Transcription
In the words of Seth Goden, if failure is not an option, then neither is success.
Somehow, somewhere, in some or many ways, you will fail. It could be a hiccup in your business plan. It could be taking on too many roles and running yourself into the ground. It could be fear of growing too fast, creating a pseudo ceiling that you will perpetually bump into. It could be a global pandemic that brings commerce and global enterprise to a grinding halt and your inadequate ability to pivot.
But that failure is not final. All of these minor and occasionally major failures are the things that guide us towards growth, renewed vision, and a deeper sense of purpose and focus. With these failures, we will have unique opportunities to grow. But this growth is not just in our business. It's personal. Your business can't grow unless you do. And it's not easy. It's hard. And of course, there are times you will want to give up. But now is not the time to throw in the towel. Keep going. Ship the work. It's time to rise to the occasion. Do the work. And remember that people like us do things like this.
All right, good morning. Good morning. Welcome back to day two. Uh, so, so excited about this session. We're continuing along the solarreneur success path. We are now in what is step five, but as we talked about yesterday, most of us already have that pain step already covered, right? So today we're going to talk about growth. And there's so many different aspects to this. As you just heard in the bumper and as we talked about yesterday, it is difficult for our businesses to grow unless we do. And someone who has helped me grow my business over the years from afar is Seth Goden. And before I jumped in the car to come down to Chattanooga to the studio, um, I was just perusing my bookshelf at all of the amazing books. Uh, many of you are familiar with Seth because of his blog. Um, it's I subscribe to only three. This is not exaggeration. I subscribe to three things via email um that come to me every single day and hit my inbox every single morning. And Seth's blog has been one of those for, I think, over 20 years now. And it started because of this book, Permission Marketing. Permission Marketing. Um, I was just, I had to go back and see when was this book written and I was going through and it said 1999 in the beginning and I was like, man, no wonder this man has had such a huge influence on my not just my work, but really my life. Uh, in, in my opinion, when I read Seth's writing, um, it doesn't just apply to my business. He helps me find future, uh, understanding of what's coming down the pipeline in culture. He helps me become a better parent and a better husband, even though it feels like everyone thinks he's writing about business. Uh, he's just an incredible leader and he's spoken in my life so much. And so the, the span between these two is, um, that long. 22 years. 22 years. And in between these two, there's been a ton of other books, 19 best-selling books over the course of those years. Um, and so we're going to talk a lot about this today, but rather than me just tell you about how awesome he is, I just want to jump into it so you can see for yourself. He, you are already familiar with his work for many of you. If you're not, uh, prepare to be amazed and inspired. Let's get started this morning with Seth Goden.
Today is the 30th anniversary. The phone rings. It's our biggest client on the phone. So I looked on my calendar. I think it was today, 30 years ago. At the time, I was pioneering the internet before the worldwide web. We invented email marketing that was ethical and not spam-based. And our biggest client was AOL. And I had dozens and dozens and dozens of employees, most crammed into one room. And AOL was on the phone and Audrey was screaming at me because it turned out that the email promotion that we were doing for AOL, we had accidentally sent an email from Aridextra Dry Deodorant to every AOL user by mistake. And my heart just left my chest. It was horrible. And I promised all sorts of fixes. I called my tech guy and we spent a lot of time on it. And a week later, the next email went out and the mistake happened again. And Audrey called again and I said, "Audrey, I don't know what to say. I'm getting on a plane. I'm going to fly down to Vienna, Virginia. I want to apologize face to face. I know how serious this is." And Audrey said, "If you set foot on the AOL campus, I will have you arrested." And then she hung up the phone. And we turned around and we hired someone at great expense, being paid more than me or my head of tech, to fix this problem full-time on our staff. At the time, in 1991, we needed four full-time people to do what you can do with Mailchimp for $20.
Welcome to the revolution. Revolutions destroy the perfect before they enable the impossible. And many of you are here because you want to do things that are impossible. The very fact that we're having this conversation from me to Chattanooga to wherever you are in the world is impossible. It is impossible for one person or a tiny team of people to build an entity at scale. WhatsApp is impossible. Go down the list. We are living in a world filled with impossible. And here you are on the frontier, ready and eager to dive in. And I'm here to cheer you on. But I'm going to start with a couple questions. And the first one is this: What do you make?
Now, when someone asks you, "What do you make?" at a cocktail party, back when we had cocktail parties, and I hope one day soon again we'll be able to be in person, um, what they might mean is, "How much money do you make?" Which is pretty rude. Or they might mean, what do you make at work? Do you grow wheat? Do you put together threshing machines? What do you do? Not my question. My question is, what do you make? And the answer, if you're here and you're doing the right work, is you make change happen. You take somebody from where they are to where they want to go. You turn someone from a skeptic into a believer. You turn someone who is disconnected into someone who is connected. You turn someone who is afraid into someone who is no longer afraid. And if we are doing good work, we are in the business of making change happen. Can you be really clear about what that change is? Because if your change is simply, "I turn people who haven't given me money into people who give me money," it's going to be a long slog.
