How to Craft Your “Life Strategy” | Seth Godin

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Episode Transcript:

Seth Godin: [00:00:00] A lot of us have been trained to come to the conclusion that we are who we are, because our past made us this way, that we are simply the expression of all the things that have happened. But a different way to think about it is maybe the future is counting on us to do things so it can arrive. We are not doing things because the past made us. We are doing things because the future asked us to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:29] So in our rapidly changing and complex world, it’s just all too easy to get caught up in short-term thinking and quick fixes that provide temporary relief, but really fail to create lasting impact. But what if there was a way to step back, to think strategically and craft a vision that could genuinely revolutionize everything from your career to your relationships, health, and life? Maybe even spark a movement or transform an entire industry? Turns out strategy. It isn’t just for business, it’s for life. And that’s what we’re diving into today with an old friend, Seth Godin. So Seth is an author, entrepreneur, and teacher who has spent decades helping people find clarity and take purposeful action in his latest book, This Is Strategy Make Better Plans. Seth challenges us to abandon outdated systems and instant gratification in favor of smart, purposeful choices that shape a better tomorrow. And Seth is renowned for his pioneering work in marketing and leadership and changing the status quo. He’s written 21 bestsellers and also founded several groundbreaking companies and really inspired millions through his teachings on everything from effective promotion to the spread of world changing ideas. In this conversation, Seth and I, we explore the vital role that strategy plays in living your best life, and we’ll dive into his four key threads of strategy time, games, empathy, and systems, and how weaving them together can unlock new possibilities. So whether you’re an entrepreneur seeking to make your dent in the universe, or simply want to approach your personal journey with more clarity and intention. This conversation will leave you inspired and equipped with practical wisdom and deep thoughts. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:17] So it’s interesting having this conversation with you at this point around some of the topics that we’re going to dive into. So I turned 58 last year, and it was an interesting moment for me because I was like, you know what? I am spitting distance from 60 now. And I started asking myself, I’ve got this two-year window now when I have that milestone in my life. So how do I want to feel? How do I want to feel about me physically, my relationships, about the work that I’m doing in the world? And I realized that I wanted to feel differently in all domains. And in that moment I started asking myself, how will that happen? It’s not that anything is terrible. A lot of stuff is awesome, but it’s really, you know, I’m about to step into what I would consider a new season, and I want to do it with intention. And so I started to think, you know, like, do I have a vision and do I have a strategy for this? And it’s taken some time to both develop and they’re both very fluid. So diving into your latest book was just really interesting for me because it brought up so many more things to think about. And one of the questions that really occurred to me early on was when it more broadly, when it comes to doing this thing called life to living a good life, do we actually need a strategy or can we just let it unfold? Or does it make more sense to actually say, like, no, I’m going to craft something more intentional? So that would be sort of my my first curiosity for you.

Seth Godin: [00:04:00] What a great place to begin. I wrote this book for you. As you know, I often have conversations with people I care about. They think they are asking for marketing advice. It turns out they’re actually asking for strategy. The arc of your thousand-plus episodes is largely about two things one, the story we tell ourselves about what happens to us, our internal expectations and narrative about how the world is, and two, our way of creating a future that we want to live in. And that is what strategy is. It is possible to live a good life without intent to simply accept, embrace and dance with what happens. But it is easier, more productive and more generous to do that and also bring intent to the change we seek to make. And to do that, we need to see and talk about strategy, because it’s not just for MBAs and generals, it’s for anybody who shows up in the world for other people.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:07] Mhm. It definitely makes sense to me. And I’ve tried both approaches, just letting things happen and surrendering and saying what will come will come. And part of my work is to just find peace with that, to find joy in whatever it is. And I think there’s a value to that also. My sense is increasingly that unfolding and intentional strategy are not necessarily an either or. It can be more of a yes and.

Seth Godin: [00:05:37] Correct. It’s not just yes and. It’s essential that we have both pieces of it. But the phrase, you know, don’t play games you can’t win has built into it the semantics of what does it even mean to win that there is. The summer unfolded more than 10,000 people went to Paris to compete in the Olympics, and only a few hundred of them come close to winning what they want. Does that mean the other 9000 people are losers? Well, they are if they want to interpret not winning as losing. But if the narrative is this journey is its own reward, then you can have both. It’s yes and yes. I am seeking to have this victory and regardless of the outcome, I can enjoy the journey.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:24] So you lay out these four threads of strategy time games, empathy systems. Yes. I want to dive into each one of them a little bit individually, because there’s a lot to be said about each one of them. But the timeline, I think jumps out, especially at me given the context I just teed up for myself because I gave myself a very defined timeline. And it’s not like, you know, God willing, I’m going to be around for long past that birthday. But there was this really profound change in the way that I thought about how I’m going to step into this fixed time window compared to if I just said, you know, I just want these things to happen. And there’s a tension that was created and this is something that you write about as well by time bounding it. And that really led to thinking and action in a way that I think is much more deliberate than a lot of things that I’ve done in the past.

