Why Strategy Always Beats Talent (w/Seth Godin)

"Strategy says it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. Figuring out where the prevailing winds are, figuring out who we're trying to help, and getting that part clear before we start racing around with all the tactics and the clicking and the posting is so important, and yet people skip it. Billionaires I know skip it.

Nonprofit leaders I know skip it. Seven-year-olds skip it. We got indoctrinated to skip the strategy, and it just felt to me like people didn't understand what strategy was, and maybe I could help them.

[Music] Seth Godin, you're on the podcast again! Thank you for joining me, joining us, our audience of listeners. They're super big fans of yours, and you're back on the show.

Thank you for being here. You know I would be on the show even if you forgot to hit record just so we could chat. You remember, um, not too long ago, sitting in a café somewhere on the Upper West Side with the slippery floor?

Yeah, with the slippery floor. And you beamed, went into your backpack, and pulled out a stack of paper. I have that stack of paper with me right here.

For the people who are listening, you can't see this, but it is a—what is this? A 17 by 11? Yeah, 17 by 11 printout of your new book before it was published.

This is one of the most generous offerings, to me your most generous offering. When you said you were writing a book on strategy, I was baffled. I was like, ‘What is a book on strategy about?

’ And then, you know, 25 pages in, it all clicked for me that this is the best thing you could ever write about. Why did you decide to write about this in your next book? Well, as you know, writing a book isn't what it used to be.

It's this five minutes of inspiration followed by a year of slog, and part of— They don’t tell you that in writing school, right? That's correct. Part of the reason I do it, truly, is so I can have conversations like this with people like you.

Part of the reason I do it is because I want other people to talk about it. A book is a signal; it's a signal that says this isn't a blog post, it's not a YouTube video. It's this document that demands to be rejected or absorbed or discussed.

What I found, like you, is that I have peers and friends who ask me questions for advice. I don't do any coaching or consulting, but what I found is people would come to me with marketing questions that weren't marketing questions—they were strategy questions. They would come to me with philosophical questions that were strategy questions, or whatever their frustration was.

Strategy says it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. Figuring out where the prevailing winds are, figuring out who we're trying to help, and getting that part clear before we start racing around with all the tactics and the clicking and the posting is so important, and yet people skip it. Billionaires I know skip it.

Nonprofit leaders I know skip it. Seven-year-olds skip it. We got indoctrinated to skip the strategy, and it just felt to me like people didn't understand what strategy was, and maybe I could help them.

Well, that is about the clearest lens I've ever heard on the concept of strategy, especially that it's relevant to, you know, whether you're seven or seventy and whether you're a billionaire or you're just trying to get your business off the ground. Is it the equivalent of, if you're going to chop down a tree, you need to spend some time sharpening your axe first rather than just chopping? Or is it slightly different than that?

Well, I love a good metaphor. Part of it is, if you're going to chop down a tree, it helps to plan 20 years in advance so you can plant a tree. And part of it is figuring out which kind of tree to chop down because if you're making a cherrywood canoe paddle and you chop down a pine tree, you're out of luck.

So, yeah, sharpening the axe is a good tactic, but a strategy is why do we have an axe at all, and why this tree, and why today, and what are we here to do, and what change are we trying to make? And so, you know, since you made me start thinking of trees, who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, which then led to the demise of the entire population? Didn't they see that there was only one tree left?

Well, another interesting question is, who chopped down the hundredth from the last tree on Easter Island? Because by the time there's only one tree left, it's probably too late. There's an ecosystem all around us; sometimes it's an actual ecosystem with trees, sometimes it's an ecosystem filled with social media or competitors or whatever.

Do we understand that tomorrow is going to be a little like today but different, and what's going to grow and how it's going to shift? These are super juicy things, and you know, when I think about the seminal breakthrough business that you started, it worked partly because of your magic, but also because you saw the systems. You saw how media was changing, you saw the rise of the independent freelancer, you saw that people were craving not just craft but connection.