And then the second half of it, which goes back, uh, to the book that Harris was just so nice to hold up, is what do you own? What do you own? Because if you don't own anything, then you're simply hustling to get people to pay you for your time. What do you own? Do you have an asset that you can leverage? Now, we live in this social media-driven world where some people will tell you that hustle is the secret. No one wants to get hustled. Nobody. The secret is not claiming more attention. The secret is earning more trust. And too often, we find people who are willing to burn trust to get attention. That's sort of the secret of faux vulnerable Twitter. Burn trust because maybe you'll get a little bit of attention. You need to go in the other direction. You need to figure out how to walk away from attention to earn trust. Because if you own trust, you get to take care of it for a little while. And having that trust gives you the ability to earn permission, the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them, not spamming people, but being missed if you are gone.
And so here we are in this extraordinary world for imprarios, which is a lot harder to spell than soloist. So I'll just stick with soloist. But the empressario is not an entrepreneur in the classical sense. Building a business bigger than themselves that they're going to sell one day. Figuring out how to hire more and more people so that you don't have any jobs to do. And is different than a freelancer. And I am proud to be a freelancer and I'm going to talk about freelancing in a minute. But the empressario puts on a show. The empressario establishes conditions where community can occur. Came from Italy, the person who put on the opera. The impressario doesn't sing in the opera. The impressario doesn't collect tickets at the opera. The impressario doesn't clean up the venue afterwards. But if the empressario didn't exist, there'd be no opera. And so we're here, if we're acting as a soloist at scale, to create the conditions, the ecosystem, the environment for something might happen. And that's scary indeed.
So, let me just spend a minute to classify what I'm talking about with these three words. A freelancer gets paid when they work. Freelancer works with their own two hands. If you read a blog post from me, I wrote it. If you see a video that I'm in, I'm in it. And I wrote it because I want to be a freelancer. And there's nothing wrong with being a freelancer. And the only way to get more results as a freelancer is to get better clients. And it may be that you were a freelancer and you headed over to this other idea, this imprario soloist idea, because you're tired of getting better clients. I got to tell you, it's not going to get any easier on this side of the fence. Getting better clients doesn't mean being cheaper or working harder. It means doing the kind of work that better clients want. And better clients demand a different kind of work. They pay you differently. They pay on time. They talk to others about what you do. They don't go to Fiverr or Upwork to look for client for to look for freelancers. They are getting something very special from a special freelancer. And it is up to you to choose to get better clients.
But if you want to be a soloist, you need to say, "I'm not a freelancer." Which means I'm not getting paid for work that I could hire somebody else to do. Your job as a soloist is to hire someone as a freelancer to do any job that the freelancer could do as well as you could do it. So that all that's left is to be on the hook. And being on the hook is the best place to be. It's being the one who can only do this, the indispensable one at the center of the ecosystem. And so any time that you are spending doing a job where you have hired yourself as a freelancer because you're the cheapest and most available is a time that you are failing. You are failing because you have walked away from your stated goal of building something bigger than yourself and instead become a lousy client because you're not even paying the freelancer you're hiring. That what we end up doing when we're in a jam as people who are builders is reverting back to ourselves instead of building the ecosystem and building the community.
And then the third category is the entrepreneur full out. And this is a word that's been misused by magazines and pundits for a long time. An entrepreneur is somebody who is willing to use capital, maybe somebody else's, to build an asset that will work just fine without them, that's bigger than you, and you can sell it. The fact is, the people who started Google don't run Google. And even when they ran Google, if you had a problem with the search, they didn't fix it. That from the very first day, their job was to hire someone to do any job they could imagine and to hire them on the payroll because that was one of the assets.
But back to us, back to this idea of what it means to have the discipline to be a soloist. Far part of it begins with the story we tell ourselves, right? The story we tell ourselves. Impostor syndrome is real. Impostor syndrome of, "What right do I have to put on this show? Who am I to act as if?" Well, the thing is, you are an impostor, and so am I. Because if you are leading, if you are doing something that might not work, if you are on the frontier, how can you be sure it's going to work? You can't. Therefore, acting as if means you're imposttoring. You're saying as a leader, "I'm going over there. Who wants to come?" And the unstated rule, which might be worth stating, I have it on a big t-shirt that I wear all the time: "This might not work." If you want to do something that's definitely going to work, go to work at a fast food place because the frier always does what it's supposed to. And if you show up on your shift, you're definitely going to get paid. But this work, this work on the frontier is the work of "this might not work." The work of leadership. And if you're not able and eager to develop a practice around that, if you keep coming back to safety, "Where can I hide? Where is a synicure? How can I be insure that I'm doing something that's going to work?" You're in the wrong place. And you would be much, much, much better off getting better clients and embracing the lifestyle of the freelancer. There is nothing wrong with that. I have done it again. Akimbo, the company I built, is now an independent B Corp. I don't run it and I don't own it. And that's great because they are leaning into building something that's different at scale, and I can go back to sitting in a room trying to figure out how to be the freelancer that I want to be. But if you're going to be in this space, then we embrace the fact that it might not work.
So, a couple more things and then I'm really looking forward to having a conversation about this. I would like to teach you all, thousands of you, something that I have taught tens, or maybe now hundreds of thousands of people around the world how to do. That's right. Juggle. I don't know if you like juggling. Most people do. The thing is, if you watch a juggler, what you will notice is they don't drop the ball very much because it seems like the point of juggling is to not drop the ball. You're not going to attract a crowd if you just throw the ball and it drops to the ground. So, when I say to a bunch of high performers like you, "Do you want to learn how to juggle?" People usually say, "I tried. I can't do it." And here's how you tried. You listened to somebody who taught you how to juggle and you threw a ball and you caught it. You threw a second ball and you caught it and then a ball goes a little bit out of whack and so you lunged to get it because you don't like dropping the ball. And if you do that, now you're out of position and the next ball you're going to drop the next ball because it's all the way over there and you say, "I can't do this." And you don't like to fail. So you walk away.
