#108 The Practice: Shipping Creative Work Seth Godin

All right, friends and

listeners. Today's episode is with the legend, Seth Godin. He's the author of 20 International best-selling books. His latest one is the practice shipping creative work and we talked about what goes into the practice of shipping creative work inside, shared in the book. Things like what is the difference between process and results?

Or the difference of foot a nuanced, but really profound difference of hustling versus generosity.

And in many ways Seth is he's an antidote to a lot of the messages that I know for myself as a Creator you hear constantly that are these short-term gains or were all just so pressed for time. For each second that we're putting into our work to Growing, our work to Growing whether it's engagement on a social platform or money in a bank account. It is so

easy to get sucked into the quick tricks. The hacks

And in my conversation with Seth, I think it became just more and more apparent that and also in reading his books but specifically the practice is that those are dangerous not because they could take you off of more gratifying career path or more gratifying path towards shipping. Your creative work but they're dangerous because they reinforce a mindset around results. The only thing that matters and the

5 tips to grow your XYZ that you click on and you read through it is. It's candy and and sugary hit of feeling like oh wow, the results that I'm seeking could become.

Might be easier to get it fight, learn these brand new tips and tricks, but something that is not fully, I don't think fully appreciated when we click on those things, when I click on those things, is that they reinforce that the goal is, the result. That is the only thing that matters is getting there as quickly as possible.

And if you

Went to see an orchestra that would mean that the composer that composes best is the one that gets to the end the fastest and it's that is a dangerous thing to reinforce day after day. We also talked about the roles in story. Telling the stories that we tell ourselves and be and their relationship with behavior and how it's it's not typically it's not actually around the story first, then the behavior

We talked about vulnerability and is contrarian view on vulnerability. Same thing for authenticity, Seth isn't a fan of authenticity and that's such a refreshing. Take, whether you agree with him or not, Seth as a dozen, different contrarian takes on creativity in the creative process that we talked about in this episode. So for a podcast that's dedicated to Creation floss,

Fe technology and the intersection of those three. This is a phenomenal conversation for for myself, and for the listeners to really take note of if you dig our conversations, smash that subscribe button. Whether it's on your favorite podcast player or whether it's on YouTube, which are growing the YouTube channel, more and more investing in there in that channel more and more. So, feel free to check us out over there. If you haven't before, and like, comment you can do whatever you want them. Apparently,

Google The Google Algos. They love any and all clicking on that page, especially, subscribe. So, feel free to hit that subscribe button if you dig these conversations. So, without further delay, let's get into it. Seth Godin, this is below the line. So Seth welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me.

Well, it's a pleasure, thank you for doing this work showing up week after week, it matters.

Well, it is it so much of your work is, has been an inspiration in this podcast. So it's truly coming, full, circle, and somewhat surreal to have you on the podcast. I remember buying Purple Cow when I was, I was maybe a senior in college and it was it was the very first marketing book I ever read and all downhill from there. Well, actually

What I think your books and we're going to talk about the practice here in a second, but I think they've gone deeper and deeper and and Beyond the tactics or Beyond. I think the Frameworks or the observations into really where this podcast goes into. And that's the deeper the foundational sides of these things. And in many ways I feel like I should many ways. I feel like I should read your books and cross and reverse chronology starting with the practice.

Has your latest book The subtitle shipping creative work and and it does that make sense to you. If you hear someone say that almost I feel like the practice is the most foundational. One of the most foundational books I've read on Creative work ever way before getting to a, how to Market your

work. That's very, very kind of you. I didn't have the privilege of having an audience for that book until I'd written the other books. So I was, I was a book packager before I was in awe.

they're in addition to inventing, one of the first internet companies, but I did a hundred twenty books, and some of those books were, you know,

had profound things in them but I couldn't find traction because I hadn't shown up for people who were waiting for a book like purple cow first and so permission marketing and purple cow gave me a platform in a voice and then I can write books like the practice and linchpin

as we get into you know I have such a split mind of spending the time with you right now talking about your career and your creative output and then spending a lot of the time on

The practice because I know that that's going to be so I believe so fundamentally powerful for listeners to listen to. So maybe we'll spend a few minutes just on your creative output and in the chronology leading up to realizing some of these foundational lessons for the practice. Did you, did you have any stutter starts to your, yo, 20 best-selling books from the outside just looks like a Flawless, okay? You're either born, Seth Godin or you're not.

