How to Show up and Do the Work (Even When You Don’t Feel Like It) with Seth Godin

In this episode of MarieTV, we do have some adult language. So if you do have little ones around, grab your headphones now.

Seth Godin: So what I’m arguing for here is not perfection, nor am I arguing for betting everything on it working. What I’m saying is the best way to do the work we want to do is to have a practice and to show up and do the work regardless of how the world around us and, and we are feeling.

Marie Forleo: Hey. It’s Marie Forleo and welcome to another episode of Marie TV and the Marie Forleo podcast. Now, if you’re someone who wants to get more of your creative work out in the world, I got to tell you, there is no better guide than today’s guest.

Seth Godin has started successful companies, taught millions of people and left his mark on our creative culture. He’s the author of 19 international bestsellers translated into more than 35 languages, including Tribes, Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip and This Is Marketing. He also has one of the most popular blogs in the world. He’s also the founder of Alt MBA and the Akimbo workshops, which are online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people. His latest book is the practice shipping creative work.

Seth Godin. Oh my goodness. Thank you for coming back on for the practice.

Seth Godin: I have to thank you. You’re a shining light and it’s so nice to see you again, even if it’s not in person.

Marie Forleo: Well, same. I will say this from my heart, you keep getting better and better and better, which I was thinking about this. I was like, well, that is the best sales pitch for the practice. The fact that, for me, at least I’ve read, I think all of your books, if not close to it. I enjoyed them all. This one made a profound impact on me. I’ve pulled out some of my favorite pieces. We’ll walk through that, but I just want to tell you this. I was reading it in preparation for our conversation today.

I got so inspired at some point, I had to put it down, Seth, and I wrote an entire kind of sales page, for lack of a better word, about something that’s been in my heart for a while. It came pouring out of me. I’ll tag something and it’s not very long, but it felt very impactful and true to me. I’ll flag that when we get to that particular part, but I just wanted to say all that upfront. I know so many folks in our audience are fans of you already, but if there happens to be some folks who haven’t encountered your work yet, I’m so excited for them to get this book.

Seth Godin: Thank you. You made my day.

Marie Forleo: First bit, let’s start with the quote from page 22. You write, “Do what you love, is for amateurs. Love what you do is the mantra for professionals.” I cheered. I underlined. Curious if you could say more.

Seth Godin: I don’t remember before the internet, anything, but my instinct is that before the internet, we didn’t spend a lot of time about find your passion, because it was understood that work is work and work involves a promise. It involves showing up, even if we don’t feel like it in exchange for it being work, your hobbies can be whatever your hobbies are, but you haven’t promised them to anyone. And so now, particularly in this moment of upheaval, it’s important that we fill our days with things that find meaning for us. But it’s just so much easier to decide, to find meaning in what we do, than it is to go shopping around in things to do, hoping we find something that gives us meaning. And I’m focused on helping people get on the hook. If you say, “Well, I don’t really feel like it.” Then you’re off the hook and then it makes it hard for you to do the work that will make you feel like you’re connected and you’re following your passion.

Marie Forleo: It’s a really interesting fun place to explore. I’ve found it so much with MarieTV. We’re coming up on our 10th year

Seth Godin: Wow.

Marie Forleo of doing this. I have often shared, there are many times when I sit down throughout the years to write MarieTV if it’s a scripted episode or to do the things we need to do to produce the show, that I don’t feel like it, but because I promised, and it is a commitment of mine, and I believe in its power and I believe in the power of the conversations we have and the ideas that we get to share, I show up like a professional and it makes a difference. And it happens and I wind up finding inspiration or something but, at the very least, the work gets done.

Seth Godin: Yeah. And when we do the work, whether or not the work works in the short run, when we do the work, we can feel engaged. That’s what flow comes from. We don’t get flow and then do the work. It’s the other way around.

