Seth Godin

• How Seth's bestseller "The Dip" came to be, and why it was influential to Frank Blake (03:19)
• The overarching theme of all of Seth's work (09:27)
• What to look for in a "generative cycle of contributions" (30:13)
• Good Bids, the website Seth created that is reimagining charity auctions for the better (11:44)

FRANK BLAKE: So Seth, it is a great pleasure. It's actually a privilege to have you on Crazy Good Turns. Thank you for making the time to join us.

SETH GODIN: Oh, it goes back to you.

First, for all the stuff in my house that I bought at your store, but secondly, because of the way you are showing up in the world, you don't have to do this.

You're more than a hundred episodes in over and over and over again, turning on lights so you don't hear it from your listeners often enough.

Thank you, Frank, for doing the work.

FRANK BLAKE: Thank you, Seth.

So I want to start with a thank you to you because you wrote a book in 2007. So it was roughly around the same time I was starting as CEO of Home Depot and the book was titled The Dip, and it's an absolutely terrific book.

It's hugely helpful. It helped me enormously.

And rather than my going on about a description on it, maybe just start turning it over to you.

What was the prompt behind the book and the key lessons you wanted to convey?

SETH GODIN: So I don't think many people listening to this still wear a tutu and take ballet lessons or maybe even do karate, but you did when you were a kid.

You quit those things and you quit them with honor because it freed up time to do the thing you wanted to do next.

And it turned out no one had ever written a book about quitting before.

And it felt to me like talking about it, staring it straight in the face and being clear that there are things we should quit and there are reasons we should persist, and we need to know the difference between the two.

It unlocks our ability to stop hiding.

It gives us the chance to be the contribution we want to be because we get to say, "I'm not a failure because I quit. I'm not a failure because I'm not listening to Vince Lombardi. I'm actually a success because I care enough about something else to go do it."

And the flip side of that is too often we sign up for projects that seem like we're going to get a lot of applause for them, but as soon as they get hard, we quit.

And that's a mistake that getting through the dip, getting through the hard part gets you to the other side.

And I think you demonstrated that as the CEO.

FRANK BLAKE: Before we got on air, I told Seth that I used a chart of his over and over when I would talk to folks at Home Depot and outside Home Depot.

I'm sure the question I got is the same question I'm sure you got.

Well, how do you know what you're supposed to quit and what you're supposed to continue on through?

SETH GODIN: Right. So the book's really short, and I didn't answer that part on purpose because it turns out there isn't an obvious answer.

That is the art of this thing.

There is a shortcut and the shortcut is - has anyone ever made it through this dip before?

And when you're taking organic chemistry in med school, it's really, really hard.

It's hard on purpose, not because you need organic chemistry to do most forms of medicine, but because it's to separate the people who can do the work from the ones who can't.

And you know that people get through it. And on the other side there are doctors.

So when the hard part shows up, we need to celebrate and say, "Oh, this is the dip. Other people have been through it before."

On the other hand, you are delusional if you think that you're going to be able to assemble a hundred NFTs and become a billionaire.

That's never happened before, it's never going to happen.

Maybe someone will be a pioneer and win that lottery, but it's not going to be you.

So understanding that there's history here I think is the first step.

FRANK BLAKE: It was important to me, but I love the quote in the book that, "Successful people don't just ride out the dip, they lean into it."

Would you explain that a little bit?

SETH GODIN: So if you run the marathon, people often stop at mile 20 and other people finish all 26 miles.

What's the difference? Both people are tired, right?

No one finishes a marathon, run well, and isn't tired.

The difference is when you get tired at mile 20, it either takes over or you figure out where to put the tired.

And that act of saying, "I'm supposed to be tired at mile 20, that means I did what I was supposed to do in this race. Thank you, now I can finish," is different than simply suffering.

And so if you go to the gym in March when we're recording this, it's a lot emptier than it was in February.

And that's because a lot of people who join gyms after the holidays do it for three or four weeks, then it gets hard.

And when it gets hard is when people quit. But that's exactly the moment when we need to not quit.

FRANK BLAKE: So I have huge admiration for people like yourself who can put big thoughts into comprehensible commentary.

And I'm curious how much of it comes from your own experience or observing others?