Yeah, so I mean I have a meta comment

And I'm happy to share. I'm super proud of my failures. I've had more failures than most people and that's the key. I wouldn't trade in any of them because if you don't have the failures, it means that you're not leaning toward the edges that allow you to do creative work. And the interesting question is, why is the failure Olympics? So popular? Why do people you know, in the first episode of your podcast you talked about how it felt

Hit the wall a year and a half before you sold your company and why didn't anyone tell you? That others had gone through this. But of course, lots of people told you that you just have to read, you know, Winston Churchill's biography or 500 books on any historical figure. Any business thing, you know, all the twists and turns of Western Union and Alexander, Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, it's all there. We don't need more of it, we just don't pay attention to it.

And I think I know why we don't pay attention to it, but if it makes people feel better to know that I got 900, rejection letters in a row that I was eating macaroni and cheese for dinner and then window shopping and restaurants that people who cared about me said, I needed to quit and go get a job at the bank teller. That the biggest client, we had at AOL threatened to have me arrested, if I showed up on their campus and on, and on, and on, and on, and on and the fact that I could have launched, whatever, it does. All of those things happen, and I'm proud of

Them. But focusing on them hides. The real thing which is we want to believe that we are different. That when we do creative work or leadership which is the same thing, we want to believe that this time, it's going to be easy, we're going to be seen, we're going to be understood. We're going to get the benefit of the doubt and so there's no reason to read about how all these yokels who didn't understand what you understand have failed because you're not going to

Fail. And it's going to be fine because we have to tell ourselves that we think in order to find the guts to launch creative work in the first place. And that's what I'm trying to do. In the practice is not share, all my failures, but help people understand failure is what creativity is based on?

Tell me more about what that narrative you'd like, if you feel like that is a narrative that can be helpful to get started, but maybe it isn't a truly nutritious narrative. What would be the

The more nutritious narrative for the person listening to this that has been as you talk about in the book, kind of distracted by a passion and but thinking maybe I should pursue this or I kind of tried five years ago. What would be the healthiest narrative for them to

ruminate on well? So imagine that you're running coach and someone comes to you and says, I really want to run the marathon, can I train with you? And he said, great and they say, but I want to be able to do it without getting tired. No, you can't.

Rain with me, because the point of running the marathon is to get tired. If you're not tired, you're not running fast enough, right? That no one argues about this. No one says, I want to be able to run marathons and not sweat. I want to run marathons and not get tired, not not how it works. So, the reason that organizations after they have three or four people in them, tend to slow down and become less Brave is a they have meetings now where they didn't have to because they're more people but be

People don't sign up to be serial failures and what it means to do any sort of creative work, whether you're Jackson, Pollock or Spike, Lee or anyone in between is persistently and consistently discovering, how it's not done before you stumble onto something that other people didn't expect that works. That's the deal, that's how it works.

Why is that? So why is that so hard to grok win when it actually sounds so brilliantly? Simple and analogous to everything we have seen

before. If if 15,000 years ago you were in a village and you offended, the tribal leader, they kicked you out and you got eaten by a saber-toothed tiger and you died and so you had no grandchildren. And so we evolved culturally to understand that getting kicked out of the Villages of me.