Seth Godin: [00:07:26] Yeah. So many things to unpack here. Time is nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen. And when we think about our lives, we tend to focus on what is right in front of us, not what something might become. So it’s easy to write off the iPhone, because in the first few weeks they didn’t sell that many. It goes on to become the most successful consumer product of all time. But in the first three weeks, you couldn’t tell that that an embryo of an elephant weighs exactly the same as an embryo of a person and a blue whale. But what do they develop into? And so time isn’t easily judged in any given moment. It is simply this other dimension where things travel. And what that means is if you have a project, whether it’s opening a yoga studio or trying to find 100,000 people to listen to you online, none of those things are going to happen today, but you can establish the conditions for them to happen over time. If you can see time. Talk about time. Put time to work for you, not work against it. And so one of the challenges we have when we hit our 50s and our 60s is it’s easy to get into this mode of working against time, and that feels non-generative to me, it feels negative. The question you could ask yourself if you’re a skier or a surfer, is are the last couple hours of the day better or worse than the morning? Right? Because a surfer who says I only have a few runs left is the most likely to hurt themselves because they’re not approaching the unfolding of the next series of time windows the way they did in the morning. And yet we have that as a choice. We can choose to treat the next two years. If you’re 58, the way you treated 24 to 26. And when we can imagine that it’s not our last time at bat, we probably enjoy it more.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:30] Mhm. Yeah, that resonates a lot. And as a snowboarder who lives in Colorado now, I have had that very self-talk chatter thing happen in my head when it hits 330 and I know the last run is at 4 p.m. and the last shutdown. And I’m like, I’m feeling really Tired. I’d love to take another run or two, but I know my chance of doing something stupid or just being too tired goes up dramatically. And I have just very recently started packing it in a little bit earlier. It’s taken me a lot of years to learn that lesson, knowing that this is, you know, I have another day tomorrow.

Seth Godin: [00:10:08] Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:09] And in the context of time, also often feel like we have a distorted sense of time. And maybe that changes with seasons of life. Maybe it changes with external pressures and expectations about what we’re supposed to be doing or who we should be. But time doesn’t feel like this sort of thing. That is always the same, that I feel like the way that we look at it and experience it changes our experience of it pretty dramatically.

Seth Godin: [00:10:40] Yeah. I mean, something magical happens to the physics of air travel because six hours on an airplane feels a lot longer than six hours doing something that you really want to do. It’s the same six hours. One of the things that people have a lot of trouble with is opportunity cost. If you choose to do something, anything, you have now chosen not to do a myriad of other things. So there is a cost to every hour we spend because we can’t get it back. So if you are spending an hour a day grooming your social media accounts while you were doing unpaid labor for social media companies, you are not necessarily allocating time in a way that helps you get to where you seek to go, but it feels so urgent and dividing the urgent from the important. One of the things that comes with maturity. Three-year-olds are terrible at this. They only do things that are urgent. But over time we get into a rut and we find ourselves focusing on things that have to be on our to do list today, never getting around to the things that would actually support the change we seek to make.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:52] So part of this also, I feel, is tethered to a question that you asked a little bit further into the new book, and you ask it a couple of different ways also, which I thought was really interesting, which is this question of what do I want? Because I think that determines so much of how we invest ourselves and also our experience of time doing this. And I also feel like we are really terrible at answering that question.

Seth Godin: [00:12:20] The what do I want question comes up on this podcast a lot, and it’s hard to put our arms around it because it comes with responsibility, because wanting something puts you on the hook. It makes you responsible for the side effects of what happens. And if it doesn’t work, you have to own the fact that you said you wanted it and you did not get it. It’s so much easier in the short run to be a wandering generality than to choose to be a meaningful, specific, and part of what it is to be good at strategy is to have people around you that you can talk to about this, to claim a version of the future and have someone reflect back to you the opportunity costs that come with that, the risks that come with that, and then encourage you because the thing you’re seeking to do is worth doing. And if we don’t do those things, then we just turn on Netflix and let tomorrow come.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:21] It reminds me also of a question that was posed to me a couple of years back. We had a guy named Matthew Crossman on the show who co-teaches a class at Yale. I think it’s called The Life Worth Living. He’s a theology and divinity professor, and he posed this really interesting question, or a variation of this question, which is what’s worth wanting? And this is one of the questions that he poses regularly to students that frustrates the heck out of them, right? You know, because it really gets underneath it. And that’s part of what you’re speaking to here. It’s like, okay, so we could probably list out five things we want. But the question of are those worth wanting? That’s a whole different thing. But it’s also profoundly important.

Seth Godin: [00:14:06] Yes, marketers are partly responsible for so much of the ennui that people of privilege feel, because the easiest way to sell something is to make people dissatisfied with what they have. And it turns out that the things people want the most often are the things they need the least. That somebody who has five handbags and is dreaming of the sixth one does not need a handbag. They just need the feeling of being able to acquire it. And when we talk to people who have so much less from a financial point of view. As folks like you and me, this does not come up because there isn’t some force. A system that is constantly pushing them to want more and more does not mean better. And so when we make these choices of what am I willing to work for? What am I willing to trade time today to get tomorrow? We haven’t done a very good job of deciding what’s worth it. And that’s, I think, one reason why so many people who shouldn’t be unhappy are unhappy because they got sold this idea that if they just got one more thing, they would be happier. But the thing isn’t what’s going to make you happy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:27] Yeah, I think we all learned that. Well, you know, we don’t all learn that at some point, but we get glimpses of it at least along the way. Parker Palmer posed the question, I think, in a really interesting way to me as well, he said. He flipped it around. He said his question was, I’m going to mess up the language here. But something akin to what does my wife want for me or from me? And which kind of I took it outside and said, well, this is bigger picture. It wasn’t sort of what is the system within which I live want from me, which we can get into, because that’s another one of the questions that you ask. But he’s assuming that there’s something that’s a part of me but external to me. What does my life want from it? Right. And I thought that was a really interesting frame that got me thinking differently as well.

