Seth Godin and The Song of Significance

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Seth Godin: Am I in the right place at the right time?

LP: You absolutely are. I wouldn't have expected otherwise. Good to see you.

Seth Godin: Yeah, likewise.

LP: Thank you so much for making time. I want to dive into The Song of Significance. There's so much to unpack in that sort of small pocket-sized book. One of the things I wanted to start with was something that kept coming up for me throughout the book, which was And I'm not going to ask you to name this per se unless you're comfortable doing so, but I was trying to get a feel for, lack of a better way to say it, your politics.

When you talk about the differences between industrial capitalism and market capitalism, the goals of each and how they work, and all the trickle-down repercussions of them, I wonder if you're a revolutionary or a reformer. (laughter) Or some third way.

Seth Godin: Well, the word politics is a very tricky word because what it really means is having an argument you're not willing to engage in, in the sense that you have to win, and it's about dividing one side with another. And the stakes in politics are established by someone other than you. It gets in the way of society, civility, and governance because those are things that don't have the same game theory associated with them.

So, if the approach is my side right or wrong, or the approach is I have to do the leader said because that's the only way to make the other side go down, we're having a political conversation, and I avoid those because I find them banal and toxic. What I am trying to articulate here, going back to first principles, is it's very clear to me that a structured but free market solves many problems better than anything humans have ever discovered.

We have invented 8 billion jobs. We have fed an enormous number of people. We have solved problems people didn't even know they had because a market of choice enabled that to occur. But built into that is all the way back to Adam Smith, et cetera. You can't have a free market without a foundation, and you can't have a free market without rules, structures, a civic mindset, and a civil society to live in.

And the second thing is monopolies and side effects are the two things that wreck a free market. I wish we were aware enough that on any side of any political argument, this is assumed to be the case because it's really hard to argue against. So, in that sense, I'm a reformer in that I think the first principles are correct.

And I think we overlook side effects. We justify what we're doing by saying, I'm just doing my job. And lots of us are influenced by monopolies, monopolies that hurt us in ways we have trouble imagining.

LP: You used a word there, structured market, and I would like to know if you could talk about that. I don't want to blow past that word because, for me, it implies regulation, management theory, and leadership style. There's a lot there, but that also dovetails into something else you say in the book, which is that the industrial capitalist or industrial capitalism, I loved the line, doesn't know where to stop.

If a market is predicated on a system of incentives or if capitalism is a system of incentives, the industrial incentive is zero-sum. And if you have anything, I have less, as opposed to a notion of abundance.

Seth Godin: These are great questions. Let's talk about music because I know that that's something that's important to you and probably people who are listening to this.

If we didn't have the player piano lawsuits from a hundred or more years ago, if we didn't have copyright law, if we didn't have mechanical licenses, if we didn't have ASCAP and BMI, if we didn't have all of that regime, there would be no popular music. That the "free market" in popular music only existed during its glory days is because there were boundaries, right?

That's when you say payola's against the law because you're using bribery to get your share of the public spectrum. That's how we ended up with a whole bunch of rock groups that couldn't afford payola, right? But then, if we take industrial capitalism a little further, left to its own devices, Clear Channel would have made it so there are only two radio stations in the country, and that would have led to an extinction of variety. It would have led to less music consumption.

We can see in that very simple example that very few people were actually physically harmed by the side effects that monopoly and structure enabled what we thought of as this vibrant free market in music in the '60s. And when the mafia shows up, that makes it worse, not better.

LP: It's interesting thinking about the music business and the work environment of the music business in the context of your book because a lot of young people go into the creative industries because they love that thing — film, music, maybe even working in an art gallery. And they want to be surrounded by that in their work life. And I've seen over and over again young people disillusioned, abused … you're going to take a discount for the right to work in this field.

And the sum of that has been, at least in my observation, That's not how you attract the best and brightest. Then you attract the people who are only there because they want the free concert tickets or the record before it hits the street. You don't necessarily get the people who are going to die on behalf of the project.