And in the case of The Dip, is this something that you go, "I had to fight through that 20th mile and this is what I learned," or "I saw a lot of people who fought through the 20th mile"?

SETH GODIN: Well, I guess I have two parts to my answer.

The first part is I write like I talk, and it makes it much easier to write if you do that.

So we need to learn to get better at talking.

And what I've built my career around is noticing things, noticing things that happen to me, noticing things that happen to others, and then talking about them.

And if I say it out loud and it sounds cogent, then I just have to write it down.

And too often we forget to say it out loud.

And so if I see something I don't understand, if there's a business in New York City that sells a certain kind of pizza slice, and I walked by at one o'clock in the afternoon and there were 18 people waiting in line.

And how could that be? No other pizza place, isn't it?

And so I inquired and I looked at it and I thought about it and then I figured it out.

That's not worth a blog post because the answer was sort of banal.

But the point is we are all noticers. We've been noticers since we were two years old, one years old.

What are you noticing? Say it out loud and then write it down.

FRANK BLAKE: So there's a self-description that you provided somewhere.

There are so many quotes from you from the internet, it's hard to know where, but there's a great self-description where you say that you're a teacher and you do projects, which is a great description.

But what's the throughline or what do you see as the throughline for all of the things that you've been doing and looking at and commenting, if there is one?

SETH GODIN: I think there is.

I think that some people would call me a marketer, but I don't because I was lucky enough to be in the right place to redefine marketing when the world of marketing was changing.

But it's not because I want to be a marketer because I want to be in service of a certain kind of change.

And I won the parent lottery. I won the birthday lottery.

I was born with an enormous amount of opportunity and both my parents were philanthropists and Thanksgiving would be a dozen refugees at our house for dinner.

And I just came to the conclusion that the object of the game is not to win as much as you possibly can and then die, that this whole idea that we have to add another zero and that Milton Friedman had a point I think is ridiculous.

That what we're here to do is to be generative and to create possibility, to leave things better than we found them and to be missed if we're not doing what we do.

And so all of the arc of my work is basically saying, "Here's this thing, how can we use it to make things better?"

And sometimes people will misuse my words and build things to tear things down, and that bothers me a lot.

Sometimes I build software projects where the goal is to help charities raise money or to connect people.

They're all about the same thing though, which is we only got one planet, we only have a finite amount of time, what are we doing to make things better?

FRANK BLAKE: That's a great throughline and perfect for our audience in Crazy Good Turns.

And related to that, I love it if you describe for our audience a little, because I think it's a fascinating concept, your approach helping charities raise money on Good Bids, which is such a creative idea.

SETH GODIN: Well, thank you, Frank.

We're launching it in April 2024. Here's the short version. Charity auctions are broken.

In the US, charities raise a billion dollars a day, a billion dollars every day from consumers, $350 billion a year, and it's a struggle.

FRANK BLAKE: Right. Painful, not fun.

SETH GODIN: It's a struggle particularly for the people who are doing the fundraising because they're hassling people, they're shaming people, they're doing whatever they can to get this money to do good things with.

And I hate galas. I think they're inefficient and a waste of time.

And one of the reasons that galas do work is because if you get people drunk enough, you can have a charity auction and maybe raise a lot of money.

So the problem with the charity auction is everyone wants a bargain and the charity wants the opposite of a bargain.

So how could I put these pieces together?

So Good Bids is a tool that charities will be able to use to run charity auctions online.

And we made two big shifts. The first one is this, the bidding starts at 10 bucks and goes up in $10 increments and you can't skip a step.

So we're launching with really cool things like an Apollo 11 logo patch that Neil Armstrong owned, a Bob Dylan Slow Train Coming tour jacket, a signed Grateful Dead guitar from Bobby Weir.

Things that are priceless.

You're going to see that this thing is going up for $40 or $50, that's impossible.

Well, each bid is actually a non-refundable donation.

And what that means is if you don't win, you've still made a donation directly to the charity.

And if you do the math, if the bidding gets up to $900, the charity gets $80,000 because each one of those incremental bids was a donation.

And we've tested it and it works. It's a pretty extraordinary thing to see happening.

And the other thing-

FRANK BLAKE: It's such a great idea to flip the paradigm.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. I hope so. I hope so.