Seth Godin: [00:16:19] Yeah. No. Parker is so profound. Here’s one way to think about it. A lot of us have been trained to come to the conclusion that we are who we are, because our past made us this way, that we are simply the expression of all the things that have happened. But a different way to think about it is Maybe the future is counting on us to do things so it can arrive. We are not doing things because the past made us. We are doing things because the future asked us to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:50] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You fairly early on also lay out a kind of three general things that most people want broad categories affiliation, status, and freedom from fear or affiliation. And I think we get I think I get, you know, kind of what we want to associate with other people around or the communities and identity or whatever. The thing is, the status part. We’re striving for that, especially if we live somewhere where everyone around you has something that you feel you’re not quite living up to, and you’re just more, more, more, more. And freedom from fear was really interesting. I’m wondering what that really deconstructs to.

Seth Godin: [00:17:40] Let’s talk about all three, because I think that we can acknowledge them, but we don’t really understand how universal this is. Affiliation is culture. It is. People like us do things like this. It’s the reason we don’t wear a tuxedo to a pool party, because that’s just not what we do around here. Affiliation isn’t so much of what we assume is true, except it’s only true because of who we are surrounded by. If we were on a spaceship surrounded by astronauts, we would not do what we do now. Not because of who we are, but because of who we are affiliating with. Status has nothing to do with luxury goods. It’s much more subtle than that. If we look at the history of a bridal dowry, it goes back tens of thousands of years. If we think about how the first peoples of Canada and the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, developed the tradition of potlatch, in which people would compete with each other to see how much they could give away. Giving away your belongings is a sign of status, because it means that you can get more, that you’re not so poor. Status is everywhere we look. The Godfather movies are nothing but exchanging status every five minutes, and you can learn a lot just from the first scene of the first movie. And the third one predates culture. It’s the same thing that happens to spiders and puppies and everything in between, which is we are hardwired to not want to feel afraid. That is different than not exposing ourselves to risk feeling afraid. Those three things are what drive everybody all the time. Once you have enough to eat and your health is taken care of, those are the three things that we care about.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:33] It’s kind of hard to get away from them no matter what we do or who we become. Although I feel like part of life is we’re constantly trying to get to a place where we get to opt out of them, and yet they’re just kind of built into our DNA. It is what it is. So it’s more important to just acknowledge that and work with it. You spend a lot of time talking about systems, and understandably so. Everything is a system. We live within nesting systems all around us. When you talk about systems, what are you actually talking about?

Seth Godin: [00:20:10] I could talk about nothing but systems for the next ten years. Let me try to make it as simple as I can. Everyone knows what the solar system is. There’s the sun, there are the planets, not Pluto, but the rest of them. The planets rotate around the sun because they want to, but because of gravity. Gravity is an invisible force that keeps the planets doing what they’re doing. The planets exert some force on the sun. The sun exerts a lot of force on the planets. Once you understand the solar system, now, you can think about the banking system. If you go into a bank and say to the manager, I would like a better deal on a mortgage, and you tell that manager a whole story about why you deserve it. It will not work because the banker might even be your next door neighbor, but they are a part of a system much bigger than the two of you. There are forces on that banker that will cause them to act in different ways. So if we’re going to get absurd. Don’t go to an ATM if you’re hoping to get a muffin, because no matter how much you argue with the ATM, it is not going to give you a muffin because it’s an ATM. It’s part of a system and a lot of unhappiness, particularly in our current age when you’re supposed to be, quote, authentic and follow your purpose, which I find ridiculous. A lot of happiness comes from working with the system, and then being surprised when the system does what the system does, instead of what you want the system to do. So when we pick the system we are working with at some level, picking the narrative of our days.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:51] Yeah, I mean, it’s both a narrative of our days. And also we’ll bring that word status back into it, right? Because status is baked into systems and there’s a pecking order, there’s a way things that are within a system. And once it gets big enough and installed enough and entrenched enough, people step into it and start to make assumptions and build their lives around it. Even if the system has like passed its expiration date, we still just don’t want to rock it. It’s like, just keep on keeping on.

Seth Godin: [00:22:26] We might want to rock it, but culture will we’ll keep pushing us back, because culture is invented by systems to maintain their status quo. They don’t want us to point out that famous colleges don’t deliver better outcomes than more efficient or lesser-known ways to become educated, because all of the forces of the system are aligned to keep the system the way the system was, what attracted it to us, to it in the first place? That doesn’t mean change can’t happen. It means we have to be aware that there are forces in the system that don’t want the change to happen, and that arguing more loudly about why we are right never changes the system. What changes the system is when nodes in the system, in their own self-interest, decide that different decisions will help them get to where they want to go. And we can see enormous change happening in our culture, picking something like gay marriage as an example, or the way just a few million people changed the Constitution of the United States by joining the NRA. Right. That the number of people in the NRA, compared to the number of people in this country is tiny, but because they built a system next to a different system and reinforced it and reinforced it persistently over time, offering status and affiliation to people who had a different objective. You can change a culture. It doesn’t have to be right or wrong. It can be done. But it doesn’t happen. Just because you wrote a medium article and everyone read it and said, oh, you’re right.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:06] Which also brings up the bigger question how exactly do we change systems? And also not that we necessarily need to change all systems. You know, there are some systems, micro and macro that I think probably support the way that we want to be and the way we want to become. But when we live within a system and we realize that this is actually not serving us, and maybe it’s not serving the bigger community or culture. Also, the collective really needs to change. You talked about nodes. I know we’ve had past conversations about your enduring interest in the world of chocolate, and you share these two really fantastic stories in the book around Shawn Askinosie and also the guy who started Tony’s Chocolonely. So would you mind sharing those stories? Because one. I love chocolate also, as you know, but there are such visceral examples of what this can look like.