Marie Forleo: Yes. “Creativity is an action, not a feeling. Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today.” I love this one. I feel like it is an underscore where we started. I’ve shared notions like this sometimes and some of the pushback, and that’s why I want to bring this up, is I can hear some folks in the audience going, especially in a year like this, “What if I’m ill? What if I am a person who lives with a chronic disease or a chronic illness?” And I know that’s not what we’re talking about, but I wanted to at least voice that because what you’re writing about is so important. I’m curious if you have a perspective on that piece of it.

Seth Godin: There’s always difficulty and there’s always trauma. There’s always injustice. This year highlighted for us so many things that we didn’t necessarily ask for and other things that desperately needed to be highlighted. But the biggest difference is not that there was difficulty or trauma, but that all of us had it at the same time, in the same way. And so when it’s all around us, it’s very easy to put up our hands and say, “I give up.” That the excuse is universally understood, but, and it’s a huge but, then what are you going to do? Now, what are you going to do? Because as I learned from Roz Zander, you can replace but with and. The world is upside down and I could make something better for someone else. I’ve been feeling ill and I could open the door and I could turn on the light because they don’t have to be one keeping you from doing the other ones.

Are you likely to run a ten second mile or whatever that they keep track of and track? No, because you’re under the weather, because you’re behind, because you almost died because whatever. That doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to contribute. So what I’m arguing for here is not perfection, nor am I arguing for betting everything on it working. What I’m saying is the best way to do the work we want to do is to have a practice and to show up and do the work regardless of how the world around us and, and we are feeling.

Marie Forleo: And do you, from your experience because you’re one of the most prolific, consistent creators. I have benefited so much from the generosity that you share with your work. I know for me, in my own form of practice, it doesn’t always look the same. And there’s some times where there is a lot of output and there’s sometimes where the output perhaps is a little bit smaller. The quality is a little bit different, but there is, there is still a consistency. I think that might also give people a different facet to look at this, right? It’s not like the practice is you have to, although you could, write 500 words a day, 750 words a day, it doesn’t have to be that formulaic. Am I getting that right?

Seth Godin: Yeah. I think that we can define who we are by what we do, not the other way around. If you want to be a runner, it helps to run. If you want to be a writer is sure helps to write. In fact, if you write, you’re a writer and if you wait for perfect, you’re hiding. One more way to stay off the hook. On the other hand, if you say, I have a practice on the regular and you can measure it any way you want, you’re taking the negotiation away. You’re lightening the cognitive load. So tomorrow, there’s going to be a blog post on my blog. Not because it’s the best one I ever wrote, but because it’s tomorrow. And I don’t have to have a conversation with myself. I decided 20 years ago, there’s going to be a blog post in my blog tomorrow. And once you make the decision, it becomes who you are, and once it’s who you are, then you get to do the natural expression of that.

Marie Forleo: You write, “Imposter syndrome is real.” Let’s talk about how confidence isn’t the same as trusting the process.

Seth Godin: Okay. So, what, f you went to school, you’ve heard the sentence, “Will this be on the test?” The question, “Will this be on the test?”, means, “Dear teacher, you’re asking me to give up some of my life and time and attention to expose myself to some facts. I’m willing to trade those for an A and that’s the only reason I’m interested. That the result is the entire point.” We built that trade because that’s how capitalism and industrialism works. You will put something on the assembly line because it gets you an output, the end. And this attachment to the outcome paralyzes us, because if we’re not sure it’s going to work then we don’t want to do it. We say, show me it will work, prove to me that this is the way it is, then I will do it, which is why so much of social media is filled with people copying other people, because they did something that worked well. That’s what happens in the factory so let’s do it here.

The alternative is to say, you know what? This is work worth doing, even if it doesn’t work. It’s work worth doing because the process of me doing it the way I feel doing it, the effort of doing it, the chance that it could touch someone else, all of those things make it worth it. And if it doesn’t work, I’m still glad I did it. Now, with that said, we can now decode what confidence is, because what confidence generally means is you’re sure it’s going to work, but if you’re leading or making art, you can’t be sure it’s going to work because you’re leading or making art. So the paradox is you, got to do work you’re not confident of. How? By trusting yourself that you have a process. It might not work, but what you’re doing will work better than the alternative.