So, a lot in your book felt so aspirational to me. And I know that you're not a prescriptive writer. You don't lay out the roadmap. You present the conditions or pose the questions. Still, I'm really curious if you think that or if you see realities where any organization in any field has successfully made the transition, has had a light bulb moment, and said we're functioning under the wrong paradigm. It's not getting us where we need to be; let's do it differently.

Seth Godin: Oh, I see those all the time. If I didn't, I don't know how I could do this work.

I want to put in an aside about the heartbreaking work of showing up in your industry, thinking that being in your industry is being in your craft. Liz Gilbert has written so beautifully about vocation versus avocation versus hobby.

I had a friend who became a well-known screenwriter but started his career by selling junior mints at a Broadway theater. That's not a good way to become a screenwriter or a playwright. Being near the people who do the work is a way to hide. It is not a way to expose yourself to the work. That mythology, that form of resistance, as Steven Pressfield would call it, feeds into the fact that these industries don't want to pay very much.

It makes way more sense to me to get the most productive job you can and use the money and freedom that buys you to do your hobby, to love your hobby, to get great at your hobby, and then when you are great at your hobby, the world will show up and say, we noticed this hobby of yours, and then you can skip the line.

Paying your dues by making french fries in a fancy restaurant for 12 months, thinking that that's the way you become a chef, I'm not sure that that is actually the direct route. So that was an aside that I had to get off my chest before. You were talking about organizations that figured out significance.

So, let's talk about one of the biggest ones, which is how Microsoft altered its path after the disaster of Steve Ballmer versus what Google fell into. Ballmer almost ruined the company when the new regime took over. They took a deep breath, and they looked around, and they said, we're going to have to play by different rules.

So, they measured and rewarded programmers in a different way. They spent their R& D money in a different way. They decide whether or not you like where. Bing and AI are going to make bets on people to move things forward, whereas Google took its head start and said, how do we squeeze every dollar out of this?

And as you and I are speaking, they're in the middle of an antitrust suit. That's a giant company. If we think about a smaller organization, a restaurant with five or six or ten people in it, they can figure out that they want to be cooks and churn it out and make everything they made yesterday over and over again.

Or they can decide they're going to use the new communications dynamic to be able to Invite customers to be part of what they are building. And instead of finding diners for their food, they find food for their diner. And it lights up everybody in that place because it's a different thing. It's not, how do we get bigger?

It's how do we double down on why we're here in the first place? So it's everything between those two. My friend, Ben Zander, has done it in classical music, and in most industries, I can point to somebody. Ray Anderson took one of the most polluting industries in the world, carpeting, and his little carpet company and transformed it into the first zero-impact floor covering company. And while he was doing it, he changed the lives of the people in the company and made a lot of money.

LP: Yeah, I love that example in the book. And I loved the humility of basically, he set the North Star and said, I hope you know how to figure this out because I don't know how to do it. Good luck, keep me posted.

There were several moments for me in reading the book where I had a couple of ego-gratifying moments because there are a few places I've arrived at over my career and philosophies that I've come to hold that I felt in a very self-satisfying way were seconded by this book. It felt good like I'd actually achieved something as a working human.

One of the things you get into that I was very excited to talk to you about is this notion of passion at work and how it's tied up with values and principles. I've had this sort of rant for a while, and there are a few words I like to see squeezed out. Passion was one that has bothered me for a long time, and you articulated it very well. I won't paraphrase what you said; you know what you said. My take on passion was when someone's passionate. I think about what that word means: they're perhaps overly excitable, they're not stable necessarily, and they're susceptible to manipulation.

Now, there are lots of very positive connotations of the word, of course. But in the workplace concept, I've always said, bring me an excited professional, somebody who wants to do great work. And if they view what they're doing as their job, to pay for their lifestyle interests, or to support their family, why they're there is almost less important to me than how they show up.

It's not necessarily my business why they're there. People's lives are complicated. Some people are climbing the ladder, and some people just want to survive. They're paying off student loans, a myriad of reasons why people work. So, passion is closely related to the idea of being a family.

And again, so subject to manipulation and interpretation, right? Not everybody has a good family. Or you may not want to have the kind of relationship with other people that you have with your family. (laughter) But anyway, what I'm getting is that you talked about values, and values were another one that bothers me.

