Josh Nielsen from Zencastr Interviews Seth Godin 🎙 Zencastr, Record High Definition Video Podcasts

[Music] welcome everybody today we've got a very exciting guest seth godin well i guess you could call me excited

because it's great to talk to you and i appreciate you taking the time so thanks awesome awesome thank you seth uh likely needs knowing in her introduction but if you are not familiar with seth

he's an author an entrepreneur and most of all a teacher he has 19 worldwide bestsellers including the purple cow and tribes soon to be 20

by my guess with his new book the practice that's coming out on november 3rd i believe seth is also marketing hall of fame member and perhaps uh

equally as impressively he's a daily blogger for the last 10 years uh seth i'd love to learn how you decided to do that and why and what it was like 10 years ago when

you first made that choice uh okay so daily blogging is something that almost everyone should do even if you don't do it under your own name even if you don't have a business reason to do it

the idea that tomorrow you need to say something fairly permanent for anyone who wants to find it makes your life better it helps you notice things

it lets you put a stake in the ground i'm really glad i did it i started blogging 25 years ago before they were called blogs

and have written thousands and thousands and thousands of blogs what i was doing was semi-erratic some days i do three or four posts some days i'd skip and then about i think it was a little

bit more than 10 years ago i took a deep breath and i said this should be a practice this should be something that i don't have a discussion with myself about whether or not i'm going to do it

it is simply something that i do and that's why i like the idea of a daily blog why i think most people should have one we brush our teeth every day we take a shower every day

you should blog every day so i'm curious because that was you know for someone who is not a daily blogger that feels like a huge commitment and i think a lot of people might feel the same way why do you focus on daily

rather than you know weekly or monthly to start off with at least what what i'm trying to do and i do this a lot in the book is destroy

perfectionism perfectionism is a trap perfectionism has nothing to do with perfect perfectionism has nothing to do with quality perfectionism is simply a place to hide

and so if you say i'm going to blog every month you're saying well every month i have to put something out there that is justified by the fact that i did it that i waited a whole month to do it

whereas a daily blog you simply blog and you know that half of them are going to be below average and you know that you're going to do 365 of them and you know that tomorrows

could be even better than today's it is a commitment but it is not a risk and it's okay if your daily blog posts don't say very much i

just am encouraging people to say shipping the work is part of our craft and if you get the chance to ship the work in this low-risk way

why wouldn't you take it i think back now it's it's hard to think uh it's sometimes hard to think yeah i'm going to do that moving forward but it's really easy to look back and say man if i would have just started

five years ago or even one year ago how much more experience would i be now how much more confident would i be how much more would i've learned from uh you know my audience and honed that down

and so you um i i gotta say you know that that outlook has made me feel like i've lost a lot of time and opportunity but you know no better time than to start now i suppose

exactly and i didn't blog until i was 35 years old so i wasted 35 years so i think a great way to think about your book is contained in the last line

which says the magic is that there's no magic would could you care to elaborate on what you mean by that we would like to believe that there is magic in many elements of our life

because then it lets us off the hook if you don't feel motivated if you don't feel like it if if if you say well the magic didn't show up today and

struggling sales people wait for the magic writers who pretend they have writer's block wait for the magic programmers who are stuck with a bug wait for the magic there's no magic no one in the universe is paying

attention to you there aren't angels or people with lightning bolts or the muse just watching you carefully and then throwing down little breadcrumbs you're all you got and so as soon as you

acknowledge that this is a skill not a talent it puts you on the hook because you can learn to do it better you can bring more

rigor to it you can bring more generosity to it it's on you you have a practice no one wants to go to a doctor who says oh yeah they died it must have just been you know the heavens

you want to go to a doctor who says i know why they died and that it's not going to happen to my next patient they get better at it and that's our craft is to lean into the work

and to bring a practice to it there's another another quote from the book that i think really sums that up is you said creative creativity is an action not a feeling and that getting into the

