Ep 1. Seth Godin Talks About His Stanford GSB Experience, When to Quit Your Job, and How to Find Your Next Career
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In this episode, you will hear about key moments in Seth Godin's own Post MBA Pivot and get a taste of his writing and ideas around….
• Knowing when to quit
• Understanding you are not your resume. You are your work
• Why playing it safe is risky.
• Embracing self-determination and leading
This episode is designed to set the stage and frame the stories you will hear from other MBA professionals in future episodes this season.
Transcript
Victoria Hefty (00:00):
Welcome to The Post MBA Pivot Podcast, which shares the stories of professionals who took unexpected, interesting, or unique paths after graduating from business school. This is a podcast for MBA professionals who want to make a pivot, but are struggling to figure out what's next. Today, you'll hear about key moments in Seth Godin's own post-MBA pivot, and get a taste of his writing and ideas around knowing when to quit, understanding you are not your resume, you are your work, why playing it safe is risky, and finally, embracing self-determination and leading.
Victoria Hefty (00:36):
This episode is designed to set the stage and frame the stories you will hear from other MBA professionals in future episodes this season. Seth Godin is the author of 20 books that have been best sellers round the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He's also the founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo Workshops, online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leading, and most of all, changing everything.
Victoria Hefty (01:13):
You might be familiar with his books, Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and Purple Cow, or his latest two books, This is Marketing and The Practice. In addition to writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog, which you can find by typing Seth into Google, is one of the most popular in the world. In 28, he was inducted into The Marketing Hall of Fame and his podcast is in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide. Seth, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.
Seth Godin (01:47):
It's a pleasure. I know what it's like to show up day after day, week after week with a podcast. It's generous and important, so thank you.
Victoria Hefty (01:54):
I really appreciate that. I remember first seeing you in Marie Forleo's video called Finding Your True Calling. I remember watching it the day before Thanksgiving in 2016. I signed up to receive your daily blogs, and I've been reading them ever since. And actually yesterday preparing for this, I checked and I have 1,596 emails from you. It doesn't feel like a lot, but for me actually, the number is quite staggering. So in the year since, I've read several of your books.
Victoria Hefty (02:27):
I've watched countless presentations, especially on YouTube, launched my personal podcast, Activate Purpose, which was inspired by your posts, participated in the marketing seminar, Story Skills Workshop. And in fact, this podcast was the direct outcome of the book, The Practice, where you talk about shipping creative work, even if you don't think it's ready. I'm still amazed that I now have recorded an entire season of episodes and that you and other guests said yes, when all I had was an idea and a one minute podcast trailer to start.
Victoria Hefty (02:58):
But that trust and generosity is a lesson I will take with me forever. It really is hard to overstate how your work has transformed my thinking and my confidence. It means the world to me, and I'm truly honored.
Seth Godin (03:11):
Wow! Well, you had more than a one minute trailer. What you had was a trail that you have been leaving behind for months and for years of showing up, of doing the work, seeing people have contributed. That can't be minimized. And that's the essence of what we're going to talk about today is, you don't get to be an overnight success, but you do get the privilege, if you're lucky, of earning the benefit of the doubt and doing that by consistently creating things that are worth listening to or engaging with.
Victoria Hefty (03:41):
Thank you. I can't wait. I want to begin with one of your first posts that got my attention and I think sets the stage for this. I distinctly remember forwarding this to my husband September 2018. It's called Diving Boards. I don't know if you remember it, because you've written a lot, but I wanted to give people a recap of what it is. The leap at the swimming pool is obvious indeed. 10 steps up the ladder, the weight at the end of the board, the moment in between not diving and diving. The leap is clear. We can see it.
Victoria Hefty (04:12):
We can feel it. In day-to-day life, we have worked with eliminate that feeling. Organizations and marketers and friends work hard to have it happen gradually instead. An incremental, almost invisible creep along a slippery slope, until the next thing you know, we're in a rut or bored or ill. We've constructed a life where we rarely leap, and most of the time we coast or fade or increment our way forward. It may be worth investing the effort into turning some of your decisions back into leaps.
Victoria Hefty (04:43):
This post came precisely at the right time for me, and it really propelled me to make one of my most decisive post-MBA moves, which involved me sort of leaping from pure strategy, management consulting, healthcare background, to professional development coaching and I think most importantly creating. With that, I would really love to start with your own post-MBA story. We're going to go back. I did a timeline and everything. So let's go back to 1982. You graduated from Tufts with a bachelor's in engineering and philosophy.
Victoria Hefty (05:18):
I'm curious, what was the primary motivation to then go to business school?
Seth Godin (05:23):
Yeah, I don't think people often recollect just how much indecision and fear they feel when they're 20 years old, right? When I was at Tufts, a great thing happened to me, which is I got hired for $50 a week to run a failing temporary employment agency on campus. They also hired somebody I'd never met to do the same job as me. And then they said, Here. Here are the keys," and they left the two of us in a room. Steve Dennis and I ended up building the largest student-run business in America, and we had 400 employees.
Seth Godin (05:58):
10% of the Tufts student body work for us. We had a temporary employment agency, a coffee shop, a ticket bureau, a travel agency, a snack business, a birthday cake service. Every week I started a new division. I couldn't make any money because it was loosely affiliated with the school. So it was this wonderful laboratory to see what it felt like to be an entrepreneur. And then as school started to end, I went on job interviews to get engineering jobs. And I realized two things. One, I was incompetent at engineering. Really, really bad at it. And two, it was so boring, my eyes were going to bleed. It was just like, you're going to be in the division that makes this stainless steel screw for this little thing. Oh no! But I had great parents and I had a lot of momentum. I wasn't capable in that moment of saying, "I'm going to walk away from institutional labeling and start an entrepreneurial venture." I just couldn't do it. Steve had decided to go to Harvard Business School, and he was going to apply to Stanford just in case. And I was like, right, well, I'll apply to both of them as well.
Seth Godin (07:11):
We'll see what happens, because at least I get that next stamp, right? But then the two of us sat down and said, "Wait, what if one of us gets into both and one of us gets rejected at both? That would be terrible." We sort of flipped a coin and he got Harvard and I got Stanford, and we took a deep breath and we applied.
Victoria Hefty (07:28):
It worked well.
Seth Godin (07:30):
It worked out fine. Steve was the guy who bought Lands' End when he worked at Sears, and he used to run part of Neiman Marcus, so he's had quite a ride. But I got to Stanford and immediately was shamed for being the second or third youngest person in the class for not having gotten to an investment bank or a commercial bank and wasting two years of my life, for not having labels that proved that I was anything but a wise ass 21 year old.
Seth Godin (07:58):
It didn't help that the first day in the first class I got cold called even though Stanford had a no cold calling policy and just winged it from that day forward. I was just winging it. And I felt a whole bunch of social pressure and shame around career choices, because one of the things they teach you at business school is the job title and the money you get are important. And I wish they didn't teach that, but they do. And the other thing they teach you at business school is to ignore sunk costs.
Seth Godin (08:29):
And almost nobody actually learns that lesson, that the sunk costs are piling on and piling on, because maybe you're living at home, maybe you're not. You're definitely going into debt. You're putting in all this money. You're putting in all this time, and you're earning this label. It's very hard after you earn the label to say, "I'm going to walk away from all of the things that I sacrificed for." At the end of the first year, a guy named Jim, who was the CEO of Activision, came to campus to give a talk. Activision at the time was the...
Seth Godin (09:03):
... Came to campus to give a talk. Activision at the time was the fastest growing company in the history of the world. And I was like, "Oh, that sort of matches my entrepreneurial thing." So I walk up to him after the talk and I said, "I'd love to work for you this summer as assistant to the president." And he looks at me and he goes, "All right, come to my office for an interview next week." Because why else would you speak at Stanford? Because you want someone like me to come over and do that. And it's not a job offer, it's an interview.
Victoria Hefty (09:27):
Yeah.
Seth Godin (09:28):
So I'm cramming for this thing, I'm reading, Marketing Myopia by [Ted 00:09:33] Levitt. I'm thinking about Activision, I'm looking at their products and stuff. And, I go to the interview and I sit down with him and I say, "So, I've been thinking this over."