I like principles a little bit better because I find values don't help you make decisions. If I'm at a crossroads, I can look at the principles, and they're more guiding, whereas the values are more aspirational and more open to interpretation.

I'm not looking to pick a fight. I just wanted to know if any of that lands for you.

Seth Godin: These are really deep, important ideas. Let me take them one by one. If I forget one, please remind me. What I write about with passion is this. The story we tell ourselves is fuel for how we're going to show up.

Resistance has caused many creative people to say, "I need to do work that I'm passionate about." And as a result, they can phone it in when it's something that feels like work or that exposes them to fear. It leads to a sense of entitlement. I don't think it's useful fuel. On the other hand, I think the narrative of, I can choose to be passionate about the work that I am going to do is an endless source of fuel.

I don't view those sorts of people as uppity or unpredictable; I view those people who have decided to bring something to work. So, I have met passionate baristas. I have met passionate people selling at the farmer's market. I have met passionate lawyers. But I've also met people whose narrative is, "I just gotta phone it in because I hate this." They're both doing the same job. But one has a better source of fuel than the other one. I don't think anyone was born to be an oil painter or born to be a litigator. Over time, we tell ourselves a story that helps us feel like we've found our footing.

The second idea you talked about was the family thing, and you make some excellent points. This, I think, comes to make promises and keep them. The writer's strike just ended, and a couple of weeks before, Drew Barrymore announced she was bringing her show back without her writing team. And she had this whole long story about family and blah blah blah, but that wasn't really what it was. She just wanted to make more money. After the strike ended, her three top writers chose not to return to the show. It was their choice, and they quit. Now, you could say that's because the family values were torn asunder. It's more accurate to say promises were made but not kept. And we need to work with people who will keep their promises.

Whether those promises are based on values or principles, I think the key is, if someone says it's just business, If they say, leave the gun, take the cannoli, if the whole mindset is, "My job is to maximize shareholder value," now you know what their values are. You know what their principles are. You understand that at no time will they do anything other than what helps them do that. That's very cut and dried. And for the 60s, in this country, it was a useful map. But I think The side effects and trauma it created have now shown up enough that we understand that's not the guiding principle of a useful business, but we better be able to say what it is. What are our promises? And let's keep them.

LP: That's interesting, Seth, because there are two things I'm hearing when you say that. One is, "Let's just use the language we mean. If we are saying family values, but we mean the commitments we make to each other, let's use that language." It's more direct. It's more clear.

Seth Godin: I agree.

LP: The other point is that when somebody's telling you what they are, you should listen to them. When they're telling you what their values are, the benefit of direct communication allows you to do that more easily. Still, the benefit of experience in life in the workplace allows you to recognize the things that you are saying. If somebody's telling you, and often they're telling you by what they're focusing you on to measure. Or they're just saying it in their words, and we're going to prepare this type of style of communication for the next board update, or we're going to have an all hands, and these are the things we're going to talk about. You're being given a very explicit signal that you could just stop filtering.

Seth Godin: Yes, let's get real, or let's not play. Why are we here?

A friend used to work at Bloomberg, and Mike Bloomberg personally makes over a billion dollars every few months from that company. There's nobody at Bloomberg who thinks that the work at Bloomberg is their passion. There are people at Bloomberg who think beating the numbers is their passion. That's made very clear from the first day you get there. This is a place for people who want to beat their numbers. It is not a place for people who want to find that other sort of meaning. And if you're the kind of person who wants to beat your numbers, that's great because you could have been in the Olympics when you were 18, but now you're 30, and you've got bad knees, go beat these numbers. But at least they're clear with each other about that.

LP: That's fascinating because that speaks to skill transfer as well. It actually opens up career paths when you think about it. What is it that's important to me? I'm actually interested in having an objective measurement that I can blow away. There are lots of places like that. Yeah, that's really interesting.

Something that surprised me in the book was that you mentioned Joe Hudson. I was with a company that was one of his early clients and went through his program. I enjoyed it very much. It wasn't easy. It was personally challenging. The biggest endorsement I would make is that I found the applications in all aspects of my life, not just the workplace.

