Transcription
What is a big failure that you experienced that changed the way that you went about things?
Some people are ashamed by their failures. I am delighted to say I have failed more than anybody who's watching this. I sold my first book, and then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. If your only goal is to make a million dollars, there's something wrong. Yeah, that's valuable. You don't need more time. You just need to decide. That's all.
In this video, I'll be interviewing Seth Goden, a 64-year-old best-selling author of over 20 books. Seth has sold millions of copies worldwide, and he is known as one of the world's most innovative marketing thought leaders. I've personally read three of his books, and they've helped me navigate not just my business, but also my life. So today I asked Seth to take his greatest marketing concepts and show me their application towards living a more meaningful life. And his stories, lessons, advice, and insights are guaranteed to give you a lot to think about.
How old are you?
On the calendar, I think I'm 64, but deep down I feel like I'm about 41.
What makes you feel 41?
I feel like a lot of people in their 60s wouldn't answer that way. My vision of what someone who's 64 is is they're wrapping up. But on my best days, I feel like there's still a lot to be done. I got one of these things, and I said, I just need to keep staying outside and walking and walking and walking and 5 or 10 miles; it makes a huge difference in my day intellectually and emotionally. I try to focus on the work to be done and not to catastrophize and not to day trade on what's wrong, but to figure out how to have a day without complaining. Unless my complaining takes the form of making something better, cuz I find if I make something better, the day was worth spending.
Where do you think most people go wrong?
I mean, I've spoken to over 1,200 people asking them about what it feels like to be their age. As you get older, like 60 plus, people start to feel worse. Where do you think that most people go wrong in that process?
Well, I start by acknowledging that I'm going to die, and I'm probably going to die sooner rather than later. I spend very little time fighting for immortality. It's the one thing that is not up for debate. I lost my parents too young, and I've had a plenty of near-death accidents. And you can look at that and say, "I hope that will never happen again." Or you can say, "That's part of the deal. What am I going to do about it?" So, if we know we're going to die and this day is here, right here for us right now, what should we do with it? I feel like a lot of people go through life and they never think that they'll never be this age again. And one day you'll look back and be like, what would I give to be 26 again?
Why do you think most people act that way?
Maturity is about realizing your legacy and the place you're leaving for the people who are coming after you, including you. That is what matters. The question I try to ask myself is, what will the me of 10 years from now thank me for doing today? Something difficult, something unrewarding, but 10 years from now, I'll be really glad that I showed up and did that. And the fact that some old guy is here telling it to you isn't going to change anything. I can't teach you anything, but maybe you'll decide to learn it yourself.
For people who don't know anything about you and don't know your work, what do we need to know about how you grew up, about your childhood to understand the version of you that we are with today?
Absolutely nothing. This origin story thing, you need to know it about Peter Parker cuz you don't get Spider-Man without Uncle Ben. You need to know it about Superman because you don't get Metropolis unless you understand Krypton. But we all get to make choices. I won the parent lottery, but I lost other lotteryies. I've had so much privilege, but other people have had more privilege. There's no direct line you can put from the origin story to the end result except the story we tell ourselves about the origin story. If you're always telling yourself that you came from X and we'll never get to Y, then whenever things get difficult, you'll go back to that story. I don't talk a lot about my origin story in public cuz I don't want you to think that if my origin story is different than your origin story, you have no chance. What I do think matters is under the circumstances, everyone does the best they can, but you are the circumstances that you have way more agency than you want to admit. The problem with admitting agency is then you have to take responsibility. And it's so much easier to blame whatever culture, environment, or boss or parent or whatever you have for where you are as opposed to saying, "Yeah, but I still have the freedom to do this or the freedom to do that. I have the freedom to put down this phone and write something down. I have the freedom to help a stranger get to where they're going for no compensation," and we don't do it because we're indoctrinated and seduced into settling so we won't be responsible. And I love being responsible, and I try to do that as often as I can.
What about with your parents? You said you won the parent lottery. When you think back on them and you think back to maybe the advice that they had given you when you were young, what is one thing that they recurringly said to you that has stuck with you?
My parents didn't give me a lot of advice. They raised a free-range kid. I was busy running around downtown when I was 14, completely unsupervised. But by example, there were refugees at our house on a regular basis. They helped organize and run major philanthropies where I grew up. They are so missed that 20 years after they pass, people still talk about my mom to me. You know, that example is worth way more than any advice.