Seth Godin (09:41):
This is the arrogance of Stanford business school. "I've been thinking this over and I think you're making a big mistake, because all you're making is cartridges for the Nintendo and the future are computers." "And, if you shifted now and started making computer games, you could own that market." And Jim stands up to throw me out of his office. And as he's standing up, the door swings open and it's his VP with a copy of Cashbox, which is like Billboard Magazine. And, it had the official list of the bestselling computer cartridges. And, that week Activision had nine out of the top 10 and he goes down the hall to celebrate. And, I'm just sitting there and he comes back half an hour later. And he says, "Are you still here?" And I say, "Well, you didn't tell me to leave. And he says, "You can start in six weeks."
Victoria Hefty (10:34):
Oh.
Seth Godin (10:34):
"And, you get paid $1,500 a week," or whatever it is.
Victoria Hefty (10:38):
Yeah.
Seth Godin (10:38):
"And, I'll see you in six weeks." I'm like, "Dream come true, status plus fast growth." And, two weeks later my phone rings and it's my girlfriend from college who had agreed to come to California for the summer. And she says, "I don't think I can come to California for the summer," and I need to make a decision. So I call up Jim and I say, "I'm not going to take the job." And now, I don't have a summer job. And, the summer job is really important for the two year thing, so I get on a plane and I fly to Boston. And, somehow I get interviews with Lotus, the people who make 1-2-3 the spreadsheet, with Parker Brothers, because my dream had always been to work for a famous games company. I love games. And, this little tiny startup called Spinnaker, which only had 30 employees.
Seth Godin (11:24):
Lotus throws me out of the office, because I'm not fancy enough for them. Parker Brothers offers me a job in their 200 person computer game division. And I'm like, "Ding, ding, ding." And then, Spinnaker had forgotten they invited me to come in for an interview. And the chairman says, "Yeah, sure, you can come for the summer." And I don't know why, I just don't Victoria, I took the Spinnaker job and I turned down Parker Brothers.
Victoria Hefty (11:52):
Was it even close, or did you just know? Or did you [inaudible 00:11:56]?
Seth Godin (11:56):
[inaudible 00:11:56]. I knew that I was going to have to go back to campus and to my family and say, "I'm making unknown products for a company you never heard of, where I don't have a title." Or I could go back and say, "You know that famous company that makes every board game you've ever heard of," and that's was a huge moment for me. And, it turned out two weeks after the summer started, Parker Brothers shut down the entire division and fired every single person.
Victoria Hefty (12:19):
So, it all worked out.
Seth Godin (12:21):
It all worked out.
Victoria Hefty (12:22):
Now, did you have any inkling of that at all? Or this was, you just picked Spinnaker because it felt right?
Seth Godin (12:26):
I picked it not because it felt like I picked it, because it felt wrong. Because I knew deep down without having words for it, that if I signed up for the business school path, my life wasn't going to be better. So that summer was amazing, changed my life. And at the end of the summer, after the going away party, which was so nice for them to have. The CEO, the president and head of marketing bring into this little room and they say, "We have a secret project, we want you to launch it starting now." I'm like, "But I have to go back to business school," and so I commuted from Boston to California once a week to go to classes a couple of times a week. But after like six or eight weeks of that, one of the professors took pity on me and just gave me my degree, just gave it to me. And, I didn't go to graduation and I didn't go to a reunion.
Seth Godin (13:14):
And I hear from my classmates and they're like, "I worked at Bain for 20 years and I wasted 20 years."
Victoria Hefty (13:21):
Yeah.
Seth Godin (13:22):
So, that's why when you reached out to me, because I don't usually talk about my personal history. When you reach out to me, I was like, "I need to say to people the sunk costs need to be ignored." I know how hard it was for you to get in and to finish business school. You might still be paying it off. It doesn't matter. It's a gift, a gift from your former self. And if you don't want to accept the gift, if the gift isn't going to help you, say no thank you. That's my rant.
Victoria Hefty (13:48):
Well, I love that. And, I just want to touch upon one thing. One, thank you for that because I think that that is something that I, as well as my peers definitely still struggle with. And two, I mean, even when you talk about it now, that experience had Spinnaker, you had written on your blog posts that, "It took me a long time to come close to an experience like that one." And, I wanted to know what was it about that experience that still leaves you feeling like that? I was so curious when I read that.