flow or the the zone as i tend to call it is a a side effect of this process and the practice that you go through rather than

something that finds you and strikes you with a bolt of lightning and now you've got it um and again that was something that's just a really empowering way to think about it because i think you do look at

it's easy to look at other people and say okay he's just super talented you know he's uh you know this guy just has it you know you know like even

some people even claim that that's how it works for them but you know perhaps that's uh they're fooling themselves i think as you said in the book uh around bob dylan i think he said somewhere the effect that

um the songs just come to him and whatever and you're like you know i think he called on him which i thought was pretty funny i i did and if bob wants to give me a ring i'll happily argue with him about

it i'm sure i'm sure um you had a couple analogies in the book that i thought were pretty helpful one of them was about a story you told

about fishing fly fishing without a hook um and the point was and i think it's ties into not not getting caught up in the outcome um and just focusing on the process why is

that so important and why do you why are you so deliberate about um doing things that way okay so um i did go fly fishing for the first time

lessons in wyoming beautiful beautiful day with good friends and i got the guide to find in his kit a fly that had no hook on it so everybody else

because there was social pressure and because they were type a people was willing the fish to bite the hook now here's this fish with a million year old brain

and people are trying to use telepathy to get the fish to bite the hook and as a result every action they took all of their casting they weren't present because it was all

about the outcome how do i get this fish to do this thing i want i had no chance of catching a fish because i had no hook and so i was there in the day casting

breathing being present and within an hour my casting was better than anybody else's because i wasn't trying to get to the outcome i was simply doing

the work doing the cast and my hunch is that if later on i had added a hook i probably would have done better than most because

i was in that mode of how do i do this well not how do i measure whether i get lucky or not and i guess that by that point you know the next day if you actually did want to

go catch a fish you'd be much better prepared because you focus on i think you also use an analogy of juggling without catching just focus on on that and don't

focus on your reviews don't read your reviews don't even think about that at least for a while and just and just create now how do you how do you reconcile that with the same

idea of um you also talk about knowing what's good and knowing how to know what's good uh i would think you you know you get that from your feedback

right so is there is it are you saying that there's a time like for the first while don't focus on that and then start to let some of those ideas in to inform yourself about what your audience needs or how should you go how should you go

about that okay so good is a tricky term good is based on the smallest viable audience you're not able to make something for senior

citizens in sweden and young kids in mexico different languages different goals different views who's it for we got to be really clear before we even start to

think about what good means number two is understanding genre what does this rhyme with it is possible that you will make a podcast like no one has ever heard before

or write a novel that fits into a a section of the bookstore that doesn't even exist but that's very unlikely it's more likely you will have something that we know what it is before

we try it and once you've claimed those two things my audience and my genre then if you've done the reading if you have domain knowledge you might be able to tell if it's good

or not and even if you can't tell it's not that hard to test if other people want to talk about it if other people want to spread the word

and so this is part of the magic of why anyone would sign up for the difficult dangerous work of being a stand-up comic no props no shortcuts you're standing in

front of 50 people and maybe they laugh and if they laugh it's better than if they don't right and if after they show they tell other people

now you have a career so it doesn't matter if you think it's funny if they don't you're not going to work it doesn't matter if you don't think it's funny if they do you have a

craft and so i think too often we censor ourselves and say this isn't good with no evidence and other times we get trapped because we are sure it's good

but we have no evidence yeah yeah definitely that's um the tough tough flying to walk for sure on that on that um the story about the stand up i think

in your book you were talking about that in context of authenticity um and you say authenticity is a trap and i this is certainly a struggle i've had for myself

with trying to find the voice for the podcast like what can i actually say and do that's authentic as well

um why why why is that a trap oh it's totally a trap um you know the last time it was useful to be authentic is when we were two years old two-year-olds say whatever comes to mind

they do whatever they want right after that we start to say what will get me the result i seek will asking nicely get me something even though i don't