We're never sure if things like this are going to work, but it's been a year in the making. I'm working with a worldwide team of people.

But the last part that's really cool is if you tell someone about it and they use your link to bid, you get a free bid in any auction of any amount.

So even a thousand dollars, you don't have to pay for it.

It actually makes the charity more money when you use a free bid because it inflates the auction.

But collecting free bids is a really good way for you to participate, even if you don't want to actively send 500 or $700 to a charity.

And that makes it more fun and making it more fun is the kind of thing that attracts people.

FRANK BLAKE: And how are you going to release this to the world?

SETH GODIN: Well, so each charity has an incentive to tell their donors about it.

So the early bids, I believe, will come from people who are already fans of the charity.

Then people will start sharing their link to get free bids and then the collectors will show up.

So it's a three tier thing.

I'm going to launch the first dozen on my blog, and then after that, hopefully the flywheel kicks in and people start embracing it.

FRANK BLAKE: That's fantastic. When I read it, I thought that is such a great idea-

SETH GODIN: Thanks, Frank.

FRANK BLAKE: That just flips the paradigm.

And I like it also because it ties to what I would say was another thing I learned from you.

You have a great phrase about changing the system to change the outputs, and this feels like an example of that.

SETH GODIN: Yeah, I mean, I'm doing a lot of thinking right now about systems. People don't really understand systems.

If you think about the solar system, which we've all heard of, the sun doesn't touch the planets, but the planets rotate the way they rotate.

That it turns out the invisible connections, in this case, gravity, control things.

No matter how much Earth wants to head toward Venus, it can't. It's in a system.

And the healthcare system is a system. And the military industrial complex is a system and your family is a system, and the place you work is a system.

So if we can just change the little edges of systems about what we report, what we measure, what things like around here, it can have a generative effect.

So I'll give you an example which I think keys into the arc of the show. In 1990, the summer camp where I grew up was about to go out of business.

So I shut down my business, moved to Canada, and the granddaughter, the founder, and I stepped in to run it and it's still running strong all these years later.

And I was 30 years old and I knew I was going to have to manage 90 people, all of whom were between 18 and 23 years old, where I didn't have a lot of connection or authority because they were a generation different than me.

And I showed up with a whole bunch of pink "while you were out" slips. I got this idea from my late friend and teacher Zig Ziglar.

Each one I had printed on it, I like, and there was a blank, because...

For the first week and a half of camp, every time I found a staff member doing something right, I wrote their name and what they had done right on the pink slip and I handed it to them.

And the first few days people are rolling their eyes, these are teenagers, "Why are you manipulating me?"

And then I noticed on their clipboards that they carried around these little pink slips.

And then a couple of days later, some guy who has always been a troublemaker came up and said, "What do I have to do to get one of those pink slips?"

The point was we changed a tiny piece of the culture of the system and it became contagious.

And we can look at systems and see them if we want to, and then we can lean in and change the parts that are available for us to change as opposed to just trying to change the big parts which are out of our control.

FRANK BLAKE: That is a brilliant lesson. So applicable, I think, both in personal life and professional life.

It ties to…uh…I noticed in the Tim Ferriss Tools of Titans that he quotes you as saying, "What's the thing to do? Send someone a thank you note tomorrow."

SETH GODIN: Yeah.

FRANK BLAKE: Is that the same genesis?

SETH GODIN: It's very similar.

I mean, it's funny because people hear that and they say to themselves, "What's the cheapest, easiest way I can hack this? I know. I'll set up an email and then..."

No, that's not a thank you note. A thank you note says, "I extended myself. I put time and effort into something."

When you and I met for the first time half an hour ago, you didn't have to talk to me the way you did, but I received it the way you sent it to me, which is that there was real connection there and I accepted the thank you you offered me.

And there are millions of ways we can do it, but what we can't do is automate it, use a third party service and just have emails go out.

That's not the answer.

FRANK BLAKE: Right. So Permission Marketing was your first really big book.

How did it change your life, if at all?

And maybe describe for the audience what the book was about and why it had such a huge impact.

SETH GODIN: So I started as a book inventor, a book producer. It's called a book packager.

I did 120 books, one a month for 10 years. I had a small team of people. I wrote the first book about emojis and smileys.