Seth Godin (14:14):
I think there's probably four components. Let's see if I can list them. One, I was surrounded by smart, fast moving people who were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. And, I really believe that the benefit of the doubt is vitally important. It's one of the reasons you got an MBA. It's also one of the reasons that we have such an extraordinary problem in our culture, because the caste system decides who gets the benefit of the doubt and who doesn't and it's tragic. Number two is I didn't have to make payroll, and that was no last time of my life I didn't have to make payroll. And, I made decisions differently. And that's the one thing I have never liked about being on my own, is spending money like it's yours because it's yours, and knowing that if you screw up, people are going to be out.
Seth Godin (15:02):
And in that thing, I was putting on a show and the people who were supporting me said, "Go, go, go." And so, the third piece of it was that we were on the frontier. And the thing about the frontier is that you can go really, really fast. I'm just hooked on that. If you're going fast in service of possibility, there's nothing better. And so, instead of waiting for approvals, instead of waiting for committee meetings, instead of waiting for something that's never going to come like [Gato 00:15:30], we just went. And, I think everyone should experience that if they can.
Victoria Hefty (15:37):
Ah, I love that. Thank you for expanding on that, so we're going to fast forward to 1998. And at the time, you were the founder and CEO of a company, as I mentioned Yoyodyne, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, hopefully. And, seemed that you were working on a lot of other projects as well. And you also wrote in that same post, "1998 was the peak year for project craziness, with books and online projects coming out at a feverish pace." " At one point, I did project presentations in three different states in one day." "I finally and painfully realized that entrepreneurs were different from freelancers, sold my company and shifted gears." So of course for me, I wanted to know what was that realization?" What is the difference between an entrepreneur and a freelancer?
Seth Godin (16:19):
So freelancers get paid when they work and we do our own work. I am a freelancer, I'm proud of it. If someone reads something, I wrote it. If someone hires me to give a gig, I give a gig. I'm the only employee of my whole company. Entrepreneurs should not be doing the work. Entrepreneurs, their only job is to build something bigger than themselves. Their job is to raise money, to figure out who to hire, put those pieces together, salvage [inaudible 00:16:48] problems and repeat. If you are doing the work in your organization and you're calling yourself an entrepreneur, what you're actually doing is hiring the cheapest best available person, you, and that is keeping you from doing your actual job. And so, when I was building Yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies, my job was to imagine the future of the internet and to staff it up.
Seth Godin (17:11):
But after I got to 75 people, I discovered 52 of them were working directly for me. I had 52 direct reports, because I was loving the day trading of all this excitement. And I wasn't doing my real job, which is hiring someone to do any job that I could do. And I looked at the two and I said, "I know how to be an entrepreneur, but it's killing me and I'm not doing it as well as I could, I love to be a freelancer, I like to do this work." And the same thing happened with Akimbo, in the sense that Akimbo is now an independent B Corp. I don't own it, I don't run it. That's great, because then I can go back to doing what I want to do, what I'm good at, which is I made this, that's my slogan, I made this.
Victoria Hefty (17:52):
Yeah. No, I love that. And, it seems that obviously set you free but did you face any, you talk about resistance or like making that shift, or was it like, "No, we're good, I'm not looking back?"
Seth Godin (18:03):
It took me...
Victoria Hefty (18:03):
... after, was it like, "No, we're good. I'm not looking back."?
Seth Godin (18:03):
It took me more than a year to recover. It was the hardest year of my professional life, because everyone said, "Congratulations, you sold your company to Yahoo." I didn't feel that way. All the way back to business school, the mindset is, what's your market cap? How much money did you raise? How many people are on your team? Who are you in charge of that? The people who sold their companies weren't considered winners. They were considered people who didn't have the guts to keep going. In the long run, I have no regrets. My family really benefited from the choices that I made. And it hurt to watch Yahoo shut down every single thing that I built. They bought it to shut it down, they didn't tell me that. It hurt me to watch the family that I had created at work eventually fall apart because the systems change.
Seth Godin (18:54):
It is personal, but it's also work. When people sign up for a career or they sign up for a job, they shouldn't be under the illusion that they have joined your family forever. What they've done is come together to build a project, and we owe it to people to treat them with dignity and to tell them the truth, but we don't owe it to them to take care of them forever.