All of that was an insatiable desire that you showed up to fill, and other people showed up to…” "said I got a hack for today, but that's not as good as having a strategy. So I think for a lot of people, uh, who are listening or watching, the concept of a strategy is fuzzy, it's obscure. It's like, you know, they go right into the tactic, like cool, I see my peers posting on social media; therefore, I should post on social media as an example, uh, that you've already articulated.

And yet the same thing is true with a million other things. Well, they. .

. I see that I have this; they have this camera, and they're really good or further along in their journey than I am, so I need to have that type of camera. Or they're having, you know, they're doing these kinds of media, and therefore, I need to do these kinds of media.

So it's very much like a culture of mimesis, where we're just imitating what we see other people doing. And then, you know, if you put a pin in that, the way that most every artist, author, entrepreneur breaks through is from strategically doing something different. So how do we get out from underneath what most people who are listening or watching run to, which is the tactic?

What, you know, what advice would you give us to get started thinking strategically first before we even, right, you know, record our first video, for example? So I'm going to assert that most of the people who are listening see themselves as creatives and are probably freelancers or soloists. Yep.

And if that is you, two things. First of all, you signed up to do things that are creative, so finding a creative strategy without a rulebook and a list of tactics should probably be okay with you, because you said you wanted to be a creative. And second, the only way for you to have achievement, for you to advance, is not to work more hours, because you can't.

It's to get better clients. Better clients demand more, talk about you more, come back more often, pay you more, and you don't get better clients by doing a really good job for bad clients. You get better clients by creating the conditions for better clients to seek you out.

So the reason that you need a strategy is because what you're doing right now is getting you the clients you're getting right now. And a strategy says, here's how I'm going to find a different path to get a different outcome—the people I seek to serve. So let's just pick a wedding photographer.

If you're a wedding photographer and you're bottom feeding, what you're doing is you're saying, if you're a bride and you want to pick me, here I am. You can pick anyone, but please pick me. And you're going to end up with indiscriminate customers who are going to pay you average and demand average.

On the other hand, if you say, I specialize in solving this problem for this kind of bride and groom or bride and bride or groom and groom, that I work in this way or in this place for these kinds of customers, this is an untapped place where once I start doing it, people go, oh, that's a whole category I didn't even know about. That can belong to you, but you're not going to be able to do it by copying someone. You're going to do it by seeing a problem and finding a solution to it.

That's strategy. That's part of the. .

. And I guess to what would you respond, or how would you respond if I said, but isn't it good to do something instead of nothing? Because most people try and solve all their problems from the couch.

They'll sit there and try and just fast forward all the perfect solutions a, b, c, and d. And you know, how do you reconcile the fact that I'm trying to get people to do something instead of nothing, and the something ends up usually being a tactic? Is it okay to do a tactic first, realize that you're excited about these tactics, and then press pause and say, okay, let me zoom out and say, what am I doing here?

Or do we always need to be thoughtful and start with the first step first? Like reconcile those things for me. Okay, so you need a craft and you need a skill, and you can develop your craft and you can develop your skill without getting paid for it.

And so we need to be busy all the time getting better at our craft and our skill, but it doesn't make sense to do mediocre crap work for mediocre clients we don't want more of just because we don't have anything else booked for Tuesday. That if we can have the guts to say, I'd rather work on my own or do charity work for the zoo or the local nonprofit for free than take this mediocre client on Tuesday, we have just put ourselves on the hook, on the spot, because we said, look, I'm only going to get this Tuesday once and I have a bar. And if you're not above the bar, I'm going to pay myself to work on Tuesday because I need to be able to say no to people.

If you're not saying no to people, then you don't stand for anything. There's a phrase: you're either working in the business or on the business. And is it fair that that strategy is working on the business and doing social media posts, and doing your craft is working in the business?

Would you make that distinction? Yes, that's a great distinction. It's the single best page in the book, The E-Myth Revisited.

And, uh, what he means by. . .