So how do you learn to juggle? Here's how I teach it. Only one ball. We take one ball, we throw it, we let it drop to the ground. We pick it up. We do it again for 20 minutes. Throw, drop, throw, drop, throw, drop, throw, drop. If you do that for 20 minutes, you will get good at throwing. And then we take our other hand, throw, drop, throw, drop. 20 more minutes. Now you're good at throwing with the other hand. It turns out once you're good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. And so the beauty of this, because you don't have a payroll to meet, the beauty of this, because the public can't see what you're doing when it's not working, is this is the moment to practice throwing and not worry so much about catching because if you get good at throwing, the catches take care of themselves.
So what we're talking about now is the overlap between strategy, understanding who it's for, what it's for, the change you seek to make, seeking out the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people that if you serve them, it would be enough. And then ignoring everybody else. That's all strategy. And then belief and the practice and realizing you're probably not that good at it yet because you're on the frontier. You're exploring. And so we have to practice. And we do that by practicing without attachment, putting it into the world, whether it works or not, seeing what works and doesn't, and then going back. I've written 8,500 blog posts. And what I decided 25 years ago is that tomorrow, Saturday, 2021, there would be another post on my blog. It will not be there because it's the best post I've ever written. It will be there because it's tomorrow. And that commitment combined with strategy, combined with embracing the impostor inside of us, is what opens the door for us to become the leaders that we signed up to be. And again, you don't have to be a leader. You can be a freelancer. You can figure out how to get better clients. That's cool, too. But pick. Own it. Be really clear.
No one buys anything on an elevator. So, an elevator pitch has very little point except for what it says to you when you talk to yourself. What change do I seek to make? Who am I trying to change? What will I own? How will I know if it's working? Is there a path from here to there? Has anyone ever been on a path like this, or am I waiting for a miracle? Because if you can see a path and you can embrace a practice, you've got a shot.
So, last story I'm going to tell you is this. About 10 and a half years ago, I got invited to a really cool conference in Santa Fe. It was a secret conference. I got to bring my family with me, which was unusual. There were, uh, literal rock stars there and entrepreneurs and business people and playwrights. And the last night, they bring us out for the closing speaker. It's really cold. It's like 45 degrees. They give us all blankets. We head up onto this mesa. The sky is clear. The stars are out. It's pretty dark. It's really cold. And they sit around the fire. And Neil Armstrong comes out to talk to us about the Apollo 11 mission. And he's standing in front of the big campfire telling us about his journey. And while he's talking, I think there was some advanced planning involved. While he's talking, the biggest full moon I've ever seen starts rising over his shoulder. And he stops and he turns and he says, "I've been there." The thing is, there's footprints on the moon. And when you feel like you're all in and there's nowhere left to go, go outside and look up and realize there's footprints on the moon. And realize that NASA did that. Sent three brave people into space and brought them back safely. When the sum computing power of the entire institution was less than the phone in your pocket. And so, yeah, I had to build a giant email system, which was nothing compared to NASA putting people into space. And you, for $20, can buy the domain, set up the system, be the empressario and show up and remember that there are footprints on the moon. We need your work. We need you to do things that matter, to own it, and to make things better. So, thank you for this. Back to you. Let's chat.
>> Oh, man. Yeah, it's, uh, I got chills a little bit there when you told that story of him looking up going, "Yeah, I've been there." There's not many of us who can say that. Um, you said something that I'm, I'm going to be a little selfish here because I know we, we're going to be able to take some audience questions here in a bit. So, if you have a question for Seth, drop it into the Q&A or the chat. I'll try to keep an eye on both. But, um, we're going to start with my questions since it's my conference. So, what, uh, you said something there. You said, "hiring yourself because you're cheaper." That stung a little bit. So, that, that reaction that I had to you saying that, what does that likely mean for me? Unpack that idea a little bit more.
>> Oh, yeah. It's everything, right? If I could only have one sentence today, that would probably be it. Um, think of how hard it would have been on the prairie of Oklahoma in 1814 to hire anybody to do anything. So, self-reliance, you know, you need a fence, go build a fence. Today, well, you didn't build almost anything in your life. You didn't build your phone. You didn't build your house. You didn't build, and go on and on and on. And then we get to work and we say, "I am going to get X number of hours at work today." And if you're a high performer, three of those hours will be pretty special. How shall I spend them? Shall I work for a great client, or shall I work for someone in my head who's always telling me I'm not very good and who wakes me up in the middle of the night because I haven't finished anything? And you get the idea. And then you say to yourself, "Do I believe enough in the ecosystem I am building to spend cash to pay someone fairly to do this, or am I trying to avoid the hard work by hiring myself to do it instead?" Believing that I and only I can do it. And if you truly believe that, what about all those millions and millions and millions of other companies that don't have your talents at their disposal? How did they possibly come up with a logo without you? Right? So, if you want to make your own logo, please do. But don't fool yourself into thinking you're the only person who can make the logo for your organization. It's your hobby. You're allowed to have hobbies. I have plenty of weird hobbies. Go for it. But it doesn't put you on the hook. What puts you on the hook is saying, "Oh, I got to pay this freelancer to do this and this freelancer to do this and this freelancer to do this. So, I better hire myself to do really hard things, really scary things where I'm on the hook." And if you're not doing that, you've probably made up a very complicated story in which explains why you disagree with me. And I'm here to call you out on it and say, your story makes no sense.