feel like asking nicely okay i'll ask nicely was it authentic that i asked nicely instead of just punching you in the stomach no it wasn't authentic but it worked

because you needed me to ask nicely for you to say yes and if we go to a concert you know an elvis costello concert or whatever we don't want elvis to show up as however he's feeling

tonight we want the best version of him the best available version we want the all-star version of elvis costello that's what we paid for in fact that's true for every single

interaction we have we don't want authenticity we want consistency and the reason it's work and not your hobby is you don't just do it when you feel like it

you do it because like my blog there'll be a new one tomorrow not because i feel like it but because it's tomorrow and acting as if makes a huge difference

in your practice so is it more or less fake it till you make it is that is that the cause that can rephrase that way or do you see them as being different well so fake it has all sorts of

pejoratives associated with it and i think we don't want to manipulate people fake implies that if they discovered something they would be upset with you so if you

buy a fake painting you want your money back right on the other hand if they discover what you know not only aren't they upset that elvis gave the

concert of his lifetime even though he was having a horrible day they're proud of him for putting in the effort right and so i think what it mean instead of

fake it till you make it how about serve people until it works because that's what we're here to do we're here to make a change happen and we do that by serving other people even though it might not feel

like what we feel like in this particular moment i estimate that there's probably millions of podcast episodes that have never seen the light of day that have been recorded partially just because

people realize how hard podcasting is technically which is what we're trying to help with is get that time but also people run into this um and i've also experienced this side of it the second guessing

you jump in to edit your podcast and then you're like uh you know sometimes even hard to listen to yourself once much less like edit it into a completed product how

how do you is that something that you feel is that self-consciousness uh around just uh did i make myself look stupid here do i want to share this if you don't feel that if you don't feel

like an imposter you're not trying hard enough and so i feel it all the time if i'm doing my work it's easy for me to coast because i've been at this for 40 years

but if i'm doing my work i feel like an imposter because i'm doing something that might not work because i'm pushing myself forward into the unknown and yeah hearing your voice for the

first time or the tenth time that's hard the good news is it's not that hard to outsource the editing if you want to do that but you simply must ship the work if you don't ship the work it's not work

it's your hobby i love hobbies you should have a hobby but don't confuse the two what it means to make art is to show up for people who need you to make a change

that's generous you have any tips for people that are looking at that trying to jump off the ledge there to find the confidence to just overcome the gravity of that choice because

i know i know you're a writer you're you know 20 best-selling books uh it's seen you know it's gotten easier for you by now i'm sure what about back when you very first

started were you scared of these things or was it like oh i'll just try this and see how it goes well i love that question because i can deconstruct some of the things you said uh do i have any tips

for helping people find the confidence to jump off the ledge and there are three clauses in that sentence and i'm trying to undermine all three so number one tips aren't helpful

what you need is a destination a compass a process a practice you'll find plenty of tips the internet is filled with tips number two confidence confidence is a trap confidence implies

that you need to be sure something is going to work before you do it and we got brainwashed into that by school because school pushed us to believe that it's only worth doing if it's going to be on the test

it's only worth doing if we're going to win and so you know you you pass by the local high school and they have the big sign up front about the trophy they won not about what their students learned or

how they participated or what they shared or how they leaned into the opportunity because we live in a trophy culture and nothing i have ever done have i ever

done for the first time with confidence not ride a bike not write a blog post not write a book how can you have confidence it's the first time and so we don't seek confidence

and the last one about jumping off a ledge it's more like stepping over a pebble because tomorrow you're going to do a whole bunch of things and some of those things you've never

done before but they don't feel fraught they don't feel overwhelming and if you treat the thing you're doing like oh no this is my one and only wedding day it's

this special day then you add this whole level of drama to it that actually undermines why you did it in the first place and it seems to me that part of our

practice is to commit to showing up even though it might not work because that's where the juice is yeah no definitely i