I did books with Jay Levinson, I did books on gardening. And so I knew the publishing world.

And this book was the first book where I was on the cover as an author author.

And as a result, I didn't have all of the thrill that a real author gets the first time their real book goes because I had done this so many times before.

FRANK BLAKE: Oh, interesting.

SETH GODIN: What made a difference for me is I invented an industry that's now worth $20 billion, $40 billion a year.

And I didn't own any of the industry. I was just the person who was narrating it.

And to be able to get that benefit of the doubt, I think was the key life lesson that when I show up and talk about something else, people are inclined to listen to me.

Not always believe me, but listen to me because I was really right at least once.

And what I learned from that is often it pays to treat somebody else as if they had done that, even if they haven't.

So here I am talking to you, we've never met before. Your professional resume is extraordinary, but I can talk to you without knowing that by assuming your professional resume is extraordinary.

If we make that assumption, everything in the conversation is going to go better.

You can always go back to distrusting somebody later, but for now, give them the benefit of the doubt.

FRANK BLAKE: Right.

And it has struck me that you've remained an incredibly influential voice on the internet, really from the 1990s on.

I'm curious to get your - Where do you think the state of things are?

Has the internet fulfilled its promise or in the process of fulfilling its positive promise? Unrelentingly negative? Where are we?

SETH GODIN: Oh, so a few things I'll tell you about my biggest mistake.

But before that, in 1840, the King of Sardinia said to Charles Babbage, I don't understand why the telegraph would be worthwhile.

What on earth would be useful about being able to send someone a message very quickly?

And only 15 years later, the telegraph completely rewired the world.

When the internet showed up, there were a whole bunch of promises being made. We forgot that a whole bunch of other things we didn't anticipate would come.

The biggest mistake I made was imagining that giving everyone a microphone would be an unalloyed good thing.

And it turns out, as we've seen that when you give trolls a microphone, sometimes they yell and scream.

And a lot of our unhappiness is coming, not because the world is significantly worse than it was, but because we're surrounded by people who make a profit by telling us how bad everything is.

And so a little of my optimism was out of reach, was wrong. But I think this is the very beginning.

AI is the biggest shift in our world since electricity, and we have no conception of how much it's going to change things.

And I think that when we connect a lot of people and add to it a narrator and a connector that works for us for free for 24 hours a day, if we are smart, we will be able to produce something of extraordinary value.

And if we are not careful, we will simply become serfs who work for the giant system.

I'm hoping for the former.

FRANK BLAKE: So explain a little bit the narrator and that was a fascinating comment.

Explain it a little bit.

SETH GODIN: Okay, so let's think a little bit about retail for a second.

If the first thing we had built when John Wanamaker was around was online shopping, and then John Wanamaker said, "You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to build a giant building and I'm going to fill it with stuff, some of which is perishable, and I'm going to wait for people to decide they want that stuff who will then come to my building."

That's insane, right? It doesn't make any sense.

And it's the coordination that enabled Amazon to become Amazon.

They don't have any other secrets.

Their secret is they connect a very limited amount of stuff in their warehouse to an enormous number of people.

And by going out on the long tail, the efficiency goes through the roof.

Well, we're not doing that with almost anything else in our world.

We're not doing it with travel or with the resources we expend.

We're not doing it with the way we educate people.

Everything is still based on the John Wanamaker model of let's build a palace and hope that people come and take what they need as opposed to finding people who have something and someone who needs it, connecting them.

How do we build these efficiencies in place that still embrace the choice that markets offer, but add to it something that becomes spectacularly more efficient?

Like, private cars make zero sense. Why do we have private cars?

Once a car knows how to drive itself and park itself, you don't need it.

It will just come for you and the hundred other people who share that car, et cetera, et cetera.

All of that's going to happen. It's probably going to happen in our lifetime.

And when we then add to it, where is somebody who's hungry? Where is someone who's lonely? Where is someone who has a health issue?

How do we get those people connected with people who are ready to help them?

And there's nothing keeping us from doing that, and we really need to.

FRANK BLAKE: Right. And do you see people who give you confidence who are focused on that now?

SETH GODIN: Most of the people who are famous in Silicon Valley stopped evolving after they read Ayn Rand when they were 14 years old. And they are-

FRANK BLAKE: Or Seneca in their 20s.