>> Yeah. Well, there you go. I think I just got called out on live in front of a ton of people, but
>> I was talking to everybody else, not you.
>> I'm pretty sure you were talking to me there for a few minutes. Um, yeah, I struggle with that all the time. Um, and I, I could
>> Me too.
>> Really? Okay. Well, now we're getting somewhere. Tell me. Why do you still struggle with this?
>> Because you know what's a good day? You know what? How does it make me feel when I look at the logo from Seth Goden Productions from all those years ago, or the logo from the Akimbo podcast? Part of me likes saying, "Yeah, I made that. I'm an amateur, but I made that. I was able to hire myself to do it." And part of me is just wicked afraid. I know that scale is available to me. That there are projects that I could do, places I could be, things that I could make if I just outsourced the stuff I spend 8 to 9 hours a day doing that someone else could do. And so part of me takes perverse pride in that because I want to say it's handmade. But the truth of it is, I'm just afraid. I'm afraid of the consequences of what would happen if I increased my scale beyond the audience I seek to serve. And that is a choice. And I made the choice that my life would be better if my audience was smaller. You know, if I think about someone like my friend Malcolm, Malcolm Gladwell sells between 10 and 30 times as many books as I do. I'm like, fine. I'm proud of him doing that. I don't want to do that because that would mean I would write a different kind of thing in a different kind of way and show up in the world in a different kind of way. And I could have built a podcast company. I could have done more stuff with my podcast. I don't want to because the scale that would come with that wouldn't make my life better. Just like more altitude doesn't make a plane fly better. At some point, you can make the decision, "I'm at a good altitude." Now, what I'm trying to say is, if you are frustrated because you're not at the altitude you want to be, ah, that's a different question, which is, "How do I get rid of my frustration?" And the answer is, stop having hobbies where you hire yourself during working hours.
>> Man, so good. So good. I'm wrestling with all that in real time going through my days going, "Okay." And what's interesting is that your journey is probably opposite, I think, than most. It's probably changing, I think, over the last few years. But most people may start as a freelancer or a hobby or have a side hustle and then eventually they get to the point where it's like, "Okay, I want to scale this a little bit." Maybe they become a solopreneur and then they go raise capital so they can do things at a much bigger scale. And I don't know what your career looked like before founding.
>> Well, I'll show you. I'll show you. Hold on.
>> Okay.
>> Um, so, and this one, and this one, and I got one more I want to grab here. So,
>> This is what we don't get at an Inerson conference. You're just on the stage and it looks good, but no, we're hanging out with Seth and he's
>> Here we go. Okay. So, have you ever used an emoji?
>> Uh, of course. Yes.
>> Someone had to invent them. This is the, this is the Japanese edition of the Smiley Dictionary for which I was paid, I think, $25,000 as a freelancer. This is, uh, a book, The Official Rules of Life, which, uh, I outsourced much of the writing to my, uh, friend Karen Watts, and I think I made $7,000 through this. And this is a series of books that I did with Walter Dean Myers, one of the most beloved and decorated, uh, authors of kids' books. Uh, Walter, you can look him up. He won the Coretta Scott King Award for young adult, uh, fiction aimed at, uh, black kids many years in a row. I called up Walter on the phone. I said, "Hey, I'm a soloist. Why don't we do a series of books together? I'll pay you part of the money. You don't have to do anything." And then I found a book publisher. And then I found a series of authors who were freelancers and I said, "Here's the 15-page, uh, bible that I wrote for the thing." That was the place I hired myself because no one else could do that part. And yeah, so this is where I started and I made 120 books in 10 years. I did almanacs, complicated books. I scaled it. I scaled it. And, uh, so, yeah, um, this is back to the beginning.
>> But then you became an entrepreneur.
>> Yeah.
>> And then sold those companies, um, and then decided, "Okay, what's right for me is I'm going to go back to freelancing, right?" Is that the correct story arc?
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah. And so what, what do you think was the core motivation for you to decide, "Okay, this entrepreneur thing is not for me right now. I'm going to go back to freelance."
>> Well, I've made the decision three times, maybe four. Uh, I now have a good understanding of what it is to be a great entrepreneur, and I am not one. Part of it involves eagerly giving authority and leadership and confidence to people to run things in your name, right? Because entrepreneurship is personal for a long time. Part of it is being able to have colleagues and employees and telling employees what to do because that's what they signed up for. That I've always wanted to run a studio with colleagues, but I've never wanted to have employees. I don't like telling people what to do. And I could see that that was causing me to fail. That, you know, we were Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna's first investment at, uh, Flatiron, which is, uh, was the big, uh, venture firm in New York. And, um, so we were right there next to Yahoo and all the other fancy internet companies, but the people who run those companies didn't care as much as I did. And so they were willing to get to scale. They were willing to lean out of the boat in ways that I wasn't willing to do. And so they ended up building multi-billion dollar companies and not me. Yoan was a huge success and it has spurred the multi, multi-billion dollar industry of email marketing. Um, but I didn't want to run Mailchimp, and I get that. And so I'd rather do something that fuels me and that fills my day with the kind of work that I want to do.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Um, are you talking about skill sets right now or talent? Because I've heard you talk about that in the past that there is a difference between skill and talent.
