(2023-05-18) Ferriss Godin The Pursuit Of Meaning

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 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 (#672). When I hit like 35, “You’re just going to have to keep confronting the fact that you’re afraid and you’re not going to get better at this.” So I switched to telemark skiing, which is twice the work and half the speed. And I did that for 10 years. And then I switched to skate skiing with Nordic skis. And I get to still do that.

But I guess after my first bout with COVID, it was more like, what a gift I have today to be in the shoes of somebody who, at 62, gets to do things well, but only because I’m walking away from things I can’t do anymore. And instead of focusing on what I used to have, I’m really working hard and getting satisfaction out of focusing on what I do have, what I can do. And that just raises the stakes for things.

boomers, and I’m a little bit, I’m a lot older than you, but boomers have driven our culture since the day I was born.

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.

One of the things I took away from Zig as someone who had gotten himself into a pessimistic cycle for five years early in my career is 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 than girding yourself by being a pessimist and maybe getting what you’re hoping for.

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

would this be an opportune time to invoke the name [[Viktor Frankl]?

lot of people stop reading halfway through the first book that they touch of his because the story is really powerful. But then you get to this stuff about logotherapy, and some people say that he was part of the triad of Austrian pioneers in the way we think about the mind. There was Freud, who focused on sensuality and sex. There was Adler, who focused on status, dominance. And then there was Frankl, who focused on meaning

he lived for another 70 years after he got out of the camp, 65 years, his work in suicide prevention was extraordinary from the statistics I’ve read because he understood that for many people, I’m not generalizing everyone, but for many people, finding a path toward hope of meaning, of realizing that the struggle is the struggle, but you get to decide what to do with it, is really profound

I went to see a community orchestra last week. My friend is in it, all volunteers... no one in the community orchestra is saying, “Why aren’t I getting paid?” Because that’s not why they’re there. In fact, they often pay to be there. And I’m guessing, with no data whatsoever, that if you survey people who are in community orchestras, they probably index happier and more engaged in life than people who aren’t.

And so the question is, where are we going to find our community orchestra? For me, the last year and a half, it was The Carbon Almanac. I had 1,900 friends in 90 countries around the world. I ran into a bunch of them yesterday in Union Square. And they’re not doing it for money. None of us got paid.

provide a little bit of background, just a brief description of what The Carbon Almanac is

two and a half years ago, I read the magnificent Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, and it completely upended the way I saw the world.

I used to make almanacs for a living

I downloaded Discourse, set it up, invited some people to join me, and within a month we had 300 volunteers, most of whom I have never met in person. And in 150 days, we built, edited, footnoted, researched, copyedited, illustrated a 97,000-word book with no errors in it — all as volunteers around the world, 24 hours a day, trading shifts.

And the process of building it found solace for all of us

And I also learned a lot, like plastic recycling is a fraud.

my favorite is that carbon footprint, the concept was invented by Ogilvy and Mather for their client British Petroleum as a way of getting privileged people to feel guilty about their behavior. And if you feel like a hypocrite, maybe you won’t speak up.

You can’t really patch the hole. So is the best we can do playing violins on the deck while she goes under? Or is there anything else to do? That is maybe an overstatement, but not much of one. This is something that I really do sense in many interactions that I’ve seen and felt. And I would just love to know how you have thought about that

there’s a great book that I loved called The Last Policeman....everybody else says, “Screw it, we’re all going to be dead in a year.” So marriages break up. Why would you go to work to clean the fryer if you know you only have a year left to live? Supermarkets fall apart, but he goes to work every single day.

whole swaths of the Earth are going to become uninhabitable

some people believe that the purpose of business is to enable culture, to enable humanity. And some people believe that the purpose of humanity and culture is to enable business. And I think those people have too much influence right now, and they’re wrong

it feels to me like we need to up our focus on humanity and connection and possibility and improvement of the condition, and maybe not worry so much about public demonstrations of power, firing people online, being brutal in the service of profit. Because we don’t have a profit shortage, we have a meaning shortage

So what can someone listening do?

I surveyed 10,000 people and I said, “Tell me about the best job you ever had.”

*The results were, I accomplished more than I thought I could. People treated me with respect and I did work I was proud of.

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?*

So when I think about climate

what you can do is organize, that if you can figure out how to get five 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.

Plus the idea of banding together with five or 10 or 15 other people, creating the conditions for other people to find something to care about and succeed at it, will fill you with meaning, not with despair.

*The 4-Hour Workweek was 2007. So let’s call it 15 years ago.

Seth Godin: 15, 15 years ago. So what you said to people, to a lot of tut-tutting and disbelief, is that you as an individual have access to tools so that you can find something or somebody or some system that can do the grunt work, so that you can actually do human work that is valued by others*

However, there’s still all this pressure to race to the bottom.

When 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. Go find a charity that you care about and go raise $10,000 for them. Go to a garage sale, buy $40 worth of stuff and sell it on eBay for a $100. Go figure out how to tell a story to somebody else that changes them. And if you’re a receptionist at an ophthalmologist’s, you can do the same thing. You can figure out how to take that person, the patient who just came in or is on their way out, and make them feel 10 percent better by saying something, doing something, interacting with them

the breakthrough that industrialists do not want us to understand, that they invented public school so we would say, “Will this be on the test? How little can I do and still get picked?” And all three of those things are wrong. And the option instead is to say, “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’s what culture is. That’s what we’ve been doing for 10,000 years. That is what fills people with meaning.

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. My guess: it is not actually true. My guess is you have more agency than you are prepared to embrace. And so go start a book club at work.

I am fascinated by the bees.