Seth Godin: [00:25:02] I love talking about chocolate, and in fact, I made a collectible chocolate bar to go with the book. There’s only a few thousand of them. Halloween is a problem. It’s a problem because Hershey’s and Nestlé’s and others sell cheap chocolate in bulk. That’s what people want to buy. There’s a system, a holiday system, a commercial system all around this. And chocolate employs some of the poorest people on Earth. Hundreds of thousands of children in basically slave labor conditions work to pick the cacao in Ghana and the Ivory Coast that is used to make cheap chocolate. It also doesn’t taste very good. Shawn Askinosie, who was a lawyer, saw that he had an opportunity to make a contribution. So he built a chocolate company and he pays the farmers five times the going rate, puts their kids through private school, visits them every single year in places like the Philippines and Tanzania, does direct commerce to without middlemen. And I could go on and on. He did not seek to beat Hershey’s and Nestle’s at the Halloween game. That system is too big for someone of his scale to make an impact.

Seth Godin: [00:26:13] What he did create was a system within that system. He was one of the first bean to bar chocolate makers in the world. Now there are hundreds who are following his model and doing similar kind of work, then jump across the ocean to Tony. Tony was a journalist in Holland and he saw what was happening with the slave labor, and he wrote a series of articles hoping to shame the powerful companies and the politicians to change. The system is resilient. It found loopholes, it pushed back, and he was frustrated enough to start his own chocolate company called Tony’s Chocolonely. Called that because Tony was lonely, being in the dark, talking about all these problems. It’s now 25% of all the chocolate sold in the Dutch marketplace. Again, not because he sought to undo what the dominant players were doing, but to find a different, smallest, viable audience. Tell them a story that resonated, give them the scaffolding they needed to engage with what he was doing, give them something to talk about. And so over time, it spreads.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:25] Yeah. I mean, both of those are also great examples of people operating within a bigger system. It’s almost like Gene Sharp, who’s no longer around, um, and his deep work on nonviolent revolution, one of the theories that stayed with me so powerfully when I studied up on his work was this notion that when you’re trying to make a really big change in something, he said, the primary goal can never be to tear down the old thing. What you need to do is focus on building something new that is actually so much better that it solves the problems, that it speaks to, the pain that is supporting and creating the pillars that prop up the old thing that people just come to you. And those pillars kind of disintegrate under their own weight, and the whole thing crumbles under its own weight. It wasn’t about toppling this big system, which seemed completely like to me, let’s just start something new that is so much more appealing, that speaks to people’s hearts and minds in a way, they just start to transfer over to it. And maybe it’s the old system that never actually topples, but at least you’ve got an alternative built. And that sounds kind of like what they did.

Seth Godin: [00:28:38] Yeah. And, you know, if we think about Sal Khan, the Khan Academy every day teaches more people in one day than Harvard University has taught in 400 years. And if you’re looking for the status that comes from being the president of Harvard, you don’t get that by running the Khan Academy. But if you’re looking to find unserved, underserved people and give them a path, then over time it starts to add up and it eventually shifts things. Things change. Now, every course at MIT is available online for free. That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Sal Khan.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:15] I mean, this all speaks to this sort of meta-level set of assumptions. And this is one of the other things that you write about. That you describe them as the myths of the system, these two polars, one that you have unlimited power and the other that you have no power. And I feel like most people within a system, even if they see and want something different for themselves or for the broader whoever is within that system, they tend to default to the I have no power part of it. I can’t actually, I’m not capable of affecting change, so why bother? So, you know, let me just put my head down and just ride things out. Right. And your take is actually neither of those things is true.

Seth Godin: [00:30:03] One of my favorite autobiographical stories I don’t tell many happened to me when I was 23 years old. I had my first real job. I was in summer between years at business school, flew out to Boston where I didn’t know very many people. Company had 30 employees. I was a summer intern. Try to think back. There’s no voicemail. There’s no email. There are no fax machines. I walk into the office on the first day, and they have a plastic carousel that’s round with 50 slots in it. So if you’re out for lunch and someone calls you, they write on one of those pink while you are out, slips a message and they put it in in your slot. Now, the names on the slots are not in alphabetical order because people didn’t all join the company at once. So I walk in my first day, I see this thing and I thought, I’m going to be here for 60 days. There’s no way I’m spinning this thing. 2 or 3 times a day looking for my name. So I reach over and I take a paper clip out of the receptionist’s bin, and I put the paper clip next to my name. The theory being I could spin to my paper clip doesn’t cost anybody anything. In fact, if you’re two away from the paper clip, it’ll make life easier for you. Within a week, the carousel is festooned with pipe cleaners. Different colored paper clips. The system evolves. And if I had tried to call a meeting, I don’t know with the head of the office and said, May I please put a paper clip here? It would have been a waste of everyone’s time, but we can make tiny little adjustments to the systems that are around us. If they are built with the intent that over time the system will respond by evolving.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:46] Yeah. I mean, oftentimes it’s the intent and it’s the let me run a quick little experiment here, not even tell anyone or ask for buy-in with this, but nobody’s going to complain. And it’s not going to be a big deal. Let me just do this little thing and see what happens. And and I feel like that’s so often how change starts. You know, one of the other things I think is really interesting that you describe is when we exist within systems that decisions, we think we’re making decisions like, this is my choice, you know, capital MY, my choice. But the system really influences the decisions that we make, the the choices that we make. And this is recently had a chance to sit down with Robert Sapolsky and batted around his notion of like,