um i i've i've read the book and i've one of the um one of the examples you give like you mentioned is this riding a bike and it's funny because it's almost one of the um

most like it's it's not a new example right learning to ride a bike but the way that you said it and the way that you put it in the book was would you expect to be able to learn how to ride a bike without falling

and i think that that really clicked for me as i think that really is the approach a lot of people take when they're wanting to start creating content or creativity in a lot of different ways um

is it seems so ridiculous when you think about it as a bike but uh we don't necessarily see how ridiculous it is uh in other contexts so that was really valuable and i think that

that was one of the things i really liked about the book is you prop up all these reasons why you may not think you can create be creative and then you say that's ridiculous that's stupid that's

uh nonsense forget about that and just and just go and do it and uh very very empowering very empowering so uh it was very timely for me well thank you let so let me

let me ask you a question about this process uh zen caster is the gold standard for recall recording audio conversations for podcasts and things like this

it is hard for me to imagine the quality being better how long after you started programming zenkester was that true you know it was years really exactly

so if you had started on the first day and said i'm not going to program zencaster unless it's going to work by tomorrow we wouldn't have zencaster and it's also worth noting that

there are perhaps a hundred thousand people who know how to program almost as well as you and none of those hundred thousand people built zencaster you did right well what's the difference

the difference isn't that you have programming gifts compared to the normal programmer it's that you decided you showed up and you showed up and you showed up fell off the bike

did it again and then we have zencaster and people look at that and say wow you got really whatever lucky gifted talented whatever it is but no it actually now

that we know it can be done someone could do it in much less time than it took you but first the hard part was knowing it could be done and that is the practice is doing work that other

people don't think can be done that's human that might not work that helps other people and so seeing what you built i look at that and say yes that's

exactly what we're talking about nice thank you uh you know what's funny is when i started building zencaster it actually couldn't be built i just was too ignorant to know that and it

became possible as i was working on it and that's part of the reason why it took took a while to get out of our initial you know we ran it for uh you know it's just it was just me at the time it was a year and a half

uh in the original beta before i was ready to actually flip on the paid plans and and do all that and uh you know there was certainly an amount of luck in there as well which is something that you talk about in your book as well is

you know you've got this process and this road map for how to be creative but it's not it doesn't guarantee success it just gives you the best chances at actually finding the success one question i have for you and this is

maybe more for myself you know i want to i i think your book is really valuable for a lot of people who are starting podcasts but there's also people who are already

have an audience of some sort you know what would your advice be to someone who has an audience because i think you say start now when nobody cares what you do what you're doing and what you're saying and then it doesn't matter what you do and then you can build the confidence as

you go how do you jump right in when you've already got a platform platform and audience are tricky uh phrases right that the way we make a difference the way we do our

art is by finding the smallest viable audience what's the smallest group of people we can make an impact with and obsessing about them

so let's say uh you're a stand-up comic and you get a chance to be on conan where you get a chance to be on jimmy kimmel the question is should you show up with

an act that will mildly amuse everyone or should you show up with your act which will completely connect with and overwhelm 10

of the people who watch the show and i think we can see if we just look at the media you always come out ahead if you amaze 10 of the people not mildly please 100

ketchup is not the goal like heinz got ketchup congratulations but ketchup isn't growing ketchup isn't important no one cares really about ketchup but if you can figure out how to be

dave's insanity hot sauce that only one percent of the people are willing to cross the street for you can do great and so yes there are a bunch of people who listen to your podcast partly because

they found you through a piece of software they love but you need to make the podcast you want and the people who get the joke will stay and the ones who leave it's okay and

if you're not thinking that way if you're saying how do i get the most famous people i can and come up with something for everyone your podcast isn't going to matter

and it's not going to be worth making no i 100 agree i've had a couple of failed attempts uh previously of making a you know consistent podcast around zencaster

and um i think i really i think the the challenge that i hit in the the avenue that i took and the challenge i hit was that i was