I can relate to that a lot. I used to work at a bank. One day I was journaling and I was thinking, how do I want to be remembered? And I thought back to my grandparents and the way people spoke about my grandparents, and I was like, is doing the job that I'm doing right now going to have people talk about them the way that they would, you know, talk about me?
Yeah, exactly. What do we say when we talk to ourselves and what do people say about us?
I have a a short riff about journaling that I think is worth sharing. I think pioneered by my colleague, the late Zig Ziggler. And this is the journaling around goal setting step by step to quote Zigg to be a meaningful specific not a wandering generality keeping yourself honest because it's very hard to find someone in the world you trust enough to do that with but you could probably learn to trust yourself enough and when I discovered Zigg's work I was 27 and I was really busted and his goal planner to this 1987 the act of me writing writing it down every day, trusting myself enough to write it down. It was just a breakthrough. I learned that most people don't do that. Most people might have goals that they think about that they store in the back of their mind and maybe it comes out one day when something bad happens in life. Those are wishes. Wishes are good; goals are better.
How do you recommend people organize their life, organize their goals? Is it really through journaling that you would say?
Well, first there's a strategy. You know, my new book is called This is Strategy. And a strategy is the hard work we do before the hard work. It is finding the compass we need so that when we have a bump in the map, we can get back on track. And the most important thing is deciding to have a strategy. The second most important thing is not letting someone else set your agenda. So if your only goal is to make a million dollars, there's something wrong. We need to have goals around our personal life, our physical life, our community life, our spiritual life, and our professional life. And if you are out of balance, it's going to come back to haunt you. Zigg taught me that you share your give-up goals, but not your go-up goals. Your give-up goals are tell all your friends you're never going to smoke again, right? Because they can keep you grounded. But your go-up goals might threaten your friends because it might be putting you on a path to become someone they have trouble connecting to. When you pick your peers, you pick your future.
What is a big failure that you experienced in your career or in your life that changed the way that you went about things?
Some people are ashamed by their failures or concerned about sharing them. I am delighted to say I have failed more than anybody who's watching this and proud of it because if you fail really really badly then you're out of the game. That doesn't help. You have to fail just enough that you get to play again and then you learn something from that. So when I started out as an author I sold my first book, Chip Connley and I wrote it together 1986 for $5,000. So I got 2500 bucks and I figured if I could do this every couple weeks I could make a living. And then I got 800 rejection letters in a row. 800 times someone in New York City Book Publishing bought a stamp, put on an envelope, wrote me a letter saying no. And the thing about the rejections is they kept getting a little bit better. The early ones were no and I hope I never hear from you again. And the last ones were almost a yes. So something got learned in that year of me interacting. There were 10 years where we almost went bankrupt. There were all the opportunities I missed, not just to build valuable entities, but people I could have treated better, people I could have helped who needed me. And these failures, they weigh on me, but I also learn from them. The only way to do creative work is to be willing to say this might not work. It's the generous failures where someone is going to benefit from your effort even if you don't that unlocks the door for something to get even better.
Yeah. You started writing at what age? like when you were thinking this was going to be a potential career for you.
So my high school English teacher wrote in my yearbook, "You are the bane of my existence and you will never amount to anything." And in in college, I took exactly one English class. I didn't think that I could write because everyone told me I couldn't write.
Did your parents or or family, society, do you ever feel the pressure to go down a more traditional route, more comfortable?
Do you every day? What does that look like?
It looks like going to a cocktail party with people who have paid a high price to be lawyers, dentists, doctors, and they can't find firm footing to applaud somebody who seems to not have a job and who seems to keep walking on thin ice.
So, you're saying those people like the lawyers or doctors would think that you don't have a job?
Oh, yeah. Okay. So, it never ends. And it's okay. But the reason it's okay is my job is not to impress these people. My job is not for them to be happy with my career choice.
Did you say that about most problems in life?
Some people think that these things come to a point where I can achieve a certain level of success where no one will make fun of me or no one will say anything. Well, so when that happens, then you become Eddie Murphy and everyone you're surrounded by says your next movie is going to be great and for the next 5 years your movies suck. There's plenty of feedback in the real world. You just got to pick who you need to hear it from. The people that you surround yourself with are so important and I everyone has a story about that about how important it is and how other people hold them back. But how do we know if we have the right tribe?
