#105 Seth Godin: Failing On Our Way To Mastery

Nobody has everyone as their customer, nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone ... We have to be for someone—the smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.

The only way to learn is by doing things. We can read about how to swim, and we can read about how to make a vegetarian Maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it.

If you had a boss who woke you up in the middle of the night, scolded you for not working hard enough, criticized all your work, and told you you were never going to amount to anything, you would not work for that person for very long. And yet, most of us, that is our own boss. That's who we work for—that voice in our head. And if that voice is shaming you, you need to figure out how to undo that internal narrative because it is extinguishing your work.

The mistake that so many people building something make is they get hung up on the feedback of people who it’s not for as opposed to being obsessed with the people who it is for. Can they live without it? Would they miss it if it were gone. Let’s make that. That’s what we should make.

A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise, whether or not they feel like it ... Amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make. I love being an amateur at some things ... But if you’re going to be a pro, it means you need to understand the state of the art; it means you need to raise the bar; you need to understand who it’s for and what it’s for and what change do you seek to make.

We are not who we are because of our atoms or molecules or DNA; we're who we are because of the stories we tell ourselves—about the pain we're in, the hopes we have, the dreams we live with.

Education is compliant. Education is compulsory. Education is coercion. Learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better.

Do it on purpose, and you'll find out who you are. Asking for a guarantee before you start isn't helpful. Instead, we need to look at a concept [or] idea and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do, if we try it on for size, we will figure out if it fits us—as opposed to the opposite, which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are, and then going and finding the things that fit us.

One of the things that we do is we increase, we dramatize, how expensive it will be to tell other people that we are ignoring sunk costs. 'It will break my parents' heart if I tell them that after 10 years, I hate being a lawyer because they paid for me to go to law school. And so therefore, I'm going to be unhappy for 10 more years because I don't want my parents to be unhappy for an hour.'

Have you ever been creative once in your life? Have you ever solved an interesting problem, told a funny joke, said something to somebody else that needed to be said? I've never met anyone who said 'no.' Everyone has been creative at least once.

The people who say 'I don't have any questions.' Well, no, it's impossible you don't have any questions. What you're actually saying is 'I don't care enough to ask a question that might embarrass me' —that's what you're actually saying.

If you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation.