And he. Even after we sold the company and he joined another, he never yelled again at work because no one had ever called him out about it. He just defined a culture instead of being part of a culture.

Damon Klotz: It's so critical early on, like, you know, I've seen so many startups at that early stage and, you know, the behavior you tolerate early can, you know, subconsciously or consciously become an expected behavior that others think that they can sort of be part of as well. So, Exactly. I wanted to, as part of this sort of opening, when I was framing around, what is Seth Godin uniquely, able to kind of maybe give an interesting opinion on? There was one thing that I wanted to touch on, which was basically your role as a storyteller and a marketer and someone who looks at the way sort of brands are formed and communities sort of move. There has been a lot of branding terms that have resonated. In the workplace culture space over the last couple of years, things like quiet quitting, the great resignation, quit talk, proximity bias. So I wanted to maybe just get your sort of quick take on why do you think these trends are really cut through in mainstream media?

Seth Godin: Not most or all, but many people in HRdoing what they signed up to do and instead did their job. And over the last 20, 30 years, that has become the job of ensuring compliance of racing to the bottom and failing to develop a strategy of significance.so, the first chance people had, who had options, right? Not who live in the company town and who dig coal out of the mine, but people who had options.First chance they had, they left, because you were selling them a bill of goods. You may talk about the free snacks, you may talk about the fact that you want people who are going to challenge the status quo, but what you're really doing is sitting there with a stopwatch and keeping track of who's fitting in enough and who's following policy, and that is not surprising to me. So, the reason it caught on is because when people heard that it was possible,were like, finally, I'm out of here. And I'll give you the trivialest little example, the one that shows just how much privilege we all have.The vast majority of people who work in desk jobs say that meetings are the worst part of their day. And that when we went remote, the number of meetings went up. And these meetings are soul deadening. They're enervating, they're time wasting, and what they are, are demonstrations of power and compliance that rob people of significance. And if you are tolerating them because you've always had them, if you are tolerating them because the boss gets something out of it, then it's on you. Because it's your job to develop a strategy of significance, and it begins with, Am I really going to waste five hours of my key people's time tomorrow so that someone can read a memo out loud? Because if that's what you're using these tools to do, you're showing disrespect and that doesn't feel like a useful strategy to me.

Damon Klotz: One of the, uh, earliest CultureAmp employees who was our sort of, sales slash finance person when everyone wore multiple hats he was very adamant about if eight people are getting in a room for an hour, that's eight, you know, that's eight hours, that's one day's worth of work. Is this meeting important enough to do one day's worth of work on? And so, and again, you're talking about the cultural moments that define how a company's like, how does work get done here? And I think that's one of the things I've also learned so much from you on, which is, it's not necessarily what you do. The craft of what you do is one part, how you approach that craft and how you work is what separates people and companies. So

Seth Godin: Right. And if the people who are listening to this are saying to themselves, that's not my job, that's out of my control, then I would say, so you've just announced you're not actually responsible for the people or the culture of your organization. And in fact, if you're not responsible, no one is. And so you've decided to just float around aimlessly. And that's allowed if you're getting paid well and you feel okay about it. But if you're a professional, then you should do something about it.

Damon Klotz: I think this sort of connects to some of the sort of larger conversations we're having around. how we work, but also the value of work. And I wanted to touch on one of the big trends that I've sort of seen over the last 12 months, which is this whole idea of performance and productivity being two of the, you know, buzziest words in the world of work, the whole idea of how do we get You know, more done with less. And I remember, when I, I lived in Silicon Valley for about, you know, seven to eight years. And one thing I certainly noticed a lot, especially at the sort of the fast growing companies, the ones that were moving fast, was this constant tension between people saying, I just want to be here to do great work, but I also feel like I have to do all of this sort of busy work around, you Documenting what I'm doing, telling people what I'm doing and like showing the work. And it's this sort of tension between surely if I just do great work, isn't that enough? But then it comes to like the performance conversation. You're having this check in and you're like, well, can you show me all these things? Can you tell me a story? So I would love to get your take right now on, I guess, the importance of when everyone's saying do more with less, you know, having a personal brand, not only doing great work, but like showing it, telling a story about it.

Seth Godin: Yes. Okay. So let's begin with this idea of a false proxy.How many words per minute can Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, type?I hope we can agree it doesn't matter. That's a false proxy. It's an easy measure of something that's not related.so the first question about productivity is, are you measuring something that is actually mattering, or are you measuring something that is easy? Because many of the false proxies in my country involve caste and race and social status, where we look at someone and decide before we actually see what they create whether they're good at their job or not. And then it goes on to, do you talk a lot in meetings, or do you write a lot of memos? These are false proxies. Okay, and the second thing is,what does it mean to do good work? What it means to do good work is to tell a story that gets other people to be persuaded to follow you. So, no, you can't say I'm doing a good job if everyone around you doesn't understand that getting people to understand. Is what makes it a good job. So back to Nadella, and I'm Nadella because he added more stock market value to his company in the last two years than I think any human on the planet.many, busy work,easily measured activities, did he have to do to decide to devote the whole company AI and to artificial intelligence? Not very many. He made a bold choice. But then the second thing he had to do was get the board on board, his key employees on board, push against the status quo, not because he was threatening people if they didn't do it, but because they were persuaded, because he could show the work. So one of the things that I write about in this is strategy. Is the idea that if you can't talk about it, if you can't show me the work, if you can't describe what might work and what might not work, if you can't tell a story, then you're not doing a good job. Andnow more than ever, the whole world is being reorganized. And the question I would ask is, are you leading the reorganization or are you a victim of it?

Damon Klotz: I think that's One of those thought provoking moments where people are going to be like, yeah, like, do I actually have control over this? And if the answer is yes, then, you know, not only, I guess, doing the work, but also, yeah. Like what story do you want? Like, one of the things that I love really doing is like journaling on my own process of work. Like what parts are easy for me? What parts are hard? What parts are I enjoying? What, especially, you know, being at a startup to scale up for nine years, Things that used to be easy then get hard, and things that used to be hard get easy. And I start to go, okay, that's interesting, that's changed. And not pretending that I'm the same person. So I think, like, journaling and being reflective on how we're working is a great way, like, even if you don't have a career coach, you can journal on that.

Seth Godin: But I want to clarify one thing here. I don't think anybody listening to this has control over anything of much. I certainly don't. I mean, maybe I have control over the first draft of something that I write. But after that, anytime there's more than one person in the room, you don't have control. You have influence. So don't wait for control, because it's not coming anytime soon.

Damon Klotz: I love that. You mentioned the race to the bottom before. I want to speak about the race to the top, and that, you know, a company can make decisions to stand for something bigger. You know, one of the things we sort of talk about as being a culture first company is this whole idea of, you know, you can actually put the Culture first in order for a business to succeed, you can create great containers where people do good work. I think one of the most famous examples of this is Patagonia. And I bring this up for a couple of reasons, but, can you just maybe sort of touch on this whole idea of the race to the top and why doing significant work and standing for something as a company is actually a great approach.

Seth Godin: So Rose is a friend and what she did was extraordinary. They were a rag company, taking fabric, sewing it into pieces, and selling it. And their target customer were dirt bag climbers. Who, you know, would go out into the woods for weeks at a time. How do you go from that into building a brand that's worth billions of dollars in an industry where just about anybody can hire an offshore fabric facility and make what you make? Well, the answer isthey said, we don't want to sell clothes to everyone. We want to sell clothes to someone and we will never apologize for how much they cost. Once you make those two decisions,Everything opens up for you, right? Okay. Well, given that we have to charge more, how are we going to justify that? What do you get for paying extra and then deciding that your primary customer is the planet. and deciding that the change you're going to make has nothing to do with getting more people to wear fleece and everything to do with saving a speckled trout and that the fleece is a tool to do that. All of it begins to work in the right direction. Now, this doesn't just work for people with a conscience. It also works for people who are making things worse on purpose because they want to make as much money as possible. It still works. You're just very clear. Who's it for? What's it for? What's the change we're here to make?

Damon Klotz: I've actually, I'm going to have the chance to interview, Vincent Stanley, the director of philosophy at Patagonia about their approach to building a company and company culture. Is there a question that you've ever had about how the work happens, how they build that culture.