" Consultant, the board of directors, the CEO: you are figuring out the structures so that your best employee doesn't waste her time. When you're working in the business, you're the best employee doing your job. As someone who's been a freelancer off and on for 40 years, particularly when times are tough, we find ourselves leaning into working in the business as much as we possibly can, thinking that's going to solve the problem.

But 10 minutes of working on the business can be transformative, because in those 10 minutes, you can say, “You know what? I don't need to keep writing mediocre copy; I'm just going to hire Claw to do it for me. ” I just saved myself an hour a day, which I'm going to go spend doing something hard.

Right? That decision is not easy to make because you're feeling stressed, and you just want to do something all day to keep up. But the short version of this is: a lot of people listening to this want to have a job without a boss.

And if that's what you signed up for, I have to inform you, you probably have a really, really lousy boss—someone who wakes you up in the middle of the night and says you're not doing a good job; somebody who's undermining you; somebody who doesn't appreciate you—and it's you. So you should probably get a better boss—someone who you deserve. I have just finished writing about—there's a section on time in my new book—and time comes up consistently.

And here’s the—so I, I. . .

this is sort of my favorite artifact, this gigantic printout that I've got here, and this is going to—I'm going to—this is actually going to be on my bookshelf. And of course, I have the actual book, which is beautiful, and I love the little debossing that you've got on the front; great job, it's beautiful. As I have a number of sections marked throughout the book, you also have written about time quite a bit, and it turns out that we creators, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small business owners, we have a pretty—I might use the word toxic; I'm going to try it out and see how it lands—a kind of toxic relationship with time, not dissimilar to what we just talked about: you're working on the business or in the business.

We wake up at 3 a. m. , we know we need to be sleeping, but our, you know, that unhealthy part of our brain is telling us that we're not doing a good job.

I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the relationship between us as solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, creators, and time. It's a really consistent theme here. You’ve got one section, for example, 99, that I’ve got marked here which is “Time isn’t free.

” When we spend an hour reading a book, it's an hour we didn't spend listening to speed metal. When we take on one client, we’ve chosen not to pursue different options; opportunity cost is real. And as we've been given more access, more tools, more opportunities, the costs continue to increase.

Yeah, so let's try this thought experiment: it's 2024. Write a letter to the you of 2019, five years ago, thanking that person for something they did five years ago for you today. What was that decision?

That client they took? That client they fired? That skill they learned five years ago that you are so grateful is part of your quiver now?

It’s pretty easy to imagine the best decisions that you made that contributed to that. Well, five years from now, the you of then can write a letter to you today. What will they be thanking you for?

Right? Will they be thanking you for spending 10 extra minutes sharpening all the pencils and making sure they’re in exactly the right order? Will they be thanking you?

I still thank the me of 20 years ago for firing my biggest client, because they were horrible. They sent a lawyer to every meeting; they were undermining us; they were doing everything they could to get rid of us. I had the legal right to stay and keep all the revenue that we were promised, and I sat with my team—there were nine of us at the time—and I said, “These guys are one-third of our revenue, and they are turning us into the kind of group that’s good at working with lousy clients.

I'm not happy about that; I would like to fire them. ” And the group, to their credit, said, “Go for it. ” So, I called them up and I said, “You can keep all the royalties; we never want to see you again.

You got what you wanted; you win. ” And in the next 60 days, we replaced all of the lost business, plus extra. Wow!

Because we felt so relieved at what we had done and how willing work could be again that we were on fire. Well, if I hadn't done that, there's no question I would not be on this call today. And we all have things like that, right?

To me, this is the fundamental—let's keep poking at this time thing. We believe that time is this ongoing sort of conveyor belt marching us towards our death; that is always operating in the background. And yet, as you can experience, as you just shared, when you're working for a terrible client, doing work that is not fulfilling, largely based on the environment that that client—and your relationship with that client—creates, time feels one way.

And I'd imagine when you and the team freed up from that work with other clients, replaced the revenue, did work you love for people. . .

That you enjoyed being around, that you experienced. I'll say that work, but also probably life, a little differently. Is that a stretch?