Bad idea and in an era of industrial capitalism, Manchester England in the 1880s. If you challenged what the foreman said to do on the factory floor, you were fired and just like the person thrown out of the village, your family was going to go hungry and so industrial capitalism which we brainwashed kids on for 12 years in school is will this be on the test? And how do I get an A

And many of the people who have the means to start an organization or project are the kind of people who also were pretty good at school. And so we have to go against everything that we've evolved is a culture and everything that we've been brainwashed in to say, I am going to do something that might not work, that is totally different than saying, I'm going to open a Subway franchise because the whole deal with the subway franchisee is it's not going to fail going to make $12 an hour, but it's not going to fail.

That's why there's so many Subway franchise, not, because there was a good upside, but because there's almost no doubt

mmm-hmm, so many life decisions and even things just bouncing around in my head right now. It's still. So as you as you, it's so great at brilliantly outlining these things. Are your U of A Beautiful Mind. Seth of, of just the biological evolutionarily structured mind of

Do not no matter what, do not get kicked out of the community? I know for myself, it is a prison that I can accidentally walk into an and lock the door on of what will other people say?

You're out west. So, I need to highlight this Silicon, Valley is its own community and Silicon Valley, whether its Geographic or not,

Creates a different Community mindset and it's that start up bro, culture, it's that idea that you're measured by how big your your exit is. It's the questions of, which VCS are you in with an art? Were you invited to clubhouse at the beginning and all these other? So what it is be built is the same sort of Village. What is the village where success involves being part of the next big thing at a certain level.

And that is why a certain sort of breakthrough, doesn't happen in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, because the Silicon Valley ecosystem doesn't know what to do with it, right? And so we end up feeling, you know, if you watch the incredibly bad behavior Facebook over the last bunch of years, they don't think it's incredibly bad behavior because they're inside an Eco chamber that says, well, your investors got paid off.

Well, and you're doing fine in the stock market and my stock options are going up, keep going. And if they were in a different ecosystem they would never get away with that when we need to seek the water. We're swimming in otherwise we're just goldfish.

What would be a different ecosystem? East Coast New York or the The Village 500 years ago. What would that ecosystem, reverberate?

When, when you show up at a cocktail party in Bedding?

In Vermont, people aren't going to ask you about how much your stock options or were and they're not going to want to know how much did you fundraise to start that lumber mill down the street. We have pockets of culture sometimes geography, but now less and less where we're keeping track of something else. I was lucky enough to work with a nonprofit called Judy Colombo and to hoody is a micro lender. And the way that it works is, it does

This is in rural Kenya, you can borrow enough money to buy a cow and you pay back the money with milk. And at the end of the year, you own the cow. So it's a spectacular success. 97% of the people fully repay their loans, but what's fascinating is when you come together for the repayment ceremony because it's a ceremony and it involves actual Kenyan shillings.

People there aren't talking about the fact that then they're going to have 10 cows and forty cows and they're going to plow their that's not what they're keeping track of. And so we're tempted to believe that the only world where in is the world where in not the other Echoes of it. So I grew up in Buffalo, which is sort of the Midwest. I lived in New York for a long time and I was only in the valley for a little while and what was refreshing when I was a VP at Yahoo was everyone

Ooh, what I did for a living. What was sad is it was almost impossible talking about anything else whereas here outside of New York City, when I go to hang out with people almost nobody's asking me about things involving scale or go fast and break things or whatever slogans are you know 0 to 1 instead. It's about where do you fit into a certain kind of cultural ecosystem. So the reason that this

Is worth anything. If you want to be a creative.