Seth Godin: Well, I think the biggest challenge they have, I have no inside information at all, is what they say no to.Because if you think about what their charter is now, if you think about how trusted they are, how do they decide what to do and what not to do? And, you know, if you look at Tim Cook at Apple, he has spent the last 10 years saying no to almost everything.And as an Apple fan, I'm heartbroken, because there are all these things that I wish were better, that Apple could make better, but they don't want to do them. They just want to make more money. And so, how does Patagonia decide that in their stores they're selling cans of tin fish? Why do that and not have a book publishing division? I don't know.

Damon Klotz: All right, well, I will certainly, I think, learning how to say no to things is certainly one of the most important but hardest things that we sort of do in a professional context, especially when we overlay things like power and influence and things like that. So I will ask that question on your behalf and I will come back to you with his answer. I think that sort of ties into this next point, which is around this whole idea of balancing long term strategic thinking and you know, you've got a new book coming out. That's sort of really all focused on strategy. And then I think what we're also sort of really feeling the pinch of with the macro economic environments is a lot of this sort of push back to short term results. So how do you see this sort of playing out in business right now?

Seth Godin: It's always easy. To argue for short termresults. Lets you off the hook. You know, you get to say at the end of the day, well, you know, we saved 5 on the cost of cheese, so we'll make a profit on Friday at our pizza place. It's much harder to say, we're investing and paying a little bit extra for the cheese, because four months from now there's going to be a line out the door.And, so, it's lazy. And it's something that we do when we are facing, fear. Because If you are, you know, in the desert and you're hungry, you're going to eat whatever animal you catch without regard for whether there won't be any other animals tomorrow, because you're going to die if you don't eat it. most of the people that you and I are talking to are not in the desert, they are not hungry, and they're not going to die. And they keep, for years and years, whining, oh, we're having so much trouble in the long run, at the very same time using that to justify shortcuts in the short run. Well, they're related, and if you want to plant a forest, the best time to start was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today.You don't benefit by insisting you get an oak tree if you didn't plant it a generation ago.

Damon Klotz: Which I think sort of goes back to like the, the vision and the story that leaders are really telling, like when there is a really strong story at the top about what you stand for, the type of company you want to be, the culture you're creating, it's easier to have those signposts that people can look to, but you'll go, but hang on, We're going over here. And like, that's where we're trying to get to. And yes, there's short term fear associated with some of these things. But if that's going to take us off the path of doing the work that's significant, then that's where, you know, this sort of tension is there, if there's not a bigger story that people have bought in on.

Seth Godin: Right, and here's what I would say. We don't get tomorrow over again. So, given that you could work in a lot of different places, and you have chosen to work here, why not use that as your platform to do work you are truly proud of? Years ago, I used to say, I gave a marketing talk, there were like 2, 500 people there, and it's always challenging to ask for questions at the end of a talk for 2, 500 people. Any questions? And this guy in the 57th row raises his hand and he says, Hi, I work for Philip Morris. We make cigarettes. Do you have any marketing advice for us?And I said, Quit your job.You're talented enough to be here. You're talented enough to be literate and thoughtful and, Well spoken. Quit your job. Don't, there's no way you can justify being a marketing person for the cigarette division of William Morris. And, so that's an extreme example, but there are plenty of examples that are less extreme that we just don't want to consider. But we must, because we don't get tomorrow over again.

Damon Klotz: I'd love to maybe go a little bit deeper on strategy work and I guess the influence and impact that culture has. So, can you discuss through, like I mentioned, you've got a new book coming out, This is Strategy. what role Does company culture play in how strategy work happens in the first place and whether it's successful?

Seth Godin: So why do we need to know what things are like around here? Why can't we simply ask the boss about everything?Because that's what happened in the days of Henry Ford. The number of people who had to make a substantial decision was tiny. Because we would set it up once and run it, and run it, and run it, and run it, and run it. Well, Charles Krulak, who used to be the Commandant of the U. S. Marine Corps, coined Krulak's Law, in which he said, Wars used to be run by generals, and now wars are run by privates. That the lowest paid, least trained people who are going door to door in the village are determining your strategy. So, they don't have time to pick up the phone and call General Westmoreland and say, what should I do right now? They're in the moment. So, what it is to build a culture is to decide what your strategy is. What is it like around here? Not because there's a manual that will get you in trouble if you don't follow it. To be able to get people to think on their feet the way you would think on your feet when making a new decision, because the number of new decisions you make keeps going up.