Marie Forleo: Let’s talk about generosity and being intentional about what you say yes to and what you say no to. You write, “It might be that the most generous thing to do is to disappoint someone in the short run.” I have often talked about that. I am the queen of disappointment because I’ve become really, really good at disappointing people and being comfortable in my nos so that my yeses can be really full on yeses. Tell me what you mean or how you’ve experienced this form of generosity.

Seth Godin: Generosity doesn’t mean free and generosity doesn’t mean yes. Generosity means that you’re going to expend emotional labor, which is a lot of effort, to make something better for someone else. Not because it’s a hustle, not because you’re going to get reciprocity and something will be better for you in return, but simply because you can. We can nibble away at that by trading it for short yeses all the time, because those little yeses keep us from doing anything important. In my case, please, don’t send me an email if you’re listening to this. I’ve answered 175,000 emails, and that’s a lot of emails to answer one at a time.

How many books has that cost me? How many important thoughtful ways to show up in the world has it cost me? A lot. But in the short, it feels like I’m doing a generous thing. In the long run, I’m not. I’m doing a selfish thing. I’m giving myself a tiny little smile a few times a day or a hundred times a day. That’s my trap, but other people have their traps. When I’m not arguing for selfishness, what I’m arguing for is make your generosity count and make it count by doing something that’s difficult and scary.

Marie Forleo: And more on generosity. I love that you shared the most direct way to find the practice is generosity. This idea that generosity subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else. That, we’re getting into the part right now, there’s two parts that where I was reading it said, I literally closed the book and opened my computer and I just started going. It was particularly around an idea for my next book that I don’t know if it’s going to be my next book or not, but I’m like, this has to come out of me. It was specifically for that piece, focusing the work on someone else. I’m like, if I don’t get this out of this noggin and out of this heart, I’m stealing. I’m taking my own advice. Focusing the work on someone else. This is something you are so, so good at. Can you tell us more about how that helps us create the practice?

Seth Godin: First, I’m so thrilled. This is the best news of the day that there’s a new book for you. You’ve been hiding it from me. I’m really excited. I think this particularly resonates with your audience, for a couple reasons. The first one is for good reason, we don’t want to hustle other people. No one wakes up in the morning wanting to be hustled. And so it might be easier for many people to speak up on behalf of someone else and to speak up on behalf of themselves because it feels like we’re taking and how do we decode that and move forward in a way that lets us be productive?

For me, the answer is, is someone going to benefit from this? Is someone out there going to get touched or connected or helped to level up from this? Because if you don’t bring this to them, as you just said, you’re stealing and we don’t want to be thieves. The challenge is how do we act like a lifeguard. The lifeguard doesn’t jump into pool to save someone so they’ll be a hero. They jump into pool to save someone because they need saving. We need the people who are listening to this to show up. We need them to make things better. It’s not about a race for credit. It’s about a race for contribution.

Marie Forleo: I want to talk about the power of being inauthentic. This was one that again, I highlighted and I thought it was, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you speak into this before. I certainly haven’t seen it in many books. In a world where my goodness, we have been just bombarded with this notion of authenticity and people have asked me so many times, “Marie, you’re so authentic. How do you be authentic?” I was like, “Oh my goodness, Seth. This is such a beautiful gem you.” You write, “We can only deliver what our audience needs by being consistent, by creating our inauthentic, intentional crafted art in a way that delivers an authentic experience to our audience as they consume it.” Break this down for us.

Seth Godin: Well, you know who’s authentic all the time, are toddlers, because they just don’t have a lot of executive function. After you’re done being a toddler, you’re busy calculating all the time. If I do this, I might get that. You might authentically feel like standing up, marching into the kitchen of the restaurant, knocking the chef over, grabbing the food and going back and sitting down. You don’t do that. You don’t do that because it’s not going to work. What you do is you moderate your authentic impulse to do something that sounds like you. That sounds like you as a civilized, productive contributor to society. If you go to see a concert, you don’t want the authentic musician. You want that musician to give the best performance of their day, their week, their month. If you, if you need surgery, I hope you don’t.