His modality is, it's more about connection and communication than anything else. I also appreciated a call back to that when I read your just a couple of paragraphs about the trickster. And I was thinking about that first, not in that name, but when I read the section about Joe, I was thinking, where did our work with him not reach its full manifestation? And it was because it was not his job or within his scope to factor in the trickster. And the trickster manifests in lots of different ways, right? Especially in an entrepreneurial environment because the trickster is who we laud oftentimes. The gadfly, the rebel, the sort of myth of the founder. I wonder, where is there a constructive role for the trickster, if at all?

Seth Godin: Okay, so for our viewers at home, Lewis Hyde wrote a book about the trickster. It's a little dense. Every book he's written is a seminal masterwork. His book about The Gift is a must-read. But the book about the trickster goes all the way back to indigenous people's legends about the coyote, and forward and back and forward and back.

The argument could be made that it is technology that is the trickster of the day. We don't work in a stable world anymore because it was stable for 10,000 years. You found an animal; you ate it, you planted a seed, and you grew it, over and over and over again. But when we come together in community, somebody often shows up, not to keep the status quo going, but to throw a monkey wrench into it and to bring a sort of change. Sometimes, that person is selfish and evil and wants to run for elected office. And we need to say to that person, not on my dime, we'd have no time for you. But sometimes that person shows up and points out the emperor's not wearing any clothes. Sometimes, that person shows up and says, but what if we did it this way in a way that completely transforms? What's going on? Can it be generative? I think it's often generative.

A personal example: American Express used to have a series of interview shows that they did with a host like me and an entrepreneur like Richard Branson, and they would film it live on film in front of a bunch of credit card holders, 400 people at a conference, and then they would buy cable airtime and broadcast this interview as a promotion for American Express. I did like eight of them for them, and the first time I showed up, they had flown a hundred people in with the whole crew, they had to buy the space, they paid the talent, it was a very expensive thing. They had someone holding up cue cards for me to read. I'm like, I don't read cue cards. That's not good. That's not why I'm here.

So each time we did it, I started to encourage them to take people out of the equation, to figure out how to make it, to show up with alacrity to make it more flexible, quicker, and reach more people. Why do we need to buy cable TV ad time? Just put it on YouTube. You'll reach ten times as many people.

And so I was the trickster because I wasn't a lifer at American Express. I wasn't the person at the production company who was getting paid for every hour spent on the job. One person showing up to just ask some questions with no power is, at some level, a trickster. They're shining light. Now, if I had been there to try to hurt American Express at MasterCard's benefit, they should have asked me to leave the building.

What often happens as a lifetime positive trickster is sometimes you do get asked to leave the building. Because people say, "We have a signature right now, and we're really comfortable. These are fine ideas, but you're just messing us up. It would be best if you went over there." And it's like, "Thanks for letting me know." Those kinds of tricksters are the ones who are happy to leave when they're not helpful. We need more of those in our organizations.

LP: That dovetails, perhaps in a roundabout way, but into the notion of turnover and also into the notion of the inappropriate proxies. Earlier in my career, when I was first leading organizations, I used to think that low turnover was something to aspire to.

Seth Godin: Most people do.

LP: Yeah. I remember a couple of years running where I had very low turnover. in my organization. And I remember towards the end of that time feeling very stale. I wasn't getting challenged, all the things you could imagine when you have a crew of people who just become not even complacent, just comfortable. There needed to be more new perspectives. But later on, as I grew out of that proxy, the inappropriate proxy was that it was a measure of a good workplace, a good environment, safety. Excitement, enthusiasm, et cetera, et cetera. As I observed other leaders, something that I never related to was a fear of turnover because it was a personal rejection or your idea was bad.

And I've witnessed environments where someone wants to leave, and instead of the conversation being, "Are you leaving because it's good for you and your family? If yes, Mazel Tov." It became, "Where are you going? How much are they paying you? What do you need and want?" First of all, it's a too-late negotiation, and it's about the wrong things. There's always somebody that's going to pay more. And often, as an employee, especially in the industrial mode, you unlock your true growth in your income by leaving. What is measuring turnover obscuring?