Oh no, that's it. And again, back to hiring the best boss you can. This idea of being a working creative has two parts: number one, you've got to pay the bills because when you run out of money, you're out.

But number two, you have to make it worth doing because when you run out of time, you're also out. So, don't run out of money and don't run out of time. But the way you run out of time is by wasting time doing tasks as opposed to your craft, your art, and making a change happen.

So, strategy begins with a very simple two-part question: one, who exactly am I here for? And two, what is the change I seek to make? So, the “who” isn’t someone’s name necessarily; it’s what do they believe, what do they seek, what do they want?

So, in Chicago, there’s a really great dive bar that looks like it’s out of a movie called The Green Mill. I'm not sure if Patricia is still there, but for years and years on Mondays, this bar basically gave themselves over to Patricia Barber. Patricia Barber is a world-class jazz pianist, and her trio would come and play for five or six hours every Monday.

The time I went there, the guy sitting next to me had flown in from Mumbai for the show. Now, there are only a hundred people in the room; it’s Patricia’s living room, and she gets to do her work. No one is in the back going, "Play Freebird," because they are there for her and she’s there for them.

There are other jazz musicians, maybe, who have plenty of skill but instead just do whatever is next on their gig sheet, and they’re not having the same sort of magic and the same sort of career because she picked her customers and they didn’t. When you pick your customers, you pick your future. It feels like there’s someone listening right now for whom that feels like a thousand miles away because there’s a lot of desperation between where they are and where they feel like they could be in choosing their customers rather than their customers choosing them, and that’s a scary gap.

Yep. So, strategically speaking, what’s the first step in helping people besides this—the awareness? Because let’s assume that the awareness is there, right?

What’s the first step beyond the awareness that, “Oh my God, I need to choose my clients and choose them intelligently,” and that’s actually the difference between where I am now and where I want to be? So, Pressfield's resistance is key here. Yeah, because if you’re on the hook, then you are responsible.

You and I have both seen portfolios from photographers who say, “Well, under the circumstances, the best I could do because this is what the client wanted. ” Okay, where’s the work you did when you were the client, right? Go find a nonprofit and say, “I’m going to do a portfolio shoot for you for free, and this is what I’m going to make.

” Right? Where’s the work when you were busking on a street corner and could play any songs you wanted? What did that sound like?

Being able to say, “I made this,” and not have to explain how much you got paid for it begins this journey of what do you actually stand for and who are you going to turn away? When we turn someone away, we’re not insulting them, particularly if we send them to a worthy peer. We’re just saying, “I get you; I see what you want.

That’s not what we do. We do this. ” But it’s very scary to say, “We do this.

” I was at a wedding a couple of weeks ago, and they had a standard Long Island DJ. I don’t know why, and it was right out of a bad movie. “So, ladies and gentlemen, meet the family, the bride and groom,” and then they play “We Are Family.

” Like, you became a DJ to do that. And so, even when people like that have the freedom to innovate, they don’t because they’ve been so browbeaten by nervous clients, and they don’t have enough cycles under their belt to say, “No, no; I’m doing it this way. Trust me.

” And that is why you set out to do this in the first place, but you forgot how much of this is about forgetting who we are. Yeah, it happens to me. It happens to me all the time.

Yeah, and you know, again, that I—I—I part of when I first started reading the book, it was like, “What am I reading here? ” And then it hit me like a truck. It’s like, “This is the—it’s basically a roadmap for all the important questions that we have forgotten to ask ourselves.

” Like, “Why am I doing this? What am I actually doing here? ” You know, writing a book is one thing, but writing a book starts out with writing a sentence and writing a, you know, a journal entry.

And you know, that to me, that’s part of what so many people in my community—we lose track. We forget to ask ourselves the most important questions, and we’re halfway down, you know, halfway through a weekend of just nonstop working, or we’re halfway through with the project, or we’re halfway through and we haven’t even asked ourselves the most important questions. And it’s just, it’s a sort of like—there’s an awakening that I felt in this book that I guess if this book is there to remind us, you know, what else can we do to remember?