You want the surgeon to ignore the fact that they had an argument with their spouse and to bring the best version of themselves. That’s what we want in almost every interaction with very few exceptions. If you’re in one of those other interactions where there’s really value to be had by stripping away the promise and being emotionally present, then that’s fine. That’s hobby work. That’s personal work. If you want to be a professional, get past all this authenticity stuff because what I think people mean when they say, “Well, I was just being authentic.” What they’re actually saying is, “I did something and it didn’t work. Don’t blame me.” Well, if it doesn’t work, you should think hard about why it didn’t work because our work is at some level for other people.

Marie Forleo: Yes. You also wrote of my 7,500 blogs half of them are below average compared to others on any metric you’d care to measure. Popularity, impact, virality, longevity. The practice embraces that simple truth. I’ve often talked about this. One of my favorite shows, I love Saturday Night Live and I love it because a lot of this stuff doesn’t work. A lot of the sketches don’t work, but they go on and every once in a while you get these breakaway hilarious moments that it is so, so moving and they stand the test of time, many of them. Gosh, Seth, 7,500… Did you say 20 years? Is that what I heard you say?

Seth Godin: Yes.

Marie Forleo: All right. This is just me asking a curiosity question. When you started blogging, did you go, “Okay. Today’s the day I’m going to start and I’m never going to stop.” Was it that intentional or did it grow? Like you’re were like….

Seth Godin: There was a day that, that happened. It wasn’t the first day.

Marie Forleo: It wasn’t the first day. Okay.

Seth Godin: It wasn’t the first day. It started as an email newsletter to explain to my extended family what I was doing for a living in 1996. That was more than 20 years ago. Then I met Joey Ito, at the same conference where I met Justice Breyer, Queen Noor of Jordan, my dear friend Jacqueline Novogratz, all on one day, which was pretty cool. Joey was playing with this new thing called Typepad, and I thought that’s beautiful. I would like that to be my handwriting. He was on the board so he got me in fairly early and I was blogging a couple of times a week. Then I was balling three or four times a day. I only had a hundred, 200 readers because every podcast, including yours, including mine starts with 50 or a hundred people, that’s all, everyone.

Then I wrote a post called The Provincetown Helmet Insight, about how people on Cape Cod ride bikes together. That was one of the first blog posts that sounded like me. That sounded like this is a blog for other people. Not just whatever the hell I felt like writing that day. I said, “I’m going to, I’m going to focus on this.” Then I got notes, fascinating notes, from people who said, “You know, when you write three times a day, it makes me feel bad. Would you please write less?” I was like, “They publish newspapers in other cities you’re not reading. You’re not writing letters to them. Please, don’t publish the newspaper. Just skip them.”

I heard that from like four people, they just like, “We want to go on the street with you.” I moderated it down to every day. Then I said, there needs to be a practice here because otherwise I will talk myself out of this. I didn’t want the cognitive load of saying, “Do I have a good excuse to skip today?”, because I always have a good excuse to skip today. Now, that I know that discussion is off the table, it’s off the table.

Marie Forleo: That’s so cool. By the way, I’ll ask you a few more questions on this because I know we have so many writers, aspiring writers, people who imagine they could be writers, they aren’t writing yet. I think that even just this discussion is so incredibly valuable. If I ask anything, you’re like, I don’t want to answer that. We can just move on.

Seth Godin: It’s all good.

Marie Forleo So has, I mean, over these past decades, I’m curious from even the logistical standpoint, if like the practice, “Hey, I’m going to write today. Even if I don’t publish this blog post, I’m going to do my practice and I have travel coming up. I am going to a speaking engagement. I am doing a workshop somewhere. I have kind of pre-created things, but I’m still showing up for my practice.” I’m just curious about the actual logistics as someone who runs a company.

Seth Godin: Sure.

Marie Forleo: Yeah. If there’s anything you wanna say about that.