Seth Godin: [00:32:35] Oh that book is incredible.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:36] Oh my God. And he’s not just like, you know, we mostly don’t have free will. He’s like, it doesn’t exist. And it just did not want to believe that with everything in me. And every time I kept coming back with an argument, he was like, yes. And I’m like, oh yeah, you’re right, aren’t you? But it’s amazing if you think about the fact that we exist within these systems. But when we think we have just complete free will to be who we are, do we want to do and decide what we want? And deciding in these systems, reality is we don’t. And sometimes profoundly influenced by what is in service of just supporting the status quo.

Seth Godin: [00:33:20] That’s right. But we do get we still, many of us have the agency to walk away from systems that don’t serve us. So a high school senior says should I go to Princeton or Yale, they’re not adding to the equation. Should I take a gap year and go to India to help acumen doing X, Y, or Z? Or should I skip going to college altogether? It’s not even on the agenda because of the power of status and affiliation. So part of what happens when we reveal the systems is our choice set increases. And part of what Sapolsky, I think is arguing is that we do have the ability once we see systems that reinforce caste or that reinforce inequity when it comes to health or whatever, we actually can do something about it. But if we don’t do something about it, we shouldn’t be surprised that the world doesn’t change.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:20] I mean, the curiosity for me around that is that it’s around optionality. It’s like if the system is going to consistently put a certain set of options on your menu, how do we even become aware of the possibility of options that the system will never offer us, so that we can put them on our menus and then say that you’re like, that is not an easy thing to do.

Seth Godin: [00:34:47] It’s really difficult because you have to give up status and affiliation, and the reason you haven’t done it yet is because that’s very scary. The status we’re giving up isn’t the status of I won’t be able to feed my family tomorrow, because most people who listen to this podcast have options that can feed their family. It is what will I tell myself, my neighbors, my spouse? What will I tell the world that I got off this merry-go-round. So many lawyers are unhappy being lawyers, but they can’t get over the sunk cost that they went to law school. They can’t get over what would happen if they announced that they’re not going to do that anymore. So they believe their only options are big firm or little firm. Not you don’t have to be a lawyer.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:35] Yeah. I mean, loss aversion is real, right? It is amazing how much of our lives and our decisions it drives. We just don’t want to give up what we have. And if we’ve been fortunate enough to attain something and status being one of those things and affiliation as well. And it does drop us into the fear zone. You know, if I’m not X, what will I be?

Seth Godin: [00:35:58] And I don’t want to keep coming back to people who have backgrounds like you and me being a special case. So I did work with Acumen in Kenya, and approximately one-third of the farmers that I was working with. We’re going to the marketplace to spend $20 to $30 a year to buy seeds for their farm. If you buy $30 worth of seeds, you will make a profit of $3,000. If you use farm-saved seeds, which are the seeds that you corn that you saved from last year? So you just take the corn you’ve got and plant it again. You break even for the year. And yet one-third of the farmers bought better seed. Two-thirds did what their parents did. It’s not that they didn’t know they could see their neighbor growing enough corn to make thousands of dollars, but they didn’t do it because they had a narrative of affiliation and status based on their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents. So they were seeking something and finding it, which is the solace of not being responsible for a new choice outside of the system they were used to. They weren’t stupid. They weren’t wrong. They were human. And people do exactly the same thing when they buy a Cybertruck. We’re just making decisions based on the culture around us and our endless quest to not die, to find status and to be part of something.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:30] Yeah, I feel like so many of us are driven by a sense that we want to experience freedom. However, we might define that freedom, but we also want to belong at the same time. And sometimes there’s tension there. You know, it’s one of the things that you speak to. I think your language is something like freedom comes with responsibility. And so we deny our agency as a part of that equation.

Seth Godin: [00:37:55] Yes. And a couple of times you’ve mentioned tension, and I need to keep arguing that part of what we do if we seek to make a change happen is we create tension on purpose that our job is to create tension. If I want to shoot a rubber band across the room, I have to pull it backwards first. And so it’s the tension of FOMO. It’s the tension of do you see the system? It’s the tension of this might not work. And too often people who mean well when they have the chance to create this generous tension fail to do so. And the intent of making things better, not with selfish intent, but we have to create the tension.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:40] So what’s your sense of why we back away from that? Is it just psychologically uncomfortable for most of us to a point where we just don’t want to feel that?