So my book tribes first of all a tribe is any group of people that shares a culture, a commitment, a goal, a community, but they're not your tribe. They are a tribe that you are part of. They are a tribe that you might get to lead, but they're not yours. This group of people, they have norms. They have expectations. They have language. Is it helping me get to where I want to go? Am I trying to make them happy in what I do? So, when you pick your tribe, you pick your future.
How do I kind of reorient my life around and maybe join tribes that fit more to what I want to be and who I want to be?
Well, where are you aiming your attention? Are you letting an algorithm of a social media network decide what you're going to see next? When we decide we had a good day, what made it a good day? How do you cue up more of that? And the same thing is true for the artistic person that surrounds themselves with peers that push them to become who they said they wanted to be. So when we're surrounded by creatives and they're like, "Well, what's your next book or what's your next talk about it?" That pushes us to go to the next thing. But when we're surrounded by people who've been doing the same trick over and over and over again, it's going to be a different sort of feedback. So, I guess it's about knowing who you are, knowing what you want. I mean, that's journaling, right? That's that's you going back to what you said at the beginning. That's learning about who you want to be and then putting your life together around there.
You've been writing for quite a long time. Over 20 of your books are bestsellers. I think of all the people who want to be writers or who wanted to be writers and tried and tried and tried and we've never heard of them. They never published what they wanted. They never achieved the success they wanted. What do you think was different about your process to have gotten to this point that most people probably didn't apply?
Okay, we need to be very clear about what we're talking about here. I am very good at being published. I am not better at writing than most people. Those are totally different crafts. And so I will read some writing that someone did and it will just blow me away cuz each paragraph, each word is so perfectly placed. But that doesn't mean it's popular. I in the book tribes and in permission marketing I talked about building a community of people. I write my books for them. I don't write it for other people. I give them a book that they can share with others. You get what you measure. And if you measure the wrong thing, then you're going to be disappointed. So, please don't measure how many copies you sell cuz that's not the point.
You think most people get in their own way?
Who else is going to get in your way? Do you ever get in your own way or did you a lot?
Every day. Every day. every single day. I mean, think about it. I could type 100 pages a day if I knew what to say, but I'm not writing a book every week because I'm getting in my own way.
Would you like to?
No. That's part of why I'm getting in my own way.
Yeah. So, it's warranted.
Yeah. I mean, I'm again, this comes back to, well, what is it that you want? And what are you willing to pay to get what you want? And what fuel are you using? And how will you know if you're accomplishing what you want? You know, in in the journal that you showed me, one of the things I'm supposed to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 is ambition. What does that mean? Ambition. So, I left that one blank because I didn't know what you meant. Does that mean I'm reaching my ambition or my ambition's getting better? My ambition is getting more generous. My ambition is getting more resilient. What does it even mean to have useful ambition? I don't think most people have had a conversation with themselves about that.
For someone who is feeling lost in life, they could be any age. These people who feel lost at just about any point, what would you recommend as a question that they could ask themselves if they want to get one step closer to figuring the answer out?
So, there's a book by my friend Steve Presfield called The War of Art. I hope you'll read it. And the question is simple. What are you afraid of? And if you can't answer that question, it's cuz you're hiding. What are people hiding from? If you name the fear, then you got to go do something about it.
A lot of people go through life wishing they would have learned a certain lesson sooner or someone would have taught them a lesson about life sooner. What is a truth you have learned about life that you wish more people understood?
You don't need more time. You just need to decide.
A lot of people live in the one day and on day one mentality or I need to think about it and I'll get back to you. Okay. I'll pull up your journal entry. Inside this entry that you wrote, one of the prompts here is one piece of life advice that you would give to yourself for today. Do you mind sharing that with us?
Say it out loud. Just to say it. Not because other people need to hear it, but they might, but because you need to say it. If you can't say it out loud, then I'd ask, "What's your fear? What are you afraid of?" You got to start by saying it to yourself and then figure out what to do when other people push back.
If you have to boil it down to a simple answer, what do you think makes a great life?
You can't change everything, but you can change something. And what it is to have a great life is to have this generous posture of a series of changes that you're proud of. It's work that matters for people who care. I call that making a ruckus. Making a ruckus isn't about attracting attention to yourself. It's about creating the conditions for other people to thrive.
Thank you so much, Seth.
A pleasure. Appreciate it.
Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, guess what? We actually released the full-length interview, every single second of advice on our podcast channel, Seas of Success. You can check out the full interview by clicking the link right over here and subscribing. Thanks again and see you next.