Seth Godin: I don’t talk about the logistics much, but I’m happy to do so. I have written ahead and every night I read tomorrow’s blog posts and I often replace it. At some point people started noticing I had a streak. At that point I didn’t want to accidentally break it. Yes, I write ahead. This is different than morning pages. So let’s talk about Julia Cameron’s morning pages for a minute because they’re so misunderstood. I’ve heard people talk about the fact that they’ve written in their will that no one is to read their morning pages and blah, blah, blah. Just throw them out. The purpose of morning pages, which I do, thanks to my friend Brian Koppelman, is not to write anything good nor is it to write anything you’re ever going to read again. The purpose of morning pages is the same as the purpose of brushing your teeth. That you wake up in the morning and you brush your teeth because you always brush your teeth and now your mouth tastes minty fresh.

And you wake up in the morning and you write a few pages of whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re clearing your throat, because now for the rest of the day, you don’t have to write the first thing of the day. You already wrote the first thing in the day. It’s over with. Now, you’re in the flow. My morning pages are worthless. There’s nothing in them I could ever publish. That’s not what they’re for.

Marie Forleo: Yeah. Same here. I love morning pages and they’ve helped me so much. I haven’t thrown mine out. I have some stacks of them and I was actually looking at some from some earlier years and I was like, wow. For me, they’ve been really cool because I can see some recurring patterns of how I torture myself.

Seth Godin: Oh yeah.

Marie Forleo: Oh, that conversation, still Marie, still very interesting. Back to the original where I put the 7,500 blog posts, I love that you shared that with us. It’s like, “Hey, part of the practice, we’re not trying to put out the best things every single day and this level of pressure about the outcome as you so eloquently shared. It’s like, no, it’s about the practice.” If Seth Godin is here telling us like, “Hey, half of them are below average.” It’s like, we have to give ourselves permission to keep creating and to develop that.

Seth Godin: For math people who are listening, of course, half of them are below average. That’s what average means. And the other half of it is every single time, not every single, most times that I have a blog post it takes me five days to write, it doesn’t resonate. Other times when at the last minute, in less than six minutes, I wrote a blog post. Eh, whatever. I never know. Since you don’t know, since this is mostly about luck, what you do is you show up at the right place at the right time with your best effort. Then you hope that today’s a lucky day. If you’re sitting there trying to reverse engineer luck, then you’re hiding again. We’re back to trying to put ourselves on the hook.

Marie Forleo: I have a friend who was shopping around a book and she’s a lovely writer. And her, I think it was her agent. There was someone who was supporting her, who was like, “Can you write a viral article?” I was like, it doesn’t work that way. It just made me laugh so hard. Another favorite part of the book, page 71, “Shun the non-believers.” You write, “A key component of practical empathy is a commitment to not be empathetic to everyone.” I want you to unpack that because this is really important. This is the other piece that got me to close the book, open my computer and write away.

Seth Godin: Okay. There’s four levels here. The first one is this. If our work is professional it’s for someone else, it has intentional action. Who’s it for? What’s it for? What change do we seek to make? How will we know if it’s working? If you can’t answer those questions, then you’re just putzing around. Number two, once you have a who’s it for, you have to acknowledge it’s not for everyone. Nothing important is for everyone. It’s for someone. That’s critically important. Now, this someone who it’s for, they don’t know what you know. They don’t believe what you believe. They might not even want what you want. You have to be able to say, “That’s okay.”, because if you can’t say that’s okay, then you can’t approach them. They’re not going to come to you. If you can’t work with someone who doesn’t know what you know, or doesn’t believe what you believe, you’re toast.

And that leads to the last part, which is practical empathy is the work of going to people who you hope to connect with, to build a bridge for, to open the door for, who are a specific group and take them somewhere they’re enrolled to. If it’s not that person, they’re a non-believer. They aren’t there for you. They don’t speak the same language as you. They’re not going to the same city as you. They’re not enrolled in the same journey as you shun them, ignore them. Wish them well, buy them a slice of pizza and then move on because it’s not for them. My mom was on the board of the Albright Knox Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, one of the most important painting-for-painting contemporary museums in the country. She pioneered the modern museum store and she was a docent.