Seth Godin: [00:38:50] Let me give you a really fast example. That was only seven seconds, Jonathan. I felt the tension. You probably did too. Seven seconds of silence. It’s hard and we don’t want to sit in the tension. We don’t want to sit in zazen for four hours without speaking. You know, one of the things I do sometimes in workshops, 20 people around the room, they’ve been working together for a year. And I hand out index cards and I say, on my way here, I got a call. It was, I don’t know, Bill Gates or somebody. And he said, he’s got this great new project, $200,000 a person budget. It’s a three-month sprint. You’re in charge. You get to pick any three people in the room to be on the team with. You write down their names. And I said, I don’t want to look. Just write down their names. And there’s all this discomfort in the room and I say, okay, question number one. How many people think the same names came up over and over again? And if people are telling themselves the truth, they will have to acknowledge that that’s the case. I said second question, how many of you think your name came up a lot? And I said in the third question is, if you knew this exercise was going to happen in three months, would you change how you show up for this team in the next 90 days. Not because it’s a competition, but because it’s an opportunity. So everything I did for the last minute is just about creating tension, being left out, moving up all of the things we’re afraid of and what most people in most organizations say is if they had their druthers, the names would be evenly distributed. And it’s not fair. We’re not here to compete, but in a world of limited time and limited resources, at some level, we are competing for the chance to contribute and developing the ability to create that tension in a way that helps other people is what change agents do.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:49] Yeah, I mean, that’s also circling back to the beginning of our conversation. That also speaks to why I think I’ve taken more action on my sort of like two-year quest, because there’s time bounding, you know, it created that tension for me. It’s entirely self-created. Like, I could just push it back a month or six months or a year. Sure. Of course. But for me, there’s something in me that said this is sacred. Like, this is the endpoint. And there was that time bounding, just like you said, the 90 days thing. You know, you’re doing the exercise. It does create that, um, that reframe around tension that can actually be generative fuel, because I think we often just experience it as this is something that’s negative that needs to be eliminated.

Seth Godin: [00:41:39] Yeah. But a life without tension gets really dull really fast.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:44] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You offer up a really interesting concept in this latest book as well, nostalgia for the future. And it kind of ties a bit into what we’re talking about here, because we have these dreams, these outcomes that we want to manifest, you know, like this change that we want to happen. So take me into this concept because I thought it was really fascinating.

Seth Godin: [00:42:11] So the origin of nostalgia is homesickness. Going back to the place you’re from, we solved that problem with the bus, so it shifted to yearning for where you used to be time-wise, the eight-track cassette tapes or whatever it was. But many of us feel a nostalgia for a future we dreamed of that now isn’t going to happen. And so one of the things that causes so much pain with climate is people in their 40s or 50s or 60s are realizing that the life they’re leaving their kids isn’t what they dreamed it was going to become. And one of the challenges that we have when we look at the future with clarity is it never matches up with our nostalgia for what the future could have been. Okay, that happened Now what are we going to do about it? Now that we know the structure of the systems, now that we know the game that we are playing and the things that are on offer, where do we have the leverage to lean in to at least guide that future to what it could be, not what we just hoped it would be.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:22] And I wonder if one of the things that stops us often is what goes back to one of those three qualities, the fear side of it. You know, one of the big fears, so many, and it’s a fear tied to affiliation, is fear of being judged. You know, again, this is something you speak to. But the question that you pose in the context of this when you write about it is how do you decide who has the power to judge you? Which I think is a really interesting reversal of the way that most people experience this.

Seth Godin: [00:43:58] Yeah. So for me, people in high school thought I was obnoxious, and I probably was. And in high school, you have no choice. You’re going to get judged by people who are 16, who have short attention spans and are generally jerks. But once we’re done with high school, we have a whole set of choices about who will judge us. About 12 years ago, I made the decision never to read another Amazon review. Not because I didn’t want my writing to get better, but because I’ve never met an author who said all those one-star reviews I read made me better at writing, because all a one-star review is, is someone announcing that the book you wrote isn’t for them? Because if you get any five-star reviews, it’s not about the book at this point, it’s about who it’s for. Now, if I say to myself, don’t read any one-star reviews, I also have to say, don’t read any five-star reviews. Don’t read any reviews whatsoever. By forgiving everyone who has spent the time to write a review and saying, that’s your experience, but I don’t need to hear it. I freed myself up to find other people who I would listen to who weren’t anonymous, folks who I would never be able to ask a question to, but were actually people in the audience I was trying to serve colleagues, professionals. When we pick our critics, we pick our future. And if you look at anybody who has a fashion sense, they didn’t develop their fashion sense by listening to people who wanted them to fit in and wear beige Land’s End clothes, they did it by ignoring those people. And so I’m not saying that we should be arrogant and ignore culture. I’m saying we have to choose who we are going to listen to in all of the choices that we are making.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:47] Yeah. I mean, and when you at the beginning of what you just said, you said it’s not that I don’t want to be a better writer. The data that the potential critics out there, The universe of critics, especially in this one domain, they wouldn’t have helped you with that goal with that aspiration. Which also brings us to the conversation around feedback and feedback loops, because we do want feedback to improve ourselves and improve the system to create something new and better. So there are data points where people are systems or structures, contributors that we do actively want to seek that input from because that lets everything that lets us. It lets everything get better. And sometimes it’s really hard to figure out what gets let into the feedback system.