I don’t fly for work anymore because airplanes feel like cannibalism to me after working on the climate thing

They will organize without an organizer, leave without a leader. 12,000 bees will leave the hive in a 10-minute period of time. They will leap out of the hive singing the song of increase. And Jacqueline has written beautifully about this. And then they end up in a tree 100 yards away, in a tight ball

And now they only have three days to find a new place to live

hearing this story, I was completely transfixed by what the song of increase could mean to people. And then I realized people aren’t bees and we’re looking for something with even more internal meaning than simply this leap forward.

then this mission of talking about significance just flooded over me and I somehow figured out how to get back to shore

the world probably doesn’t need another marketing book from me, but probably could benefit from thinking about all of those things at once and realizing that we have so much more power than we want to acknowledge. (Song of Significance, ISBN:0241655544)

writing a book, as you know, is more of a lift than is rational. And I could have just written a few blog posts, but having people see you do this irrational lift helps them understand that you have something important to say and that maybe they’ll share it with somebody else.

The Quakers invented solitary confinement.

When we add solitary confinement to the panopticon, we end up with surveillance capitalism. We end up with this idea, not the surveillance capitalism of consumers being surveilled, which is what that book is about, but more about workers being surveilled, that we isolate them from each other, except when they’re in a Zoom call where the meeting was designed to make sure they weren’t picking up their dry cleaning

Well, why are we surprised that turnover is high and work satisfaction is low? Because we stripped meaning from people when they go to work because we don’t trust them to be people. We need them to be resources.

So let’s just say you are the founder of a small company and maybe it started off as a solo operation or a husband-and-wife team. And good news, you seem to have created something that people want or need and it’s growing. So you hire. You hire people

they may hear this and say, “Yes, Seth, I want to value my employees as humans, not just resources. And the reality is we have pretty tight margins. We’re attempting to grow quickly.

I’m not here to say that workers benefit when the boss goes easy on them.

In fact, I’m talking about the opposite. That the significance of what can be built by Cesar Chavez or what could be built by The Carbon Almanac team for no money has nothing to do with soft or hard. It has to do with the idea that you make a promise and you keep it, and you need to have a lot of rigor where you are relentlessly criticizing the work, but you are not criticizing the worker

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.

But what usually happens when a freelancer starts to succeed is they hire junior versions of themselves and try to push those people to read their mind, work ever harder and faster for less money than they get paid and then pass it off as their work. That’s super stressful and it almost never works

if you’re trying to out-Amazon Amazon, you’ve got trouble

if someone is going to build a bakery, or a wedding services business, or a physical therapy facility, they can win by racing to the top.

what are some of the maybe questions or issues that you seem come up repeatedly with me? Is there anything that comes to mind?

I have a 70 watt laser cutter in my basement. Doesn’t everybody? And so I make these things that are like I Ching cards. And so instead of having notes or something, I just really like the texture of them. So that’s what the wooden tiles are. And so there’s a wooden tile right here that says “False proxies.” (proxy metric)

At work we developed proxies because we have to hire people for a 20-, 30-, 40-year career before they work for us. So one proxy is, “Did you go to a famous college?” One proxy is, “Are there any typos on your resume?” 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. And yeah, the thing about false proxies is they lead to caste systems

So there’s all of this information that’s now available to us where we can look at the work instead of looking at the proxies. So the simple solution, which I’ve been lucky enough to adopt, is I won’t work with someone unless I’ve worked with them before. And that means I will pay someone to do a short project and I pay them whether they do a good job or not

What we need are people who are resilient, and risk-taking, and honest, and transparent, and connected, and loyal, and all these other words which don’t match up with the proxies we usually use when we decide who to hire, who to let into an institution, who to reward, who to follow online.

there are false proxies in our life and they’re expensive. They get in the way of our output and they also steal our soul and they denature our culture

an ad agency. I read a book about them many years ago called St. Luke’s in London. There were 30 people, they won a whole bunch of awards

they made a rule and the rule is “We’re never going to be more than 30 people.” They then said to their clients, “That means we can’t take any new clients unless we lose an old client.

And it also means that if you are only going to have 30 employees, if someone wants to leave, let them leave.” There’s a waiting list of people who want to work there.

Turnover is a good thing when we are doing human work, not a bad thing

this permeability is where the future lies.

seeking retention doesn’t feel right to me.

when I think about what am I going to do for my next five or 10 year gig, I think very hard about who am I promising and what am I promising them?

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

We never once had a meeting the whole time we built The Carbon Almanac. There were times I sent a video to people and said, “This is what’s up. Watch it if you want to.” But because we were in time zones around the world, a meeting wouldn’t have made any sense. We had things where I said, “I’m having office hours, you can come ask questions,”

it feels to me like the future of the resilient organization is a lot closer to what Matt does at Automattic, which is how do we build this asynchronous geography free institution that doesn’t depend on me making stuff up while I’m on camera.

We know in the future there will be a page 19. We know that it will come from this group, but we also know there’s not anyone here who’s qualified, so what should we do?” And the answer is someone should write a paragraph of page 19 and say, “Please make this better.” And then someone else will add to that and someone else will footnote that and someone else will illustrate that.

And we will relentlessly criticize page 19 without one saying, “The person who worked on it was wrong or incompetent.” And page 19 thinking, I’ve always had page 19 thinking, I didn’t need it. But so many people when they heard this felt the freedom to now speak up and contribute because they knew it was going to get better.

iterate your way to excellence

Don’t ship junk, not allowed, but create the conditions for the thing you’re noodling on to become real. That doesn’t happen by you hoarding it until it’s perfect. It happens by you creating a process for it to get better.