This is all this stuff that is simple. But not easy, yeah. That, that, that.

Whenever you start something, you should ask these fundamental questions: How do we embed this in our psychology, in our process, so that we stop making the same mistakes of just doing stuff without thinking about it? Okay, so there's two surprising twists in the story now. The first one is empathy.

Often, someone who sees themselves as a creator begins with a lack of empathy. This is the song in my head. I'm going to play it, and I should get picked by Columbia Records.

This is the painting I made, and I'm going to paint it; a collector should buy it. I am projecting onto other people what they should want. When we start out that way, we are almost always punched in the face repeatedly because the world says, "Nah," because we're not them, and they're not us.

The second part of it, which goes with the first part, is that if we're going to try to make a change happen, we have to intentionally create tension: fear of missing out, fear of being left behind, fear of you might not get in. When we put those two things together, what we see is that to do creative work is to do something that doesn't feel easy for most people, which is to create the conditions, with empathy, for people to feel the tension that causes them to say yes. So, if you're a graphic artist and you are waiting to get picked by a gallerist in SoHo in New York so you can be famous, they're not going to pick you because they have a long list of people who know how to paint in front of you.

They're not going to pick you. On the other hand, if you're Shepard Fairey and you start putting posters all around so often that you get arrested 30 times, and then you create the iconography for one of the most important presidential elections in history, the gallerists start calling you because you created the conditions for them to get what they want, which is a piece of somebody who stands for something. So, Shepard's tactics aren't the point here.

The point is you're not going to get picked by the establishment to have a job without a boss, but you can invent your own establishment by creating the situation where the people you seek to serve show up and say, "Oh, I'm glad you're here. " Yeah, I don’t know anybody who speaks like—let's just be real—you write in these, like, the most poignant, like, laser-beam. And this is one of my favorites.

I'll just give a little context here. So, the book has no page numbers; folks, it has only stories, essentially. What would you call them?

Would you call each one of those a story or how you… riffs? Okay, riffs. So, they're all—they're numbered by riffs, and each of these—297 of them.

297, that's right—297 of them. And each of these riffs, if you think he just writes like that, then you have a conversation like this, and you realize that Seth talks in riffs, each one of its own could be an entire blog post or an entire podcast episode. Can you tell me why you decided to just—you know, if form follows function or function follows form, like, what’s your argument for why the—I mean, first of all, I think it's freaking genius.

But how did you land on this? And I remember sitting at the café on the Upper West Side, and you're like, "I don't have page numbers. " And I was like, "What?

" And then, of course, it makes perfect sense. You don't need page numbers because, you know, you just—it's like you have page numbers but within the text. Alright, so context there: Why riffs and not do it in an obvious order with an obvious table of contents?

So, if you think about how you learned about the vegetables, your mom did not say when you were three, "Today's vegetable day," and start with artichokes and work her way through to zucchini. What happened was over the course of years, you bumped into different vegetables. That's the way we learn everything: we learn things in layers, not all the things in one category.

So, I was writing about systems, but I needed to talk about games. And I was writing about games, but I needed to talk about empathy. So, I'm like, "I'm not going to force myself into a taxonomy here.

I'm going to teach people the way many people learn. " Then the second thing was, for your amazing book, for my book, for lots of books, more than half the sales are either Kindle or audiobook. There are no page numbers on the Kindle, and there are no page numbers on an audiobook.

So how are you going to talk to somebody about riff number 147? So, I'm going to number riff 147. And by taking out the page numbers, I was trying to send a signal that says, "Please, you know, order by number.

Tell me which riff you want to talk about. Let’s talk about that one. " When you talked about systems, for example, systems thinking, I think of you as a very systemic thinker.

When we have a conversation, there's almost always a framework for that conversation. There's context; there's all this scaffolding around it, which I think is the secret to the most creative people I know—that they work within a framework, and that's what allows the creativity to flow. And yet you… Know you could when then when you think of that there's 299 riffs like that.