Victoria Hefty (19:16):
No. I've loved that, and I actually think that's a perfect segue into, I think one of the biggest primary questions that professionals who are debating this pivot, Should I stay, or should I go? I have the book, love this, I call it small but mighty book. It teaches you when to quit and when to stick. First, you call a dip a temporary setback that you will overcome if you keep pushing. So let me know if you're looking at it a different way, but for someone who is, let's say, working in a corporate setting, for example, can you explain how to know when to keep pushing through and when to quit, or at least some ideas on how to even think through that question? It's so common, and I'm just very curious about your perspective on that.
Seth Godin (19:59):
Most people who work at big organizations in executive type jobs, what they're best at is going to meetings, and what they're second best at is making decisions, and what they're third best at is sticking with the system, because industrial capitalism is a system. And so, you didn't invent Heinz ketchup. Heinz ketchup was here before you got here. You didn't invent Jello. Jello was here before you got here. Your job is to not screw it up, and they had one more brick in the wall. It's hard for someone who's good at that to say, " Oh, I could go out there and do that on my own, because there's a whole bunch of things you're not good at that would be necessary for you to do that. So I want to begin by saying, there is no shame with doing good work in a system where you are welcome, if you are proud of the work that's being output. You need to figure out if that's what you want to spend your days doing. Okay?
Seth Godin (20:55):
With that said, if you have a dream, whether that is to be senior vice president or CEO, or that dream is to have a successful record deal, or that dream is to get to the point where your nonprofit is well funded, I begin by asking the following question, has anyone in your shoes ever once gotten their starting where you are starting? If that has never happened, that doesn't mean it can't work, but you need to treat it differently than organic chemistry is hard, and I want to be a doctor, because every single person who's a doctor has made it through organic chemistry.
Seth Godin (21:32):
So if you want to be the number four person at Ford motor company, well, look at all the other people who've gotten there. Well, how did they do it? That's your dip, because most people aren't going to get to the other side, but now you see what the dip is. On the other hand, if you're a 42 and you want to win an Olympic medal, you're just hiding. You're not going to win an Olympic medal. It's too late. There is no dip. It's just a dead end. So, take a deep breath and realize you have other opportunities in front of you, but not that one.
Seth Godin (21:59):
And so, part of what I said in the book is, if you see the path, then the question is, what do the people who make it through the path have that you currently don't? And the answer is, a single-minded determination and enough resources to get through the part where everyone quits. So the way you do that is by getting rid of all sorts of other elements in your life. Then you say, "Yeah, I have five things I'm doing, but the people will make it through the different way do it too. So if I'm really serious about being the best in the world at X, I'm going to have to give up these other three things the same way I gave up ballet lessons when I was sick. You're not [inaudible 00:22:34] anymore. There's no shame in quitting something if it's going to free you up to get really great at something else.
Victoria Hefty (22:41):
I love that, and I think you talked about hiding. I think that goes into the second part of the dip that I remember cringing at. I was like, "Oh, okay." So you wrote, "Quitting at the right time, it's difficult. Most of us don't have the guts to quit, worse when faced with the dip, sometimes we don't quit. Instead, we get mediocre. The most common response to the dip is to play it safe, to do ordinary work, blameless work, work that's beyond reproach. When faced with a dip, most people suck it up and try to average their way to success." Can you expand on why you ultimately say that while it hurts, average is for losers? Because you're right, but I would love to hear this.
Seth Godin (23:20):
Well, you just paraphrased almost every MBA brochure.
Victoria Hefty (23:24):
I know.
Seth Godin (23:27):
Because the MBA brochure is basically saying, do all these things and you can have an average career, but you're also going to make $300,000 a year. Welcome. Welcome to the insiders. If that's the goal, and I remember the people who sat next to me in business school, that was their goal. They were wearing lands and golf shirts and their goal was not to be on the spot or to take responsibility. Their goal was these Fortune 1,000 companies. They need some, forgive me, [inaudible 00:23:56], and there's going to be a whole bunch of people around who can be counted on, and you'll be well paid and you get to join the golf club. If that's your goal, I got nothing to help you with. But a lot of us feel deep down like we would like to see and be seen, like we would like to innovate, that we would like to lead.