Seth Godin: [00:46:40] Okay, so I need to decode what you’re saying because Feedback Loop has a terrible name. We’re not talking about feedback loops. We’re going to get to feedback loops in a second. Feedback advice insight. That is something that we can choose to seek out to get better. So if you have a new idea, if you have the first draft of a book, if you have a new plan, don’t ask an amateur. Don’t ask someone you’re married to. Don’t ask your in-laws. Don’t ask somebody who just wants you to be happy. None of those people are going to give you useful insight into whether or not you are onto something. You need to hide what you’re doing from those people until it’s ready to show them. And instead, you need a circle of people who have a combination of domain expertise and empathy to tell you what you need in this moment. It took me a long time to get through that, but now feedback loops systems maintain themselves through feedback loops. There are two kinds, and they have nothing to do with advice or criticism. The two kinds of feedback loops are the feedback loop of a thermostat, which is negative feedback in that if the room gets too hot, It makes it colder. If it gets too cold, it makes it warmer. That’s a feedback loop that keeps things stable. And this is one of the best things about democracy, that a well-functioning dictatorship is actually quite effective. Except it’s hard to stop it when it stops being a well-functioning democracy has this built-in thing that makes it way less efficient, but keeps it within bounds. Other kind of feedback loop.

Seth Godin: [00:48:25] A positive feedback loop isn’t always positive. If you’re at a wedding and the DJ holds their mic up too close to the speaker, you hear that loud noise? That loud noise is caused by sound being amplified, being amplified, being amplified, being amplified until it’s a shriek. There are positive feedback loops that can grow a social media company dramatically because the network effect leads to more people, which leads to more people, which leads to more people. So based on the change we seek to make, we need to make sure we build in these thermostats, these negative feedback loops to keep us in the center of the road, to keep us from bumping into the guardrails as we drive. And there have definitely been social movements that have failed because they did not do that, because everyone’s piling on the vegan community that won’t eat avocados, because slave bee labor is pollinating the avocado trees. If you just keep pushing too far in one direction, you’re going to lose the point of what you were trying to do in the first place, and you were looking to build these nascent systems so that a little success leads to more success, that it becomes a positive feedback loop. So here’s your podcast. More than a thousand episodes. Far more people listen now than listen to episode ten. They didn’t. That didn’t happen because you bought a bunch of ads. It happened because the people who listened listen told other people. So you had stickiness and you also had virality. It spreads and it grows. That is what happens when we put a positive feedback loop to work.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:05] I love that, and I feel it also slides us into one of the topics that you speak to. That’s been a fascination of mine. And this is part of the four threads of strategy for you and it’s games. It’s the notion of the infinite versus the the finite game. And this idea of are you playing a game to win or are you playing a game because you never want it to end?

Seth Godin: [00:50:31] Yes. And as soon as we say games, some people roll their eyes. Some people hate board games. They want nothing to do with things that feel like a game. It doesn’t feel that it’s serious enough. And when Kelly talks about games, when we talk about game theory, we are not talking about monopoly, which is a terrible board game. What we are talking about is any situation where there are players and rules and outcomes, and when we call whatever we’re doing a game, first of all, it makes us a little bit lighter on our feet because we don’t have to take ourselves so damn seriously. Two we can use what we learned from game theory to do better at it, and three, we can talk about the systems. Because games understand this. It doesn’t matter how much your queen really wants to kill their king, they’re not allowed because there’s a rule. So when I think about the game of how does somebody get elected dogcatcher? The game of how do we change the pet shelter system so that it doesn’t lead to all this euthanasia, the game of how do we use the systems we have to address the climate? These are all games and they’re serious games, but they’re games that can be seen and played. And then to your point and I’ll stop ranting. Some games are finite. These are games with a timer and a scorecard and someone’s going to win. And other games are infinite. Playing catch with your grandchild is not a finite game. You’re not trying to win catch. You are playing catch just to play it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:14] Yeah, I love that. It’s it’s funny as you’re describing that. Also, I had this strange flashback to a million years ago when I was in first year of law school and had that classic contracts professor that you read about, you know, in one L and it was everybody, you know, nobody sat down until you were weeping, me included. And you’re just absolutely destroyed. And one day, about halfway through the year, something just kind of clicked in my brain and I’m like, oh, wait, this is a game. This, you know, he’s he doesn’t actually care about me personally. Like, this is not personal for him. He’s just playing the game. He’s a role in a game with a certain system and a structure and rules. And I was like, what is the game here? And literally as soon as I started like feeling that and speaking to the lightness that you mentioned, as soon as I said, oh, this isn’t personal, this is literally just a game, I was like, oh, I can’t even stand up again next week and be blasted by him. And it’s just a game. And it just completely reframed the way that I stepped into the frame of it, and it made the whole thing just like, oh, I’m not afraid of this anymore. It doesn’t devastate me anymore. In fact, I got kind of curious about it and I’m like, well, how can I figure out the rules here? And who are the other players here? Like, what is the system I’m functioning in? And that happened to be more of a finite game than an infinite game. I was kind of happy not necessarily to win it, but for just to be over.