SETH GODIN: Yes, exactly.

And they are building things that other people are turning on their heads in an interesting way.

The question when we think about the arc is does it actually bend toward justice?

Does it actually bend toward creating cohesion?

And my feeling is that breaking news and all the trauma that's thrown into our front door every day makes us feel bad.

But it also has a positive side effect, which is that it's very hard to isolate yourself from the people around you ever again, that you can go build a compound in Hawaii, but you're not going to be able to survive an apocalypse.

And so when we see these opportunities showing up, maybe it begins with an Airbnb, "Oh, I can make a little bit of money," but then it turns into a club of 40 people in Brooklyn who found themselves only because of this network.

And those 40 people are finding meaning simply because they had been strangers next door to each other and now they're not.

And what we get to do is build new systems using these tools because the tools are available to everybody.

FRANK BLAKE: And these will…I mean I…And the source of positive community versus sometimes it feels like we're in negative communities, how will we start to bend that arc?

SETH GODIN: Well, so to give you an example, I built a community called purple.space, and there's 1,200 people in it.

And since you and I started talking, a dozen of them have written something.

And this happens 24 hours a day, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

There's no trolling, there's no pitching, there's no selling. There's just mutual support.

And how many of us could build something like that?

And what happens when one of those connects to another one of those?

It's so easy to hate those people over there and to love the people in your circle, but our circle can get bigger if we care.

And when I was coming up, if I didn't get super lucky, no one would've read any of my work because there were only five book editors in the world that could have said, "We approve your book can come out."

Now anybody who's got a smartphone can publish their work.

So the amplification of the good finders is possible.

And one of the things that I get from your podcast is you are highlighting people who want to make things better.

And what I'm saying is they have more microphones, more bullhorns, more tools than they used to.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, no, look, I think I am on the optimistic side with this as well and I feel like one aspect of it is it never would've been possible for a number of people to listen to you, to just hear Seth Godin talk and give your observations and wisdom about life.

You just wouldn't have had that opportunity. And it's really quite extraordinary.

SETH GODIN: Yeah. And it's so easy for us to take it for granted the same way by 1860, everyone thought the telegraph was normal.

FRANK BLAKE: Right. So obviously other than yourself, whose work or writings would you recommend our listeners pay attention to?

SETH GODIN: Well, I'll give you some unlikely answers and some likely ones great.

There's a woman named Patti Smith who's one of my heroes.

FRANK BLAKE: The singer Patti Smith?

SETH GODIN: The singer Patti Smith.

FRANK BLAKE: All right, great.

SETH GODIN: Her autobiography called Just Kids.

The audiobook in particular is heartbreakingly beautiful and it will help you see that you can make art without having a giant audience.

My friend, Ben Zander, and his late wife, Ros, wrote a book called The Art of Possibility, and I think that's one of the most important books I've ever read.

It is about giving yourself an A, not taking yourself so seriously and creating this generative cycle of contribution.

For people who are building a small business, my friend, Nicole Walters, her book, which is her autobiography, came out last year and she talks about her journey as someone who didn't win the lottery when it comes to how she was raised and how she figured out how to build a community.

And I think her community now has a hundred thousand people in it who she is narrating for who are building something.

If you're more of an intellectual, Lewis Hyde wrote a fabulous book called The Gift, and Frank, if you haven't read it, I think you're really going to get a lot out of it.

FRANK BLAKE: Excellent. All right.

SETH GODIN: It's the kind of book that-

FRANK BLAKE: H-Y-D-E?

SETH GODIN: H-Y-D-E. That's the kind of book that if it's the only book someone ever wrote, it would be enough.

FRANK BLAKE: Wow, high high. That is high praise.

I love the phrase you used at the start of your response, which was the generative cycle of giving, which is really what this podcast is about.

Can you give some explanation of that?

SETH GODIN: Okay, so I am not opposed to offering a life preserver to someone who is drowning.

And if you see someone who needs $5, I hope you'll give it to them.

But that's the endless emergency of poverty because tomorrow someone else will need $5.

But the endless emergency of poverty is let's just dump a bag of rice and drive away.

My friend, Jacqueline Novogratz, started the Acumen Fund. Acumen invests in entrepreneurs who build solutions for the poorest people on earth.

So if you're in a little village in rural India and there's no electricity, which is about a third of the people who live in India and someone sells you a solar lantern for the cost of three months worth of kerosene, now you have light at night for the next five years as opposed to kerosene for the next three months.

That light also lets you charge your cell phone and having your cell phone connects you to the nearby village.

So if you need a part for your tractor, you don't have to waste three days to go get...

And then the cycle and then the cycle in the cycle.

So then when Water Health International shows up and says, "We will give clean water to everyone in the village if we get 50 cents per person," it becomes generative because you can do it again and again and again.

And Acumen, the last time I checked, had helped 150 million people who make three to $5 a day improve their lives.

If they had just given people a dollar, that wouldn't have worked, right? And so we need systems.

I think most of the systems need to come from centralized community government sort of things, but we need systems in every way to be able to help people up a ladder so that the emergency itself goes away.

And that sort of generosity, seeing systems and investing time and money to fix them, I think pays bigger dividends than simply solving today's emergency.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah, well said.

So I ask everybody who comes on our podcast, who is someone in your life who's done a crazy good turn for you at any point in your life?

Just someone you say, "Boy, this person just did an amazingly kind thing for me."

SETH GODIN: I don't want to be disingenuous.

The list of people on any given day is dozens or hundreds long, but I'm going to start where I started today.

I want to thank you. I really do.

I think that the way you are approaching this stage of what you're doing in your career is moving to me, and you are spending so much time shining a light on other people.

I just want to take a minute to say I'm going to remember our conversation because you showed up the way you did.

FRANK BLAKE: Well, that's beyond kind and it's made my day, month, year, and on.

But I will press you still.

There's someone who you say, "Boy, but whatever the size of the audience of this podcast, I'm going to shine on this person who did something great for me."

SETH GODIN: Okay, well, two nights ago I was driving on the Major Deegan Expressway in New York City and I hit a hole that was probably six inches deep.

FRANK BLAKE: Sounds like the Major Deegan.

SETH GODIN: Not only got an instant flat tire, but wrecked the suspension of my car.

And there's only one company that's allowed to tow your car on the Major Deegan.

And first the tow truck driver showed up with a smile. He could not have been nicer, and he said, "I'm just supposed to dump you here, but would you like me to take you to a place that might be able to fix it?"

This is 10 o'clock on Sunday night in New York City in the Bronx.

I said, "That would be great, thank you."

He drives two more blocks and I get to a little gas station that should be closed.

It's 10 o'clock on Sunday night. These guys run out of the gas station with one of those jacks that they use at the Indy 500.

They get my car picked up, they go, they pull the tire off, they run to the back, they come out, they say, "We have the tire."

How can you have this tire? The places?

And in every single interaction, they could not have been kinder.

And when we were done, they asked for a quarter of what I was prepared to pay.

So I paid them what I was prepared to pay.

But not one person in that interaction said, "How do I take advantage of this moment?"

Not one person in that interaction said, "I'll probably never see this guy again. How do I win?"

They said, "My day will get better if I can help somebody else's day get better."

And the fact that I know Miguel's name from the tow truck is just because he gave me his card, but the guys at the gas station ran away before I could get their names.

And it's these shifts in our posture away from the biting and everything else that just fills me with optimism about what's possible.

FRANK BLAKE: That's a wonderful, brilliant answer. Thank you.

And thank Miguel and everyone in the gas station.

I don't know, so in the crazy good turn firmament, a crazy good turn on the Major Deegan in Sunday night with a flat tire ranks way up there, because that story could have ended very, very differently.

SETH GODIN: It's true.

FRANK BLAKE: Yeah. Seth, this has been beyond a privilege and usually I ask our guests, how do people follow you and learn more about you?

I don't think that's necessary at all in this case, but I still would offer if there are things that you want to direct our listeners to.

SETH GODIN: Oh, you're kind. If you go to seths.blog, there's 9,000 blog posts. They're all free.

And if you go to goodbids.org in April, you'll be able to see what we're up to.

FRANK BLAKE: That's fantastic. That's terrific.

Well, thank you again. It's been a real honor and a privilege.

SETH GODIN: Thanks, Frank. Keep making a ruckus.