The five people who are in your Mastermind group are going to determine how old you are. Because you're going to know that every Friday at three o'clock, you're going to have to turn to them. And say I looked at this and I blinked. I looked at that and I shipped and that small circle that's how chip Conley changed my life. All those years ago, figure out who those five people are and figure out what it is that you're bringing to the table every time you talk to them,

can you tell me more about, how chip

Is a is a friend of mine as well. How did he change your life all those years ago? And there's a chip Conley legendary, behind the scenes figure in San Francisco, Bay area and around the

world really correct. He helped Pioneer boutique hotels. He was a key honcho at Airbnb and a lot of things, and he's written a bunch of bestsellers. So, I knew chip before anyone knew, who, chipper, I were chip. Evan, and I were the three youngest people to Stanford Business School class of

1984. And the problem was people had spent two years. It is an investment bank or Commercial Bank hated us because they just wasted two years of their life to get into Stanford and we just showed up right out of college. I didn't know anybody and a few days into the year, there's a note in my mailbox in the mailbox. Is it Stanford? Or just is open slots and inside, I open the note and it says, hey I'm chip we've never met. I'd like to invite you to a brainstorming session. We're having every

We need anthropology department at 6:30. Well, the five of us is Evan chip. Me a couple. Other guys are the five of us met every Tuesday for a year, for three to four hours in a row. We met in the anthropology department, which was just down the street, because we would associate it with nothing, but that meeting. If you walk into that room, your brain shifted gears and from 6:30 to 10:00 at night, we just came up with ideas. We listed well, over a thousand business ideas.

Over the course of that period of time and if you brought in a lame idea and you couldn't defend it, you felt stupid if you brought in no ideas, you felt stupid. But if you could push the envelope and describe a possibility, your status went up and that was the only thing that I got out of business school was though, I didn't go my second year. But that first year that room, I don't remember any of the business ideas. I just remembered what I was doing, was normal and

creativity. It is possible to be normal.

If you didn't have that, what would have, what would have the the internal dialogue been around having ideas thinking through ideas? How do you think so indifferent? Yeah, I

mean the mindset. What you got rewarded for it? Stanford was, did you get a job at Bain or McKinsey? Or were you lucky enough to get a job at Apple? So I ended up joining a company with 30 employees and everyone thought I was an idiot. Everyone thought I

I was a failure because the convention in that moment was you need to have this veneer of being part of a fast moving bus because status roles and affiliation are key. And what was going on in the classroom is yes, case studies which are great when they're running a certain way. But they tended to be based on spreadsheets and the right answer and again creativity doesn't live there. So if we look at the history of painting

you you you and I could deconstruct Jackson Pollock and pink like he did and it would be worthless. It would be worthless to come up with a people and ft today because you only get points for doing it the first time.

And that is in short supply and it doesn't have to be in business or in painting, but in any sort of leadership, we're doing our job is to solve an interesting problem.

And if you have been brainwashed and how to do that, if you're not surrounded by people who think that's what you're supposed to do, then inevitably, you're going to back off.

We're about to jump into the practice and and more about how to not back off. But to engage with it to lean in. But real quick, you have a interesting contrarian view on on vulnerability and and being authentic. Quote, unquote being authentic, do you mind sharing that with Will listeners? I really enjoyed hearing this

so authenticity.

Is useless because no one really wants you to be authentic. They want you to be consistent that if you show up for any sort of service interaction or a meeting with a VC and they are authentically in a really really bad mood. You're not happy. You want them to pretend to be the best version of themselves that's why you went to meet with them and there's one little Slice on Twitter where we are, you know, sort of

Spectators, for authenticity theater, but the rest of the time, what we want is consistency. And the thing about vulnerability is if you're acting if you're creating something, if you're leading, it's not really you. It's you keeping your promises, you playing a role. So if you see Keanu Reeves in a movie and you hate it, you don't hate Keanu, Reeves. You don't even know, Keanu, Reeves, so it's not vulnerable for him to get up.

There and do great work. It's his job to do that. And the criticism that may come back, isn't criticism of him. It's criticism of the work. And so if we're going to walk around with, you know, our garments rent open saying I'm bleeding here, I'm so vulnerable. Well, I think we might have made a mistake about what it means to show up in the world because no one can know you. They cannot fully know who you are and where you're going. All

they can see is the performance that you were bringing them.