Damon Klotz: For a chief people officer who's listening, for someone who's responsible for, and you know, last time we spoke, we did sort of mention if you're just doing human resources, then call it that. But if you're actually trying to people together and develop them and have more human conversations about our approach to work, if someone was like, you know, I would love to get together and think about a brand new approach to the strategy of how we grow people, how we develop people, what it means to work here so that there is that significant work that people do feel like, yes, I'm choosing to be here. and they want to roll out something significant they want to do this differently. And maybe strategy isn't something that they're, You know, as used to, as opposed to maybe like marketing, where like a marketing strategy and a marketing campaign is just every day. what advice do you have for them?

Seth Godin: Well,strategy is the philosophy of becoming. Why will tomorrow be different? What assets do I own that will go up in value?What are the games and systems and empathy and time dynamics that are at my disposal? Where am I planting the seeds? How am I fertilizing them? These are all things you should know, deep down.And, if you're a people officer, You need to be sitting next to the marketing officer and the financial officer to make sure that the three of you are in sync. So I first encountered this probably in 1983. Spinnaker Software was one of the first and most important educational computer game companies, and Bill and David, the founders said, look, computers that we have now, the Commodore 64 in the Atari and the PC Junior, they're toys.They're gonna keep getting better and better and better. The places where people go to buy this software are brand new, but they're gonna keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So we see how the world is changing. We want to build a company that is filled with people who can make the best thing in their category for the people we are trying to sell it to and be eager to change when the platform changes. So now the finance people know what to do, the marketing people know what to do, the people people know what to do. Let's go. And you don't have to have a meeting to decide if you should improve the quality of the screenshots on the back of the packaging. Somebody like me who is 23 years old. Should just be able to go to the store, get a Nikon camera, and fix it. Here we go. We don't have time to have a meeting with the chairman to figure out if we should buy a 195 camera to make the screenshots better on the back of the packaging. So, the people person's job is to un brainwash, un indoctrinate all the talented people who work for us, who are used to having, a meeting before they do anything.

Damon Klotz: I think that's why storytelling about how work gets done here is so important because we do bring our history and our resume and our trauma and everything from previous workplaces where we've had an experience where we're like, I've never felt like I've had power. or the authority to be able to make changes or do something or pick something up. So that's why onboarding and embedding setting tone for culture is so significant.

Seth Godin: we've spoken about. Strategy, we've spoken about sort of knowing the path that you're on, doing significant work, the whole idea about, are the right people on the bus, are we having important conversations about where we're going? I guess one of the, potential deviating points might be when pursuing this significant work, when, you know, trying to stand for something that's bigger. How do you know the difference between, I guess, Valuable persistence in going, this is the right path versus, is this a futile pursuit? And like you said at the start, failure has been something that has really been something that you would not change about your approach to things. So, have you got any lessons about how to understand whether you are potentially going too far down one path?Well, so I wrote a book called The Dip. It's only 96 pages long. It's about this. the first thing I would say is, if you can't say, This might not work when you're launching something new, then you're never going to do anything useful. because you're looking for deniability. If you're doing something that might not work, then you got to be prepared to quit when you discovered it didn't work. There's no extra points for sticking with something that's not working. So then the real question is when you hit the dip, how do you know if it's a dip, something you have to persevere through, like organic chemistry, if you want to be a doctor, versus A dead end, right? That you can't smoke enough cigarettes to get through emphysema to the other side. Doesn't work. It's a dead end. And the easiest advice I have for people is, has anyone else ever done this before? Has anyone else ever gotten through from here to the other side? Not exactly like this, but does perseverance ever work in this case? And if it doesn't, Declare victory, quit, and go do something useful, because every day you don't quit when you know it's not going to work is a day you're not making something else better.

Damon Klotz: I think we've seen that play out, especially if you think more about companies operating with a fear based mindset right now with short term thinking and trying to just squeeze a little bit more out of what's there is we start placing bets on things that we are nearly 100 percent sure will work because it's the only thing that we can really tolerate right now of the uncertainty that we're seeing versus being willing to say, look, this might not work, but this might be the thing that defines us as well. So.