Seth Godin (24:15):
You cannot get there by being average, you just can't. You get there by doing something that wouldn't help you fit in a business school and doesn't help you fit in at the big company you work at now. That doesn't mean you have to leave your job. I have a friend who launched a multi-billion dollar... Two who launched multi-billion dollar brands at Fortune 100 companies. The first six months they were doing it, everyone shunned them, because you're not supposed to launch a brand from scratch. That means you have to go take things, meetings that feel like a risk, and you have to make assertions that you can't prove, and you have to be really rigorous about what you stand for. They don't teach you that at business school.
Victoria Hefty (24:56):
No, they don't. That's going to make me go back and reread that. This goes to the second thing, I think, people emphasize, especially for business school, and as a career coach, this resume, right? If I just tweak that one sentence, if I just have that one word, I will magically get this job. And there was a whole thing that you wrote, but a couple of things stand out. It says, "The very system that produced standardized tests also invented the resume. If you don't have a resume, what do you have?" Then you list a couple of things. How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows, and sophisticated project an employer can touch? And you say, "Some say, 'Well, that's fine, but I don't have those in my favorite.'" You're right. Yeah. That's my point.
Victoria Hefty (25:45):
My husband and I laughed at that. If you don't have these things, what leads you to believe that you are remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don't have more than a resume, you've been brainwashed into compliance. And this is my favorite great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for, those jobs don't get filled by people emailing in resumes. And so, I love that because you said you are not your resume, you are your work.
Victoria Hefty (26:12):
And so, this is so important to me. Can you expand on that? Because there's such a huge emphasis on resumes, and I feel like we're missing the bigger picture.
Seth Godin (26:23):
Right. What does the resume say? The resume says, if you are a big company, here's proof that I know how to fit in in a big company, and here's a list of other big companies where I have fit in. It works almost as well for small companies, but basically it says to the risk averse, lazy hiring manager, you will not get in trouble for moving this person to the next level, because their resume keeps you out of trouble. That is a very long and roundabout way to get to the place you seek to go. Let's say you want to be head of strategy at a company that's in the travel and entertainment business, just making this up.
Seth Godin (27:02):
Well, if you started a blog-
Seth Godin (27:03):
... just making this up. Well, if you started a blog where you painstakingly, company by company, analyzed their strategy, one competitor after another, page after page with spreadsheet, and you spend an hour a day on it, in three months, you would have learned more and proven that you know more about the strategy systems in that industry than any person on earth. And if you then turn that into a podcast where you were interviewing different people about the competitive structure of it, how long is it going to take for your phone to ring? Not very long, because you are the best in the world at knowing the competitive dynamics among the, I don't know, nine companies that make oat milk. And why wouldn't they call you? It's not safe to call you, but it's even less safe to not call you, because maybe you're going to go work for their competition instead.
Victoria Hefty (27:54):
I love that. I think that's an example that hopefully will have people thinking, because I know it's got me thinking. So we have the resume, and so we're now going into the... Put the resume aside. Now, selecting. And this is where I think it gets really important in other ways. So when you talk about picking what type of company to work for, you write in Linchpin about finding a job. If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you'll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job. This is the one and only decision you get to make. You get to choose. You can work for a company that wants indispensable people, or you can work for a company that works to avoid them. So personally, I re-read this section multiple times, because one, I wanted to argue with it, but I also profoundly knew that what you were saying was also true.
Victoria Hefty (28:42):
So I know for a fact that I, along with many of my peers... We feel like we often have to strip away parts of our personalities to fit in or land those roles, those coveted prestigious roles that maybe have traditionally not been available to us, but in the process, we lose ourselves and we do definitely become numb. So when you wrote, "You get to choose," I wanted to say, "Well, don't I also deserve to be part of this prestigious company and feel like I fit in?" But then when I do get in, I always feel so stifled. So I think after reading this and hearing you, I think it's very apparent why. So my question for you is, how does this idea apply to people who perhaps maybe struggle with these experiences of how much to conceal? Because maybe they don't want exposure, or maybe they do want exposure to some of the best companies or training in the world.
Victoria Hefty (29:32):
Is it about finding the right type of place to work? Is it about getting that experience training and then moving on? How do you sort of navigate that nuance that I know I personally feel?
Seth Godin (29:43):
Okay, so thank you for giving me a chance to clarify this. I am not talking about authenticity. Authenticity is dramatically overrated in a commercial setting. If you go to a concert, you don't want the performer to be authentic. If they're having a headache, you don't want them whining. You want the best version of that performer. If you go to a doctor, you want her to be the very best version of her, even if she and her partner were having a big fight before they decided to do surgery, right? So we don't look for authenticity except in tiny corners of Instagram and Twitter. But everywhere else, authenticity is not what we want.
Seth Godin (30:22):
What we want is consistency. And so what I am saying is industrial capitalism has dehumanized everybody. It has been particularly abusive to women, to people of color, to people who have been traditionally overlooked, but it has been abusive to every individual, because it said, "The shift starts at this time, whether you want it or not. Your job is to put this widget into that box, whether you want to or not. Your job is to do it at the rate that everybody else is doing." You're supposed to leave behind what you feel like today, and instead show up consistently. So that's built into industrial capitalism. And what I am saying is if you decide that the role you want to play is innovator, leader, person who questions authority, somebody who when they are doing their best work is not like everyone else, don't go to work for Chase Bank, because they don't like that.
Seth Godin (31:17):
They don't want somebody who'd do that. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person that wants to speak up on behalf of the customer because that gives you joy, go to work at [Zappos 00:31:26], because they want you to do that. So what I'm getting at is decide what role you want to play, because we're all playing a role all the time, and then pick a show where you can get cast in that role, as opposed to saying, "Now that I'm in, I can do this thing that feels authentic," because you never get to do the thing that feels authentic, even when you're the boss. Back when I was doing those presentations in three states at Yoyodyne, well, it's because we only had two weeks of payroll in the bank. And if I hadn't raised that money, I was going to have to fire 50 people.
Seth Godin (31:58):
But I couldn't go to work and say, " I'm near tears, and I don't know what to do," because if I had done that, I wouldn't be playing my role, and no one would have had a better day, and no one would have been able to make it more likely that my company would survive. And so I had to consistently show up with confidence and energy, even though I was really sure a safe was going to fall on my head. And that's just the way this system has worked our whole lives. Now, we are doing a better job at saying, "You can't bring microaggressions to work, and you can't exercise your power and privilege in ways that hurt other people," and that's long overdue, but we're still playing a role. And even if you're working from home, you can't wear pajamas to the Zoom call. That's just part of the deal.
Victoria Hefty (32:48):
As much as we want to. Yes, I agree. So to sort of round this out, one, I wanted to thank you again for your time today. I want to be sensitive, because I know that you do have a very packed schedule. So I think this is a perfect way to end, was to share two of your posts that really meant a lot to me. I think as a Black woman, as someone who is trying to find her way, it gave me that confidence and encouragement to not focus on the outcome so much, and just take it day by day or drip by drip, as you say.
Victoria Hefty (33:22):
So you wrote, "Perhaps the biggest shift the new economy brings is self-determination. Access to capital and appropriate connections aren't nearly as essential as they were. Linchpins are made, not born. There's no doubt that environment still plays a huge role, and race or birth location are all still significant factors, but the new rules mean that even if you've got all the right background, you won't make it unless you choose to." And so you write, "The greatest artists see and understand the challenges before them without carrying the baggage of expectations or attachment to an outcome. You must be indispensable to thrive in the new economy, and the best way to do that is to lead. What does it take to lead? The key distinction is the ability to forge your own path, to discover route from one place to another that hasn't been paved, measured, or quantified."
Victoria Hefty (34:11):
So with that, I wanted to end our time today. And I know you always tell people, "Go and make a ruckus," so I will allow you to say any final words, but thank you again so much for joining the Post MBA Pivot podcast.
Seth Godin (34:24):
I got to say, I'm a little choked up. I'm so inspired by you and the way you are doing this. And what it means to go make a ruckus is not go be obnoxious, not go be difficult, what it means is to generously solve other people's problems. And the fact is that for all of its defects, the market economy has made it that if you are generously solving other people's problems, they often ask you to do it again. And that ruckus that we get to make on behalf of the people we serve, that's at the heart of who you are and what you're doing, and it just fills me with hope and possibility to see the way you're doing it, Victoria. So thank you for riffing with me today.
Victoria Hefty (35:05):
Thank you so much, Seth.
Seth Godin (35:07):
All right, we'll talk soon.