Interesting does do you think that much of that vulnerability theater as you called a vulnerability theater? Is manipulative, what is its utility? Then

it has several pieces of utility. The first one is that it hurts to be criticized and

If we are going to bring our emotional energy to work, it's very difficult to not also experience the pain that comes from not being, because you're not just phoning it in. You are emotionally present and when it doesn't work it hurts. And when it does work you want the joy of knowing it work. You have a both weights, right? The alternative is to say, I show up, but I do my work and when I'm done, whether it worked or not, I'm onto the

Next thing and there are plenty of very successful performers who get that right that. If you're a stand-up and the audience doesn't laugh. It's not because suddenly you were terrible. It's because the audience was having a bad night for whatever reason and you have to live with that because otherwise you can't do your work tomorrow. So that's one way that pressfield's resistance kicks in is we amplify all of this as way to persuade ourselves, not to talk to the chief to persuade ourselves.

Not to be creative because it hurts too much. And what Steve taught me is resistance is the work and if you want to make a change happen, then you have to dance with the resistance. You cannot let it beat you.

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It's a good segue to to dancing with that dancing with the fear and how to what are the I want to talk about dancing with the fear. But also, what are the missteps that that creatives can make right in the beginning? Where you'd be like, oh, shit, you're starting, you just took out. $100,000 loan to write. A blog post. You didn't though. Yo, just those things that put you in that, debt, emotional, creative debt. What are those missteps?

Yeah, so I would say the biggest misstep because I don't think you literally meant a hundred thousand, right? Just the but creative debt biggest misstep is anything that feels like a hundred thousand dollar loan. Let's talk about how you learn to walk or how you learn to talk. You did it poorly really poorly but no one points to a toddler and says you suck it. Walking you're never going to learn to walk. That just doesn't happen because we understand it's a low-stakes thing.

Only two and a half feet tall, you're going to fall and then you're going to get up, and we put cushions around all the glass tables. So don't worry, that's what you need to do. So, I've written 7950 blog posts, and half of them are below average. Some of them are terrible and if you are really really good, but if I had said, I'm only going to publish the really good ones, I'd never have a Blog and I would never know which one was going to be a really good one now blogging.

Doesn't make me nervous because I've done it too many times. Going on a podcast, talking to someone, like, you doesn't make me nervous, because I've done it so many times, giving a speech in front of 25,000. People doesn't make me nervous because I've done it so many times. The first time I did any of those things, it was like, oh this, there's some Stakes here, and then you have to Free Yourself to be wrong to Noodle around on the piano to make a demo tape. You know, if a lot of people listening here, know who Billy Joel is was

Go listen to Billy Joel's original demo tapes, go, listen to Bob, Dylan's original demo tapes, the new demos for Deja, vu's Crosby Stills, and Nash record. Came out this week, the 50th Anniversary, they're terrible. All of the demos are terrible. You got to make bad demos. And most people are afraid to make that

Yeah, I know, I some good friends are in a band that is decently well known now. And they, they were, they said that they picked up their instruments about six months before, starting their band. And it was electronic a lot of electronics. So they were terrible. Their first tour with the Thousand person. They had done well enough with a few songs, but a thousand per a thousand person, you know, venues and were like we were awful and people let us know like we were we did not know what we're doing now, aren't there?

Two billion streams that reconfirm. They really do know what they're doing. But so surprisingly in the early days and it's just through knowing them that they share that that it's, they knew that they were god-awful they were taking lessons every day and from my perspective, it's it's like oh they were probably great for 10 years and then, you know, I'd been working on it for 10 years but he actually was the most surprising part was that they were willing to put out an album when they knew themselves. Okay, we

We're like infants embryonic and really learning the real instruments. The and you talk about learning to walk I think that's so in your style of so simple to understand it but so contrary and brilliantly observant but so different then feel I feel like in Creative work it's more like you tell a 25 year old how to walk after they've been sitting in a bed and then you