>> Yeah. I would, I would, I'll add a third word. Talent is dramatically overrated. There are a few tiny areas in the world where talent pays off. But I don't know about you, but I was born naked, unable to speak, and pooping in my diapers. You're not born with the ability to do what you and I are doing right now. These are choices which become skills.
>> And I think if I had lived in a different century, my skill sets would be different because I would have chosen different skills. And, um, some of the attitudes that lean to lead to skills we learn from our parents, we learn from our community. We learn from wherever we come up. And every once in a while, talent, which could include like, can you curl your tongue or snap your fingers a certain way or hear certain chords, um, informs these choices. But what I know is that the hard work it would take me to learn these skills and embrace them just isn't worth it in the narrative that I'm trying to build for what I think is important. That doesn't mean other people shouldn't do it. It just means each person approaches the opportunities in front of them with a different set of metrics.
>> Yeah. You've also talked about how attitude is a skill. What do you mean by that?
>> So, um, talking to everyone else, not to you. So, I'm talking rhetorically.
>> Sure.
>> Uh, have you ever once done something creative? Or have you ever once, uh, been honest with somebody? Or been caring? Or gone out of your way to help a friend? The answer is sure. Well, could you do it more than once? Could you do it frequently? These are choices. It is a choice to smile and be optimistic and encouraging when we run into somebody who has just a little bit of an idea. Or we could take a dismissive attitude. Those are choices. And they then, what I learned from Zig is, if it's a choice, it's a skill.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So good. So good. Uh, I want to not be too selfish with my questions. I'm going to go back to the chat here, pull some from the audience. Um, there's, there's multiple people asking, going back to the outsourcing thing. Um, what if you don't have the money to outsource yet? Is that just fear? A good question from Don. How do we tell the difference?
>> Yeah, it's a great question, Don. So, a key part that we didn't talk about is it's really important to pick an appropriately sized project. Do not start a search engine. Just don't. Because if you don't have $100 million minimum, you can't start a search engine. It's not a project you can bootstrap in your garage. If you are feeling super stressed about access to money, it could be that the scale of your project is no good. So, when I was in the book business, the way the book business works is all I need to do to get in touch with Walter, rest in peace, is send him a letter. And maybe he'll say, "No," but letters cost 50 cents. And then all I need to do to sell the books is send a proposal that costs 50 cents. If they like it, they mail me a check for $100,000. Now I have the cash to hire the authors. I picked the book industry not because I'm a great writer, because I wasn't when I started at all. I picked the book industry because they pay upfront.
>> And if you're in an industry that doesn't pay upfront, you better pick a scale that matches where your cash flow is coming from. If you need to buy an entire container of stuff from China before you can start selling things, you probably picked the wrong scale. And just a little aside about Kickstarter, it has the wrong name. It's not Kickstarter, it's Kick Finisher. You don't show up on Kickstarter with no following and no history and then hassle all your friends to maybe get some traction. That's not how it works.
>> You build a community. You build permission. You build assets and then you can finish it with a bang on Kickstarter. And so there's a path there where you don't need a lot of cash. And if you don't have a lot of cash and you're on a path like that, it's totally appropriate for you to use your own skills to hire yourself on spec to begin building something. What I'm getting at is there's only 40 hours of that available to you for free a week, and you still have to pay your rent. If you need to build something bigger than that, you're going to need cash flow or a partner to pay other people. So, if you're already paying three freelancers, pay four and then free yourself up all day to be the impressario you could be. Yeah. What is it?
Makes me wonder what the gap is between you saying if you want to start a search engine, you're almost saying like, "Good luck with that unless you have $100 million." And yet previously you're saying, "Yeah, I got to watch Neil Armstrong look up at the moon and go, 'I've been there.'" And yet probably the people who had the audacity to look up at the moon and go, "I wonder if we can go there" are the same people who are like, "Is it possible to start a new search engine?" What is the gap between, uh, I guess that possibility and impossibility? When do we look at an idea and go, "It's just impossible. Let's just accept the reality." And when do we set reality aside to chase something that feels like a really big stretch?