Seth Godin: Okay, so if you are running the Model T assembly line in year three of its ten-year run, turnover is a bad thing because the cost of training someone, indoctrinating them into your culture, getting them up to speed is significant, it's high. And so you want to create an environment where you are rewarding people enough to have an incentive to stay because your cost to them leaving is too high. That's the industrial mindset. But now, first of all, if you've got any digital systems whatsoever, an enormous amount of the learning is already on your hard drive. Someone can catch up if they join your team with Slack in three days, not in nine months because they can see all the threads and everything that came before.

So the cost of turnover has gone down. But the other thing that's even more important is this: if we're on a bus, and the bus is going to Cleveland, and you're constantly whining because you really want to go to Tulsa, Nothing good is going to come of this because we need to go to Cleveland. We want everyone on the bus to want to go to Cleveland.

I started one of the first internet companies, and I was really proud for a long time that we had essentially zero voluntary turnover. Sometimes, I had to ask someone to leave, but in general, no one ever quit. That probably cost me 5 billion and the people on the team a lot of money, as well as the joy of going where we were going as fast as we could go. We were focused on stability and replacements and everything else. Instead, if we say, let's get real or let's not play, this is what things are like around here. This is what we measure, why we think this is good, what a good day looks like. If this is not for you, as I've accurately described it, I will write you a letter of recommendation, and I'm encouraging everyone in the company to have an up-to-date LinkedIn page. Because if you're going to find someone who's going where we're going better than we're going there, you should join them.

And so turnover isn't the problem. Turnover is a symptom of being clear about where you're going and saying that your skills are better put somewhere else. The alternative is being left with a whole company filled with people who have no better option. And that doesn't seem exciting to me.

LP: A company full of people with no better option … that is about the worst thing you could ask for, especially if you still have important work left to do.

Seth Godin: Yeah, exactly.

LP: Something else that came up in the book was you talked about project work. As I was thinking back on my career and when I talk about my career to people, especially when maybe going through a recruiting process or an interview, and I think about the highlights of my career, it is always those times when even the job itself was a project, a turnaround, a post M&A integration. These things have beginnings, middles, and ends. And then when it becomes a steady state, like, "How do we grow by 12 percent next year while eliminating 12 percent of operating costs?" That's not that interesting unless some people view that as the project. Optimization is a project, I suppose.

But, interestingly, the underlying theme of a lot of this is that one, you have to know yourself and what you want. You have to know what brings out your best or magnifies what resonates for you, and then you have to be willing to require that before you can even find the place where you can get that. That's a lot of work for an individual to do.

You and I are of a certain age and a certain generation, and I didn't know all the things you and I are talking about right now, 25, 30 years ago. How can we better support the workforce to think of themselves as people who have optionality, that aren't trapped, that are supported by the things that you clearly are saying throughout the book and the theme of your recent works? How do we do that for young people? How do we give young people that confidence and safety earlier on, before they have learned the wisdom?

Seth Godin: Let's start at the end and go backward. Andrew Carnegie and others invented industrial schooling to make it so that you would be a compliant factory worker. We have the memos. We know exactly who did it and why they did it. Asking the question, will this be on the test? You've got just the minimum to get through, squirreling away whenever you're off duty to actually have fun. That's what we built schooling to teach you to do.

Left to their own devices, kids — until we forced them to stop being kids — do nothing but projects. Kids don't wake up on Wednesday and say, another Wednesday, two more days till hump day. There's a project —whether it's building a popsicle stick bridge or going on a jaunt with your friend to buy a can of beans, whatever it is, there's nothing but projects. That's what we focus on. And then we get to work, and the industrialist tells us, you will have the same job for the next 40 years, and if you behave, I will not fire you. Your job is to bring your body, but not your heart, to work and do this over and over again.

From a very early age, I realized this would destroy me. I had undiagnosed ADHD when no one was talking about it, but I knew that one summer that I was helping program the IBM 360 computer in Cincinnati that even two hours of that was going to destroy me.

So, what makes something a project? A project, if you come at it with MBA thinking, is, It's post M&A, we're going to rebuild this thing. But actually, a project could be, "I have a customer at table three, and they're here to celebrate grandma's birthday, and she just got out of intensive care." That's my project. And in the next hour and a half, I'm going to do something that's going to change that family's life. That's a project. Now, the waiter at table seven is just getting through the shift. Well, who's going to have a better day? Who's going to, if it matters, get better tips? And who's going to make a bigger impact on folks?