Judge them whether they can run a marathon because for 25 years they do go to that investment banking job. They do walk through every narrow Corridor, as it gets more and more narrow through the education system and then you're like, okay you've basically been on a wheelchair, an automated wheelchair for 25 years now, run a marathon and and they obviously stumble in the first, you know, 60 yards and then usually quit. That's this whole podcast is dedicated to the Creator. Journey, that inner Journey,

That. It's whether it's cooking or whether it is starting the next great company and everything in between it, is we miss out on so much Innovation because people get started and bail instead of thinking about it. Like you just said, of bumping, the fall down, the stakes are actually really low fuck up. The the you know that project that you're working on that website, you think is going to be huge or that, you know, salad dressing company that you think is going to be.

Screw it up and learn how to walk

through it.

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, the people sometimes come to me and say, you know, I'm twenty or twenty-two. I've just graduating with a marketing degree. How do I get a great marketing job?

And I'm like, well, show me your marketing and these well, I'm going to do marketing after I get a great marketing job and I said, it doesn't cost anything to do marketing. Go raise $100,000, for charity water, show me how you did it. Go build a store on eBay or Shopify and sell thousand dollars worth of stuff. Show me how you did it, none of this costs, a penny. What are you waiting for? Do the work, do the work, do the work, you're not a resume, your body of work. Show me the work. If you want to raise five million dollars or fifty,

In dollars to build some fancy Tech startup, well, why don't you start by being a jobber and importing some stuff from Ali, Baba and figure out if you can sell it because if you can't do that with a five hundred dollar investment why on Earth would anyone give you 50 million

dollars and and yet there is that resistance and Steven pressfield's been on the podcast and just recently, and what is that, that dance with fear, what is stopping that 22? Year-old from that incredibly inexpensive

Well, it's exactly the same thing that makes business to business, selling a little different in business-to-business selling the person you're selling to, it's not their money and so going on, and on about value is silly, instead, they're only want the answer to one question, which is what will I tell my boss? If you can tell them what to tell their boss, then they're going to buy from you if it's worth telling that story to the Boston defending. If you can't, then the only thing I'm going to tell their boss.

Is I bought the cheapest one. Well, when it comes to shipping creative work, people are saying to themselves. What will I tell the others and what will I tell myself? Because if I'm on the hook,

Then I have to accept responsibility. I can't blame my boss. I don't have one. I can't blame my co-workers. I don't have them. I did this and it didn't work. What will I tell myself? What will I tell the others? And if we don't know what to tell them, if we're being quote, vulnerable and an authentic, then we were dead. We're Tovar. We lost on the other hand. If we can train ourselves to say, I learned something today, and I get to play again tomorrow.

Well, that's a good thing to be able to tell yourself.

I want to ask you more about on on the hook, but you're talking about this narrative, the story, telling, and behavior the relationship, do you mind telling listeners a little bit more about the relationship? I think most people perceive it as your behavior. You tell yourself a story and then you say, hey, I might be that hero in this. This story. I don't want to be in that person's do. I want to be the hero of my own story? And then your behavior starts to hopefully fall into place?

Come that, you know, Odysseus type of character. What's your view on on storytelling and behavior?

Yeah, that's great. Question. I blog about this today, which is the best way to be able to tell yourself that story is to make the story true before you tell yourself the story that you don't decide to be a good person and then help old lady cross the street. What you do is you just help old ladies cross the street.

Treat. And then you start to tell yourself the story that you're a good person and the same thing is true with all of the kind of creativity. We're talking about acting as if solving an interesting problem, before you see yourself as the kind of person who solves interesting problems getting good at talking to people Begins by talking to people, not by deciding, you're good at talking to me.

I

think that's such a nuanced book profound point. Do you mind you mind saying that one more time for listeners on just that example of of thinking you're a good person, then walking some walking the old lady across the street versus the reality, or your Viewpoint,

right? So I will never dunk a basketball. That's a talent you have to be born with it. You have to be tall enough, right? And it's unlikely that I will ever play any

Anything on the piano that other people want, that's partly a talent. But mostly I don't have the commitment to earn the skill and therefore, I just do it. But all the skills that really matter most of the time are things, like, honesty and loyalty and empathy, and compassion and hard work. Those are choices and we can pick them in a moment. We don't need to be worn with them and it doesn't matter what we were like, last year, we could do it.