So I grew up in a contemporary art museum. I was there once a week and you’d stand there and listen to people talking to each other about Jackson Pollock, or talking to each other about, Degas or whatever. They were in the wrong building. You could just hear that they were in the wrong building. The answer is not to somehow justify Marcel Duchamp. The answer is to say, “The Buffalo science museum is down the street, because it’s not for you.” It’s not about class. It’s not about status. It’s just, do you see it? Do you want to go on this journey or not?

Marie Forleo: Yes. That was the piece where something, when I read that particular entry in the book, I, I, my body was compelled to shut it. And so much that came out, it was so clear and I shared a little bit of my writing with a friend of mine. She was like, “This is amazing.” I’m like, “It was channeled when I was preparing for my Seth Godin interview.” If that’s not a pitch for everybody to go get The Practice, I don’t know what is. All right. I also love the follow-up to this, in terms of shutting the non-believers, but maybe it needs more work. You write, “if there are only non-believers, maybe it’s not as good as you think. If you define good as work that is resonating with the people you seek to serve.” I think that this is so valuable too, because it might not be good enough and that’s okay too.

Seth Godin: It probably isn’t good enough. In the creatives workshop, which is what I based the book on. The book is based on the workshop. So I’ve seen 500 people exchange 50,000, 500,000 backs-and-forths about their work. This is endemic. Which is authenticity, because it’s a trap, makes people feel entitled that if they are authentic, they should succeed. I’m just decoding each piece of that. No, authenticity isn’t a guarantee. Even if you’re being a professional, there’s no guarantee. That if we look at Miles Davis’ 50 records, 30 of them were pretty bad. He’s not entitled to have Kind Of Blue show up every time. We, as the audience, don’t have to listen, even if he worked really hard on it. If we begin by saying, “You know what, this probably isn’t as good as it could be.”

We now opened the door to make it better. Whereas if we show up saying, “How dare you not get this joke? I worked really hard on it. This is my authentic self.” I quote Adam Driver in the book. Adam is the actor from Star Wars and the Spike Lee movie and stuff. He gives this quote something like, “Yeah. When an actor gets criticized, it’s really personal.” No, it’s not. You’re an actor. You’re an actor. They’re not criticizing Adam Driver. They don’t know Adam Driver. They’re criticizing the thing you did. You can learn from that and do it better next time or not. But you’re not entitled, even if you went really deep, for the audience to say you got it exactly right.

Marie Forleo: Hmm. I’m going to reiterate this. If we feel like we’re returning, I think it’s a good thing. Uh, you know. What does good mean? How do we define good? Why good needs to be defined before you begin? What is it for? Who is it for? What is it for? Who is it for? It’s like, even just those two questions. I feel so many of us do creative work, so many of us who are freelancers, business owners, entrepreneurs, coming back, even if you’ve been in the game for 15, 20 years. I experienced it like a laser beam of focus and clarity. What’s it for and who is it for? Is that part of like, if you were thinking about a new workshop, if you’re thinking about something… yeah.

Seth Godin: Yeah. If I’m making dinner for you guys, when you come over next time, it’s the same thing. It’s Oh, Marie doesn’t eat gluten. Well, that’s who it’s for. It’s for Marie. She’s coming over for dinner. Don’t make pasta. It’s that simple, right?

Marie Forleo: Yes. Yes. It feels like that. The best way to get started with any new book, any new program, any new offering, any new service. So good. Let’s talk about, there’s no such thing as being blocked because being creative or creative is a choice.

Seth Godin: Okay. So writer’s block is real and writer’s block is made up. Now, when I say block, I don’t just mean the writing of a book. We’ve all experienced something we call a block. No one gets plumber’s block. Nobody gets talker’s block or bicyclist’s block. We don’t wake up one day and say, “I don’t think I’ll be able to ride my bike today because I just am not in the mood.” So what writer’s block actually is, is fear of bad writing. We are afraid to see the bad writing on our way to getting the good writing. If you tell me you have writer’s block, I will say, “Show me your bad writing.” You will not be able to do so.