>> Um, what we call somebody who wants to do aeronautical engineering and rocket science, who insists on doing it on their own, bootstrapped in their garage, is a nut. That person, if they really want to do that work, needs to go to Houston and get a job at NASA. And we wouldn't have made it to the moon if it weren't for a confluence of public relations events that happened in the early 1960s involving the Berlin blockade, uh, Alan Shepard, and a whole bunch of things that just fell in the right direction that led John F. Kennedy, without consulting very many people at all, to announce that they were going to spend a fortune on this. And now aeronautical engineers have a job path. But using Elon Musk as a role model for anything is a giant mistake because first of all, before he started Tesla, he was richer than God. That money has not been a barrier. If we look at the history of PayPal, and there's, um, if you look at what Reed Hoffman did there, PayPal was a week away from complete bankruptcy. And it was only when Reed figured out how to pivot the thing, and then a lucky break with eBay, etc., etc., that PayPal became PayPal. For the people on this call, if you want to do that kind of moonshot, I'm not going to talk you out of it. I'm just saying, please don't also expect that the ride forward will be straightforward or will reward your time appropriately. It probably won't. And what I learned, you know, in 1986 when I went out on my own is simple. If you run out of money, you got to get a job as a bank teller. And I really didn't want to get a job as a bank teller. So rule number one was, don't take a nap. Because when you work at home on your own, once you take one nap, you're in the nap lifestyle. And rule number two, don't run out of money. And that mindset is why the first book I sold with Chip Conley, the Chip Conley in 1986, we got $5,000 for it and we had to split it. But it kept us from running out of money for six more weeks, eight more weeks. And then I got enough window to do it again and do it again and do it again. So, we've been seduced by the magazines and especially by social media into only seeing the best moments of every single person's life. "Oh, that's available to me if I just, law of attraction and nonsense like that." No, that's not how the universe works. The universe doesn't actually know how hard you're working. What is an opportunity is there are people with problems right next to you. There is a group of people just down the street, three clicks away, who have a real problem, who are disconnected, who are lonely, who want something that you can get them. Find those people. Find 10. Because if you can't please 10 people, you're not going to make it to the moon anyway.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. There's a question that came up in the chat here and it came up in, uh, Facebook group a couple weeks ago. It came up in a Q&A last night. Um, and that is that it's a lot of it, the narrative, I should say, around the word coach. And so Marissa's question specifically is, with everything being answerable and figure-out-able through the power of the internet, what is the true role of the coach? And I think it kind of piggybacks on what you were just saying, um, because it feels like we need coaches, but yet the, it feels like the, maybe it's just my perception, but you probably don't do lots of scrolling on an Instagram feed like a lot of us. You, you've avoided that somehow. But when we do, there's lots of shiny pictures of fancy coaches driving nice cars and saying, "You can have this too." Really good highlight reels, right? So, uh, Marissa has a great question. What is the true role of the coach? But feel free just to speak to anything about this rise and what it means to be a coach.
>> Yeah. No, this is a, a great point. Uh, I was, uh, there's an interview I did with Martha Beck last week and I asked her this question. I said, "Why is there such a, a gap between the fact that we have more information on every topic, including development online, and yet more people feel stuck than ever before? Where's the knowing-doing gap?" And I think a good coach can show up right in the center of that gap because the coach, any decent coach, is not telling you anything you do not already know. And that's one of the reasons I do no coaching and never have because I can't tell you anything you don't already know. But they hold us accountable in the sense that we know deep down we're going to have to say to somebody who we are paying money to, "I, I'm afraid I didn't do it." And it becomes that clear. So I am in favor of coaches. I don't think expensive coaches are better than cheap coaches at all. And I think hiring a coach who has a fancy car is foolish. That what you're looking for is someone who is focused enough to see you and to know that you will know that you are being seen, and then you can stop bluffing because bluffing wastes an enormous amount of time. If you don't want to do this work, just don't do it. Do something else. You're talented and motivated and skilled. Do something else. But if you want to do this work, own it. For me, my coach was my Zig Ziggler goals planner, and I used it every single day for a year. And there, in writing, right in front of me, I had written down what I was going to do and when I was going to do it. And at the end of the day, if I hadn't done it, I had to write down, "I did not do this today because I was afraid." But different people have different levels of resilience and self-discipline around this. And if you need a human to help you do it, by all means, it makes a big difference to say out loud that thing that we were keeping within us.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So much of what we've been talking about is from this book, The Practice. Um, and I can't help but go back to this book for a second because, um, so much of what we've been talking about over the last day has been about how do we build, uh, better relationships with our customers? How do we nurture those relationships? And right here on the cover, "Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers." I know this book is over 20 years old, but why does it seem like in modern marketing that we experience, how is the world still not following these principles? Can you help us understand why?
>> Yeah, I mean, of course, as the author, it's sort of heartbreaking, but here you go. Um, the most of the people on this call do not remember what it was like to sit down in 1976 and watch television. In 1976, there were only three things to watch in the United States. Three. And when you went to school tomorrow, there was a great chance that everyone you knew had watched the same thing you watched. Attention was cheap to farm. That television was the greatest bargain in the history of marketing. And so from 1960 to 1990, if you just bought a lot of ads, you were going to do fine. The whole myth of Mad Men is it didn't matter if the ads were good. You just had to buy a lot of ads and you would be fine. And so many of the successful players in our world grew up believing that attention is cheap to farm. And when the internet shows up and fractures all of that, there is no center of the internet. There is no homepage. You know, when I was a VP at Yahoo, the homepage of Yahoo was sold out a year and a half in advance. Not because it worked, but because you could tell your boss you had bought the internet.
>> Can't do that anymore. And so, selfish, narcissistic, short-term marketers, impatient at the fact that attention isn't theirs anymore, are spamming us. They're spamming us by following us around with shoe ads, sight to sight. They're spamming us by secretly watching what we're doing on Facebook. They're spam. You get the idea. They're stealing attention and attention has been micro-sliced. While we've been talking, people have been checking their email, looking at this ad, doing this other thing. I can see from here, right?
>> And it's exhausting us and it's dramatically decreasing effectiveness. When I, uh, was running Yoyoda, we had a 75% open rate for our emails and a 36% response rate. If you did that today, they would make you the king of Bolivia. That's impossible today. And so the thing that's going on is that frustrated, selfish marketers say, "Just tell me how to grab more attention. I don't care who I hurt."