Seth Godin: [00:53:52] I love this story. This is a great story. Jonathan, what happened to me at business school? I didn’t have the focus or frankly, the time to do the ten pages of spreadsheets that were at the back of every business school case. But I realized that if you’re running a case study, you need to get through the case, and there are certain people you need to be able to count on who have run the numbers, I’m going to be one of the people you can count on who will say something surprising about the personalities of the people involved. And once I realized I could be of service to the professor and the class by being a specialist in that, I only read the first three pages of every case. From then on, I developed a vivid opinion about some of the personalities and made it clear that they called on me for the numbers. I would say I have no idea. And by playing that role in that system, I helped the professor, but I also got what I wanted.

Jonathan Fields: [00:54:50] Yeah, I love that. You know, one of the questions that I think relates to the role that we play in these games and these systems, and also just the way that you and I look at these games, I look at the systems also just broadly in the context of life, like our life is a system and we’re in nesting systems and there’s a relationship system, there’s a contribution system, there’s all these different systems, and there are games that we play within each one of those systems. And as we just said, choosing the role that you play, it’s it’s a really interesting question too. And I would imagine that it also it changes over time as we learn more about ourselves in the system, the life that we want to create for ourselves and for those around us. And in that context, you ask a really fascinating question, which is what do you make like the way that you spend your time, your money, your effort? Does it actually support how you would answer that question? And I thought that was a really interesting set of questions right there.

Seth Godin: [00:55:54] Yeah. I mean, someone who doesn’t have a good life, but who has the conditions around them, they could probably in that situation because the thing they think they’re buying with their time and effort isn’t the thing the system is selling them, that if we set ourselves up to be in that position where there’s a mismatch between what we expect from the system and what the system likes to offer, like so if you’re looking for interpersonal connection, gratification and belonging by chatting to people at the airport rental car counter, you’re never going to find it, because that’s not why they’re there. Figuring out what you’re looking for and making sure you’re showing up in the right place to get it is critical. That’s where we began this conversation is, yes, we should improve our narrative about what we’re getting, our narrative about the life we are living. But B we should make sure we’re in the right line, because going to an ATM to get a muffin is a bad idea.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:00] Although that might be a pretty awesome atm.

Seth Godin: [00:57:02] I will talk to my wife and see if she wants to build one of those.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:06] Like a gluten-free, dairy-free muffin. There’s something. There’s something happening here right now. Yeah. And that does touch really back into the beginning of our conversation. And it also touches, in an interesting way, into the end of your most recent book, where you really talk about bringing a strategic approach to the most urgent systems and the most urgent need for change in our lifetimes. And this notion that once we begin to see the systems that we live in, once, you know, like all of a sudden these things that had been invisible to us but have really been so influential, Everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we say, they become invisible to us. And something happens through our own intention or through action. And then what do we do with that? You know, and you suggest the path to create change at that point. That’s when it becomes clear what the next steps are. And that’s going to be unique and distinct based on the person, the system that they’re trying to change. But we got to see the system before we can actually do anything to change it.

Seth Godin: [00:58:14] And cursing the system almost never works, you know? So I was at a climate conference last year, and it turns out the top five banks who support coal plants and finance things like that, fossil fuel extraction, we’re adds up to billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars. And the guy who’s a VP at the bank is standing there talking. He’s the head of sustainability, and he’s talking about how all their branches have LED lights in them now, and you just want to stand up and yell about it, right? Because that’s not the bank’s problem. The LED lights in their branches. The problem is they are funding things that overwhelm so much of the work that other people are doing, but scolding them isn’t going to get them to stop doing that. We have to see the system and what is causing each person in the system to make what they think of as a good decision, and then find the leverage points so they make a new decision based on new information. Then the system is really good at maintaining itself. It will maintain itself by investing in something else.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:25] Yeah. I mean, it speaks to something you wrote actually in the very beginning of the book. To find a better strategy, we need to be prepared to walk away from the one that we’ve defaulted into. And that is almost it’s kind of like that is the start of where the magic happens.

Seth Godin: [00:59:43] It’s so hard to do. I just got to tell you, I’ve been doing it with intent for a long time, and you just want to as soon as the new thing stops working as well as you hoped, you want to go back to the old thing. And that’s what usually happens. The ability to talk about it, to be able to say to your peers and your partner, I see this system and this is going to be a hard transition, but it’s going to be worth it because the system we’re a part of right now isn’t getting us to where we want to go, and.

Jonathan Fields: [01:00:15] We need to have those conversations now because there’s a lot of change that we all want. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle, my friend. So I have asked you this question, and over the years, sometimes it changes and I ask everyone again. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Seth Godin: [01:00:39] I got sort of Covid-sick a couple of years ago, and shifting to somebody who couldn’t walk a mile was not easy for me, and getting back on my feet reminded me how much I had taken for granted, what it is to be able to do things with less effort than some people need. And the story we tell ourselves about this is important, but also the foundation of it is truly important. We don’t have that many perfect days, and I don’t think we spend enough time appreciating how much freedom and agency we have, and being grateful for the chance we have to show up the way we do. So every day I get a day like that and this is one of those days I am really conscious of it. And a little aside, which is completely true. Publishing a book is a pain in the ass, and I prefer to just write a blog post. But one of the things that comes to mind when I say now I should make this a book, is that I’m going to get to talk to you because you make me better every time we interact. So thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:49] Ah, thanks so much for your kind words and thank you for the conversation as always.

Seth Godin: [01:01:53] It’s a pleasure.

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:56] Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Seth about the power of significance. You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven-second favor and share it. Maybe on social or by text or by email. Even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.