If you have enough bad writing, some good writing is going to slip through. It just will. No matter what it is that you do. Acknowledging to yourself that writer’s block is just a myth, makes it so, so much less powerful. It takes its hold off of you because you’re not looking for external validation. You know that writing and bicycling are in the same category. You just do this thing. You might not do it well yet, but the only way to do it better is to begin.

Marie Forleo: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Before we get to the end part that I want you to read, was there anything else there’s so many juicy, incredible mind- opening, heart-opening things in the practice. Did I miss anything that you feel like we should have underscored?

Seth Godin: You are a model for a key part of what I’m trying to teach. This model is, it works better together. That the idea that you’re in a cabin in New Hampshire, by yourself, and you’re going to somehow bootstrap your way into creativity, you might be able to muscle your way through it, but it works better together. The reason it’s worth making a book and not a blog post is if you find two or three other people and you read it together and you form a support group and you form an accountability circle, your work will get better. We need to. Ironically, we’re in this age where we’re all separated, we’re all dealing with trauma and where we’re all more connected digitally than ever before by a lot. But we’re using this glass between us to hide. Instead, if you can find people who are enrolled in the journey who are committed to giving and getting feedback that’s actually useful, that will change everything.

And Chip Conley did that for me in 1983. He completely changed my life. Amazingly, he’s also a bestselling author who knew when we were both 23 that that would be the case. The fact that he got five of us together in a room every Tuesday night in the anthropology department to brainstorm new business ideas. I remember that all the time. The only thing about it that makes me sad is, it didn’t occur to me to organize people. I needed Chip to do it. I’ve been trying to do it ever since. Right? That’s what B-school is. That’s what the alt MBA does and the folks at Akimbo running all these workshops, they are about doing it together. I just needed to say that out loud because you’ve been modeling that for a really long time.

Marie Forleo: Thank you. Thank you. I know we probably share some DNA here. Just like seeing incredible human beings that have so much to share and so much to contribute and to see it happen from where it was like, “Oh, I think this is an idea. I don’t know. It’s actually a reality. They’re engaged. It’s going. It’s moving. It’s going to have a life of its own.” My goodness. There’s no better feeling. I had reached out to you before to see if you’d be willing to read a little bit from the end. I think it’s the perfect way to wrap this up. For anyone, before we go into that bit of it, you have to get your hands on The Practice. It is brilliant for you and, as Seth shared, for your friends and for people who are on this journey. Get a few copies and talk to your friends about it and support each other. The bit I was going to ask you about this from page 255 to 256.

Seth Godin: Thank you, Marie, for letting me do this. It means the world to me. You know how lonely this work is and to see how I can land with somebody. It’s very special. So thank you.

Where is the fuel to keep us going? Anger gets you only so far, and then it destroys you. Jealousy might get you started, but it will fade. Greed seems like a good idea until you discover that it eliminates all of your joy. The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. Art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who will use it to create the next thing. Human connection is exponential. It scales as we create it, weaving together culture and possibility where none used to exist. You have everything you need to make magic. You always have. Go make a ruckus.

Marie Forleo: Seth Godin, Thank you so much, on behalf of myself, our team, our audience. You embracing your practice for all of these years has made such a huge difference to so many of us. Our episodes together, we continue to get emails and notes from people. There’s some of folks’ favorite. Thanks for making the time today. I adore you and I can’t wait to see what generates from your practice as the weeks and months and years go on.

Seth Godin: Thank you. Hugs to everybody. We’ll talk to you soon. See you. Thanks.

Marie Forleo: Come on. Isn’t Seth just the best. Of course, he is. Now, Seth and I would love to hear from you. I’m super curious. What’s the biggest insight or aha that you are taken away from this conversation and most important. How can you put it into practice? Meaning how can you put it into action starting right now. Leave a comment below and let me know. Now, as always the best conversations happen over at the magical land of marieforleo.com. Head on over there and leave a comment now. While you are there, if you’re not already, join our email list and become an MF insider. I send these amazing emails every single Tuesday. They are fun and positive and encouraging. I don’t want you to miss out. Until next time, stay on your game and keep going for your dreams because the world really does need that very special gift that only you have. Thank you so much for tuning in and I’ll catch you next time.

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