>> And a few are treasuring the permission that they get. And it doesn't matter whether you like Amazon or not. The fact is, Amazon only has one asset for their retail stores. It's not their fulfillment centers and it's not their software. You
could copy both of those for not very much money. The asset that they have is that people give Amazon the benefit of the doubt. They give Amazon their attention when Amazon whispers to them. Amazon doesn't need an ad campaign because a 100 million people are listening to them whisper every day. That's permission marketing. And so point to me some successful long-term ventures and I will show you where they have earned permission. And yet the masses of marketers who are happy to send a hundred bucks to Google, happy to to break the rules at Mailchimp and spam people, they're the ones we keep hearing from. So that's why the book still matters.
Yeah, it absolutely matters. Um, we have to learn to do better. And to be honest, you're you're kind of getting at some of the heart of why I felt so led to start a new community for solopreneurs because when you look at the landscape of any form of entrepreneurship, regardless of the labels and the semantics and all that, um it feels like solopreneurs really are born out of um some sort of pain that they've experienced in the world, a problem that they see that they want to solve, a mess that they feel like they've in, and then they end up turning that mess into a message. I know that sounds a very cliche way cliche way of saying
Um and so therefore they they tend to be very purpose driven that they often remind me like man you could easily choose a borp as an entity. You could turn your solarreneurship thing into a nonprofit because it is so mission-minded. Um and so I want to get to Tim's question. Tamim, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly because he kind of echoes the idea. says he said Karl Marx said capitalism is searching for its highest return which means big fish will eat up small fish at the end then what's the future for soloreneurs against big businesses and I'll piggyback on that is there are we in a season are we in an era do we have an economy that is sort of primed for the solopreneur more now than ever before what are your thoughts
uh well I never let a good Karl Marx quote go to waste he said a lot good books. Um, here's the deal. The first thing is in 1999, right after the book came out, Walmart hired me to come give a speech. N No, it wasn't 99. Go back. Yeah. 1999. And I show up at Walmart's headquarters for their digital division and there's a big sign and it says, "You can't out Amazon." Amazon. 22 years ago, Walmart decided not to compete with Amazon. If you are trying to build a business that competes with a giant company on their terms, you have made a giant mistake. Don't do that. But huge butt. But but number one, almost every job created in the United States in the last 20 years has not been created by a Fortune 100 company. There is a lot of creative destruction around the edges where innovators make new things, connect new communities. Number two, if you actually own something, if you are trusted, if you're not simply racing to the bottom, if your motto is not you can pick anyone and I'm anyone, then the big company is going to have a lot of trouble disrupting your smallest viable audience. And number three is big companies usually lack creativity but have pocketbooks. And if you want to sell your company, it's not you, it's your company. Go ahead and sell it and then you get to do it again. So yeah, capitalism is voracious. It is always hunting for a simple number. You don't have to play by those rules if you don't want to. But what you have to accept is that if you're not serving people with something they can't get cheaper from a big company, they're going to switch. And it doesn't feel right, but it's true. And you are doing the same thing. In your personal life, you're making the same choices. you know, in the freelancers workshop, we'll often hear from people who whine about the fact that people won't pay them to do the work. And I said, well, what freelancers have you hired? And when you hire a freelancer, how are you deciding how much to pay them? Because deep down, if it's all the same, if people have taught us it's all the same, we want the cheapest one. So that means the work you have to do is to find a small group of people who know you're worth paying extra for.
M that's so good. So good. Um okay. Uh I know we're we're running short on minutes here, but I want to finish on one of my favorite uh it's not a line. I hate to call it a line. It it belittles it. Um but something I consistently hear you say uh in every interview that I devour, every book that I read, and that is that people like us do things like this. When you think about that idea with this community of soloreneurs in mind, what do you want them to hear? What do you want them to know?
Okay. Well, first, um, I have no idea what your connection going forward with the community is. If they can buy membership from you, they should. Community is important. Being part of this circle and paying for it is worth it. When I think of the shifts in my life, whether it's the Silicon Valley people I hung out with for a while or the TED people I hung out with for a while, being part of a group of people like us is the fuel to not only make you smarter, but to make you more resilient. And what the sentence people like us do things like this means is culture is marketing is culture is possibility is community. They're all intertwined with each other. That's why people used to wear a tie to something like this and people don't anymore. It's why things like this used to have one uh way of being in the world and now they don't. Because people like us, we don't do things like that. We do things like this. This is what we eat for breakfast around here. We don't eat things like that for breakfast around here. You can't order it. It's not on the menu. If you understand who the people like us are and this is not about avoiding diversity. Diversity and inclusion actually makes people like us better because bringing new voices into the room makes us more resilient, more able to serve the people we want to serve. But we first have to know who the people are and what the things like this are before we can change them and make them better. And so when you start building a customer base, when you start figuring out who you're serving, when you start figuring out what your culture is like, you need to determine what it's like. What do you do with a freelancer who does a shortcut at the expense of a consumer? Well, if it works, do you say, "Well, I'll just live with it." Because you've just decided what people like us do.
>> Where do you draw the line? What do you stand for? People like us do things like this.