So, the mind shift isn't about being a certain age. The mind shift, which happened to me when I was 18, was, "Oh, people are going to pay me for the rest of my life to do projects. I get to pick which projects." I might have to trade money, and I've traded a lot of money to pick projects that I wanted to work on. Seeing it as a project is a freedom that's up to us, and then choosing projects for anyone who has the technology to listen to this podcast is also up to us. So, instead of blaming the industrial megalith for "I have no choices," well, actually, you do. Someone is sitting one desk away from you who's treating today like a project, and you're not.

LP: How do you think the conversations you're starting and spurring with the book? What can you say about that in the context of what we're seeing with the current labor movements? And again, I'm not asking from a political perspective. You said if the bus isn't going where you want to go, you could, today, just get off the bus. As someone who recently got off a bus, I found that very resonant and powerful. More and more people are realizing that they don't have to be on the bus and that there might actually be other buses. Is that the lesson for labor?

Seth Godin: Well, AI is going to blow this up so much that we won't even recognize it.

Organized labor is a logical and essential complement to industrial power. Suppose you don't have organized labor as a counterbalance to industrial power. In that case, industrial power's ratchet will continue to turn until either the government says you can't pay people less or people are getting paid a penny because they have all of the resources to plug people into their machine as a cog. One of the things that we're seeing in labor in this country right now is the result of a couple of years of inflation. And so if your wages were stuck and prices went up, you were feeling it. But part of what we're seeing is that there are still some big companies left. There are still some companies left that can be unionized.

Workers are starting to understand, particularly using the tools of communication that are available to them, that they all come out ahead when they do that. What is going to happen even faster because of AI is we're going to atomize the nature of work, that more and more people aren't going to have what we used to think of as a job. They're going to have projects and tasks from many sources. They are also going to own the means of production because if you have a laptop, you have access to a billion-dollar thing called ChatGPT. If you have a laptop, you have access to a trillion-dollar communications network. The same one the CEO of a giant company has.

So once people grow up understanding, they have access to the means of production. De atomization will continue, again, back to the music business; you don't need to know the head of A&R at Atlantic Records to make a record anymore. So, the idea of musicians unionizing is impossible to imagine because who are they going to unionize against? There's no boss. And that's going to happen everywhere we look.

LP: That's really fascinating because the other thing that gives me some excitement around what you just said is that it favors the young. It favors the emerging workforce because often, the people who have the most facility with the new means of production are the next generation. How many people our age or older or even younger wouldn't even begin to prompt ChatGPT? They wouldn't know what to do.

Seth Godin: Well, that's because they don't want to, not because they can't. Right? It was easy to say a hundred years ago that older people couldn't lift heavy objects. What is true now is that older people are afraid, even though the cost of being wrong is absolutely zero. I might not look forward to the half hour I spend every day with ChatGPT, but I do it because my brain is still plastic enough that I can figure it out.

LP: I know our time together is winding down. I wanted to ask you one last question. If you were told you could no longer be the voice of your audiobooks, who would you want to read them?

Seth Godin: Oh, I would definitely nominate you. I could listen to your voice all day long. (laughter) I've actually thought about this because I used to be able to do a five-hour audiobook in six hours, and now it takes me a month because my whole body doesn't respond like it used to. I gotta say the best audiobook I've ever listened to — and she couldn't do it and wouldn't do it — but Patti Smith makes me melt when I listen to her voice. If you get a chance to listen to Just Kids, I strongly recommend it. But, I gotta say, Neil Gaiman.

LP: Wow. Okay. So after Patti Smith and Neil Gaiman, you'll call me?

Seth Godin: Yes, you're third.

LP: That's fair. Seth, thank you. Thank you so much for the book, all the books, the thought leadership, and all the influence you've given in multiple industries, but especially mine over the years, and thank you for your time today.

Seth Godin: Well, it's a treat. Thank you for doing this. I know it's not easy showing up and showing up and showing up. So, I appreciate you.