Seth Godin: Exactly, well said.

Damon Klotz: What we've spoken around whenever we've had conversations is storytelling. And it's one of the things that I sort of have learned so much from you, which is the power of storytelling. So I wanted to end onyour approach to storytelling and a story that I think a lot of people in the workplace are telling themselves. So On the subject of storytelling, I did hear you share a story about a great biography that you were reading and it was of someone who I think lived to the age of 90 and then the audio book was 66 hours long, so then on the surface, that sounds like a very long book to commit to and listen to, but in the context of 90 years on the planet, most of that person's life didn't make that book. And when I just heard that story, I was like, Oh my God, like, it's so true. Yeah.it was when you were in conversation with Rich Roll on his podcast, and you basically said so much of storytelling is leaving out stuff. So how do you approach storytelling?

Seth Godin: Well, when we were three, our parents sort of ruined storytelling for us because they made us think it starts with once upon a time and it has a plot.where I live, if you go to an open house at a realist, where a house is for sale, and you walk in and you smell apple pie baking, there are no words, but that's a story, right? It's a story if you pull up to a party and everyone's wearing nicer clothes than you. You now are telling yourself a story of insufficiency. There are all these subtle emotional things that come from the dynamic of how we interpret things. So the book you're talking about, The Power Broker, which is generally considered one of the greatest biographies of all time, Robert Caro took years and years and years and left out almost every single thing in Robert Moses life so that he could tell the story. Of a man who was broken by his pursuit of power.And the book is filled with trivia and things he could have left out even more. But he wanted to exhaust us. He wanted to exhaust us with what felt like completeness. So that we would feel when we were done, like we understood what actually happened. So, the story, of what it is to work for a bad boss comes through instantly when you see the boss berating somebody, when you hear the boss talking about someone behind their back, when you hear about a boss who's cheating on their taxes or whatever it is, those are stories. So what we get to do is first live the story we'd like to live and then second narrate it for other people in a way that holds up to scrutiny but that they remember. So all of us remember something about third grade. But we don't remember all of it. All we remember is the story we tell ourselves about what it was like to be eight years old.

Damon Klotz: The uh, segue into my final question is very poignant based on everything you just touched on, which is about the story that we do tell ourselves and what parts do we and leave out and what do we remember and all the subtle signals. So, if someone is listening to this and going, you know, I listen to this show because I want to create a better world of work. I want to do better work. I want to be part of this. I want to talk about the how of the work, not just the what. do you have any final words for someone who is wrestling with their own story about, I want to do significant, great work and who might be just feeling the pinch of the fear and the reality that a lot of people are feeling right now?

Seth Godin: I've talked to people who've heard me tell stories about places where I worked, and they have said to me, I was there too. And that wasn't my experience. And I'm like, you're absolutely right. And so am I, that what we notice, what we keep track of, what we remind ourselves of, what we decide is an emergency, all of that self narrative becomes our story. And if you're sitting at the lunch table with the people who complain about work, It will become your story of work. You're not going to change their mind, they're going to change yours. And so,I'm just going to remind the people who are listening, there are 8 billion people on this planet, and you are in the top 1 percent by almost every measure of privilege and luck and opportunity and leverage. And if you're not telling yourself that story, you're already falling behind.

Damon Klotz: Well Seth, I will end by saying any chance to read your work, spend time with you and have a conversation is always time well spent. Thank you for the work that you do, for asking us to get in there and have conversations with ourself about our work, how we approach it, writing has impacted me personally and professionally and even one of my brothers was like, Oh, You're interviewing that guy that you bought like every one of his books when you were in university because it made more sense than everything you were studying. And I'm like, yes, you helped show me a different side of work and a different side of marketing. And I became a, the HR professional that I was back in the day because I did have a marketing brain attached to me. And a lot of that was through your work and your blog and your writing. So thank you for the significant work you do. It's impacted me personally and professionally.

Seth Godin: Well, it's an honor. Thank you for saying that.

Seth Godin: But mostly, thank you for leading. We need the work you do very much.

Damon Klotz: Awesome. Seth Godin. Thank you.