like not making a podcast necessarily that i wanted to make but that my creators would want to hear and so i started doing podcasts about podcasting tips and tricks and you know

technique and microphones and this and that and then after about you know seven ten episodes i was like how many more of these can i act interested in i mean i'm not uninterested in that stuff

but you can only talk about it so long before you're like okay you know what else is next and i think i kind of pushed that to the side and i was like i need to figure out what

i really want to do this about and find my voice and and and make something around that i think the really next best thing i can be doing with my time

uh is is just creating great content and trying to you know i think help show people what you can do with a podcast not how to podcast but what it can do for you i suppose and how you can learn

through it and one of the great things the things that always kind of drags me back into it is it such an awesome way to get an amazing person to sit down with you and have a conversation that's

you know what i'm doing right now podcasts are a beautiful way to put a stake in the ground have conversations with people you want to talk to to find an interesting place to be

so i'm glad you're doing it you know i want to um talk from some of the ideas from this is marketing which is the book before this one that i think are relevant to you and to many of the people who are listening

here which is that the single most important uh cultural tactic effect impact uh lever of my lifetime is the network effect

that the network effect has changed the culture more than anything in human history and the network effect is super simple it says if this works better when other

people do it too it will grow if me talking about this whatever this is makes my life better i will talk about it

those are two sort of simple statements but they inform so many elements of so the simplest example which was in a book i wrote 20 years ago there was a restaurant in

new york city called carmine's they sell italian food and it was super popular and they had two things two principles that enabled that the first one is you couldn't get a

reservation for fewer than six people which meant that if you wanted to go you had to get five other people to go which meant it was in your interest to tell them about it because otherwise you wouldn't be able

to go and the second piece was they served dramatically more food than you can eat with a lot of garlic in it so back in the day when people went to offices when you went to work the day after

going to carmine's everyone went what did you have for dinner last night and then you could tell a whole story about this place you went and so the idea would spread and so carmine's with two or three locations was filled

every single night for decades they made millions and millions of dollars because they had the network effect they didn't say come here because the food is better they said this is a party and party spread

so if i look at a business like zencaster zencaster is going to grow because people who use it never use it by themselves ever zencaster only works if you're

talking to someone else and so the act of using zencaster is about introducing zencaster to someone else or if there's a podcaster listening right

now it's one thing to make a podcaster that people go oh thanks and another to make a podcast that people want to talk about and that's what serial was and why it was such a hit

because you just felt like you had to talk about it and so when we put those pieces together the way we built something to grow is we build something worth talking

about not because it's good for us to talk about it but it's good for the people who consumed it to talk about it yeah no i i 100 agree and i i've kind of learned that lesson

firsthand perhaps unwittingly i didn't realize for a long time uh how to attribute the uh the growth that zencaster was having um just with

it's all it's been all word-of-mouth marketing and we don't do any paid ads or anything like that and it's just kept growing at a good clip and it took me a while to figure out oh it's this guest to host conversion like people come on every

every host brings on one or two other people those people enjoy it then they want to have everybody's got an idea for a podcast and then they sign up as well and so yeah we've we've greatly benefited from that and finding ways to

actually intentionally work that into whatever you're doing is going to be hugely beneficial i really enjoyed the book really enjoyed the conversation i can't wait to uh you know further apply a lot of these ideas

and uh really just get over uh i think it's really helped helping me get over just some of the useless fears that i've had around just taking that step to be better at um

at shipping creative work um so uh thank you seth where can people find you online and learn more uh the book is at trustyourself.com

uh you can read my blog post for free at seth stop blog scths.blog or just search for my name and the workshops that akimbo runs as an organization i started but don't run

anymore is that akimbo.com aki mbo.com do check it out you can pre-order the practice it's gonna be available

november 3rd i've got my copy ordered and i know it'll help you guys out as well um thanks again for being on the show seth thank you a pleasure and keep making magic with your coding and your team

i for one am glad you're doing it thank you thank you we will