#672: Seth Godin The Pursuit of Meaning, The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Your Attitude, Overcoming Rejection, Life Lessons from Zig Ziglar, and Committing to Making Positive Change

We get to pick our attitude. And in fact, it's the only thing each of us truly gets to pick. And it doesn't mean what happened to you is what you deserve; it just means that that happened. Now, you get the one and only choice, which is how to process that.

Parents who have a sticker on the back of their car have been indoctrinated to indoctrinate their kids to do the same thing—to say, oh you studied mechanical engineering, so you're going to be a mechanical engineer for the next 70 years, and then you'll die. And that's not what humans are capable of.

Conversations need to happen more; meetings need to happen never ... A conversation means there are questions and there are answers. People are talking to each other. Everyone is changed at the end. A meeting is a delivery of information for the convenience of the person who called it.

The world is going to be whatever the world is. Approaching it with a positive energetic attitude probably will make your experience of the world better.

It is entirely possible that you work in a place where you have no options, you have no agency, you have no significance. If that is actually true, you should quit because you don't get tomorrow over again.

We're all going to die—maybe not in a year, but no one listening to this is going to be alive in 100 years. Even some Silicon Valley billionaires who are getting blood transfusions aren't going to be alive. And so, the only question is are you going to die in a year or 100 years?

Amazon has had turnover as high as 30% in a 90-day period. 30% of all the people they hired across the whole company quit in less than 90 days ... It cost Amazon a third of their profit, a third of their total profit, because of turnover. And the reason is simple: Because when you get there to work in a warehouse—and more than half of all the warehouse injuries in the United States happened in Amazon warehouses last year—they don't treat you like a person.

If we feel significance, we start to feel optimistic, we start to feel meaning, we start to feel human. Where does significance come from? It comes from making a change happen. Can you be really clear about the change you seek to make and who you are making it with and for?

If you're the fastest cheapest person, you're just a mechanical turk. You're just cranking it out, and no one cares about you, because the minute someone's faster and cheaper than you, they'll switch. And what we're looking for is to find work where our work is unmistakably us.

Is there a human somewhere connected to you in person or online, can you connect with them in a way that makes things better for them at least a little, and then can you do it again? ... That is what fills people with meaning.

Turnover is a good thing when we are doing human work, not a bad thing ... I don't want you to stay here because you can't get a better job; I want you to stay here because the conditions we've created, the work we are doing, is worth you staying here for.

Marketers are trying to push people to find meaning in purchases ... The problem with that is it doesn't scale. And after you've got one storage room full of stuff, buying more things doesn't seem to help you find more meaning.

We don't have a profit shortage; we have a meaning shortage.

If you can figure out how to get 5 or 10 people together, you can probably ban gas powered leaf blowers in your village—and that will have 50 times the impact of you switching to an electric car.

Someone sends me a note saying, 'I'm 25-years-old. How do I become a marketer? Where do I get a job? Where do I train?' My answer is you do it by becoming a marketer.

Now boomers are dying. And so, we are living in a culture where there's an overhang of all these people with loud voices, talking about the end of the world—because it's the end of their world, but it's not the end of the world.

Meaning... is when a human being finds a thing that means something to them—a chance for a path forward, a pathway to hope. Everything in their life gets better.

It's very hard to scale freelance work. What you need to do is strip away the busy work, outsource it, and what you need to do is get better clients—because better clients demand better work and pay you more.

At work, we developed proxies because we have to hire people for a 20, 30, 40 year career before they work for us ... One proxy is are you good at interviewing? But of course, unless you're hiring someone to be an interviewer, being good at interviewing is a false proxy.

When the rejections feel personal, if you don't have a way to keep caring but understand that what they are rejecting is the work, not the person, it's super easy to give up.