>> Yeah, indeed they do. Um, you know, sometimes being what I will now say also an emprasario. I went down the gosh the a rabbit hole. You did a whole was it like a workshop in New York. This was years ago I guess where people could come and hear you talk about it's like a whole thing on just being an empressario. Um, and I had never heard that word before. And so I watched and consumed all that content and I was like that is what I do on a regular basis between this conference which is totally new and story conference and the tours that we do. And there are times when you're producing and designing an experience like this that it is exhausting. You're worn out and you're going, this is probably why Seth Goden has chosen the path of being a freelancer and this is really hard. And I always come back to that phrase, it's been fuel for me because when I scratch my head going, why did I let myself like how did I get into this? I just remind myself and go because people like us do things like this. Um and it reminds me that that it matters. Um, and as as much as I want to ask you to confirm um that I didn't ask you to plug and say, "Hey, if there's a chance to join anything or pay for anything, make sure that you do that."
Uh, >> you know that I don't endorse anything and other than books and this is from the heart. We are too disconnected and we are too brittle because we are having our attention used against us. Facebook is not your friend. Twitter is not there to serve you. You are the product that these social media companies create. And we have to respond to that by finding our people and by encouraging each other to do this work because it's the only way to level up. It's too lonely to do it on our own. Find the right people. Commit to it and organize your own. Right? Go find five people and start a mastermind group. They're all here in the chat. Go do it right this minute. Start a mastermind group. Five people. It's, you know, it's the top of the hour. I'll give you six minutes to to get it to go meet every Friday at 3:00 forever because it will change your life.
>> Yeah. Yeah, indeed it will. We've watched it happen time and time again. Uh, well, Seth, thank you so much for your time. Um, I know I've told you this via email, but you know, when when I sent you a copy of my book and said, you know, I no pressure. I know you get a million of these, which is probably pretty close to a literal number. Um, true true story. when you emailed back and said, "Uh, here's the blurb for the book." I was sitting at my kitchen. Um, and I was like, "Oh my gosh." And Kate, my wife Kate goes, "What?" I said, "Seth gave me a blurb for my book." And she goes, "What did it say?" And I said, "I don't know." And the reason I said, "I don't know is because on my phone, it just showed me the top line." And the top line just simply said, "Haris, I'm blown away by this." And I I couldn't read any further. Um, and it just reminds me of the importance of um, whether it's community, but also simultaneously making sure that you're reading, that you're studying, that you're improving yourself, that um, is hero. Is that a a inappropriate word to find a hero? To find someone that you're constantly striving to learn from and follow in the footsteps of should we all have that?
I think that uh mentorship is overrated because it doesn't scale and it lets us off the hook. If only my mentor would do more. I wrote a blog post called heroes and mentors. And also just an aside, if you want to watch the impressario session, I posted the whole thing live online. You can look for it on my blog. Um heroes scale because heroes aren't only the people who risk their life in battle. Heroes are people we can say without them knowing what would they do. They're a model in this space, right? You don't necessarily need to do what Warren Buffett would do Sunday morning, but you can decide in this moment when I'm investing my money, what would Warren do? He's going to be my hero in this space or this space or this space or this space. So I'm honored and quite touched if my role model has helped you. But you have produced significantly more value than I could have imagined if I were in your shoes. And if there's a whole bunch of people like you doing that, that multiplier effect makes it easy for me to go to work tomorrow.
>> Yeah, the ripple effect is strong. Uh well, thank you. Let's just finish this session by with just a moment of gratitude. Thank you so much for the way that you show up in the world, the way that you sit down and I don't know how you write every single day the way that you do. Um, but the blog is an inspiration to me. The books are inspiration to me. Uh, Seth's latest book, The Practice, if you were, you know, picking up these little nuggets and you're like, "Oh, that is gold." Um, I'm just going to be honest with you. Uh, so much of what we talked about, I was just pulling notes from the very back page. It's these lines. The very back page says, "Skill is not the same as talent. Perfectionism has nothing to do with being perfect. Attitudes are skills. All criticism is not the same. Every single one of these just takes you to a place of exploration. So that's the practice. It's amazing. I devour every single book he writes. And so I think goes without saying and there's a there's a ton of books between these two books and that they're all incredible. Tribe, Purple Cow, so many favorites. Seth, thank you so much for your time. I know some of us get to spend some more time. We'll get you on screen and asking some questions, but um thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate you joining us for Silicon.
>> Terrific. Go make a rockas everybody. Be well. All right. All right, everyone. That is uh the first session of day two of SoloCon. Um devoted an entire session to just with Seth. You can see why. Thanks for getting up and hanging out with us uh here on the platform. Um you've got a short break and then breakout start. Again, we've got lots of workshops happening on a variety of topics. So, make sure you check out the workshop guide. You can go to silicon.com/workshops and review all those breakout sessions happening backtoback today before we're back. in here on the main stage after lunch. The reason why we're doing that is yesterday was filled with tons of inspiration. As you can tell already, today is not going to be short on inspiration, but we want to equip you with these tangible skill sets. So, if you want to take the stuff that we were talking about and figure out, okay, how do I put that to work? How do I embrace this idea of permission marketing of turning strangers into friends? um take the sort of fuel and motivation, inspiration out of these types of conversations and then choose workshops and breakouts throughout the course of the day today to turn those those feelings, that inspiration and tactile skills to help you grow your business. Um I will see you again very soon. Enjoy the rest of your day.