Right now. So if you want to see yourself as an honest person, start telling the truth first and then when the repercussions rolling you'll say, yeah, well, that's because I'm an honest person. And if you want to see yourself as somebody who's a little bit of a hero, just start doing things and when they start happening, that's how you'll tell yourself. The story that you're a little bit of a hero

and how do you balance that with in the book? You talk about in the practice, you talk about, you're an artist as soon as you announced you.

You are.

So the announcement is not the announcement of telling your friends, you're going to make a painting tomorrow and art and painting don't have anything to do with each other. You become an artist when you make art.

Make a piece of art. Now, you're an artist and the art could be physical. It could be conceptual. It could be emotional, begin, simply begin. You don't need a permit. You don't need a master degree, you simply begin.

There seems to be an almost, an oscillation of doing the work, the behavior taking on the behavior. Then there is the story that you almost do need to bleed into. Okay. Now, I need to lean in

To this story, I need to because so many people.

So many 9 year olds can make art, but then not allow themselves to say that there are an artist say, oh, well, I just did that because other people are doing it. I know that it probably took me 30 plus years, to give myself permission to announce

Who I feel like I am right? And and so there it's like you're saying, if I'm reading it correctly, you're saying that, you know, it's the behavior first. Then the storytelling the announcement, the self Proclamation, but there is that part of it as well. Is that right?

Yes, because sunk costs are so important. So, you mean beings are terrible at ignoring some costs that if we have a thing, we it pains us to give it up. So next week, if you

Decided you didn't want to have a podcast anymore. It would be much harder for you than if you had decided that two weeks before you launch your first podcast because your podcast is now a sunk cost and you see yourself as a podcaster now. Which means that for you to abandon podcasting is much harder. Then the idea that you had to start podcasting in the first place so what we want to do is create a dynamic around us people like

Like us do things like this to be in that room with chip and the others established an identity. We're the kind of people who do this and to stop doing it would have broken that Rhythm. And, you know, one of the great marketing success stories of all time, which has no advertising of any kind is Alcoholics Anonymous and everyone's heard of it even though it's Anonymous. And the thing about it is it works because number one, one is a precept.

Is that if you know someone who needs help you bring them in so that helps it grow. And the other one is it becomes more and more emotionally difficult to drop out because you're sunk costs are so high. Instead of seeing yourself as a drunk, you see yourself as someone in recovery and you like being in that Circle. So you stay in that Circle and that's what we're talking about whether you're doing entrepreneurship or social work.

Or any kind of creative Endeavor is once you see that person in the mirror, you're going to want to keep doing.

Do you mind telling listeners a little about the workshop that you ran before? You wrote the book in the process of writing the practice? Because I think it's it sounds really relevant here and if you are just listening to this podcast and thinking, okay, I'm going to make decisions today. You might miss out on a really beautiful part of what you're touching on in this group dynamic.

Yeah. Well five years ago I started something called the alt MBA and it grew to become one of the most important online Workshop series and then we added a whole bunch of workshops including the creatives workshop which starts up again today and I don't run it anymore. I don't own it anymore. It's a b Corp in the public interest. The team that runs it is extraordinary. So you can find it at a Kimbo.com and the new fourth session of the Creator's Workshop is hundreds of

Of creators like you in a cohort like I was with chip in a discourse discussion board over the course of a hundred days giving and getting feedback, the typical user gives and gets more than 500 pieces of feedback a month. And you get into this rhythm of, here's 10, people or 30, people, or 40 people, there's a series of 50 lessons or a hundred lessons, and you learn things as you go, but mostly you do things and this act of doing it in a safe.