It doesn't feel like a framework. Where is the, um, the nice little tidy—what is it called when you have the first letter of? Starts with, uh, like my framework for Creative Calling was "Idea, Imagine, Design.

" Like, that's—that's like scaffolding in a nutshell. And you are the most, sort of, one of the most structured thinkers that I know, and the book has essentially no scaffolding. Yeah, how do we reconcile those things?

It's a great point. And first, to anyone who's ever had a conversation with me, I apologize if I'm annoying because sometimes it's annoying that someone has to have a structure totally. But, uh, the mini scaffolding is that strategy has four components, and I talk about that repeatedly—what the four components are.

But what I found is the amount of throat clearing and hand waving I had to do to articulate the framework was the book. And, um, you know, I've had conversations about this book a lot lately with some very sophisticated and some very unsophisticated people, and I'm constantly amazed at how often they're surprised by the stuff I'm talking about. It feels to me like a framework is most useful when we're talking about something that isn't surprising.

Like, if I was going to analyze bass fishing, I think the framework of "pick your lake, pick your lure, pick your boat, pick your time of day," we could like break it all down because I don't have to explain to you what a fish is. But what I discovered here is there was so little common understanding of what I was talking about that laying out the framework wasn't providing scaffolding, and this is a challenge. Because if my goal was to sell as many books as possible, I put way too many ideas in one book.

The best way to sell as many books as possible is to tell people things they already know and make it a really clear, uh, framework that they can tell their friends. And I am long past trying to sell as many books as possible. I'm like, this is too much work to do that.

I just want to write a great book. But here's the twist that I just have to put an exclamation point behind. It's like, this is— we're tired of the former!

Yeah, like, this is—this is like really interesting food for an interested brain because the linear, uh, framework that I could recite at a cocktail party is, to me, positively uninteresting. And I will just say, like, I went away from that—I did that in 2019 and I didn't do it in my most recent book. But this is sort of like that on steroids for the creative, uh, interested, curious person.

The what's coming next, I have no idea, is absolutely intoxicating to me. That's part of what makes it a page-turner. You know, rarely are business books page-turners, and I don't even know this.

Like, I wouldn't even say this is a business book. Like, that's—I don’t even know what category it is, what BYC code. It doesn't matter.

But, like, how do you think of this book? Do you think of it as a business book? Do you think of it as—it's sort of like a life book for me, but what, you know, how do you think about it?

On a good day, I see myself as an optometrist or an optician or something like that. There's a book Keith J. Stone wrote in the early 1960s called "Impro," and I strongly recommend it.

Keith, uh, who just passed away a couple of months ago, was a teacher of theater, and he articulated a thesis. His thesis is every interaction in the theater is like every interaction in real life—it's about status. At the end of every scene, every interaction, someone's going to move up and someone's going to move down.

And if you watch the videos of world leaders handshaking, you see an example of this. Who won the handshake? What's all of it?

As soon as you are 25 pages into that book, you will never see the world again the same way. That's what I'm going for, right? That was my experience exactly.

I think I said that before you said it. Right? So, like, you know, once you get the joke, then my work is done, and you got it.

And you don't need my help anymore. You can run with it. So many people in my life around the world, work I've done with Acumen in multiple continents, didn't get the joke.

And you know, I'll give you an example. There is a chain of hospitals in India called Lifespring, and in India, if you are a pregnant mom, you have two choices: you can go to a private hospital where you'll have to pay an enormous amount of money, or you go to a public hospital which isn't particularly sanitary and you have to pay bribes. And what Lifespring did is they created a hospital where the price list is right on the front door when you walk in.

It's spotlessly clean, and it costs about $25 to have a baby, and their outcomes are extraordinary. It's an obvious choice. So I got there when they were about two years old and they just weren't full, and they were, “What tactics should we use?

What tactics should we use? How do we get…? ” And I said, “Who's your customer?

” And they pointed to like the pregnant lady and said, “What, are you an idiot? You didn't go to health class when you were six? That's our customer.

” And I said, “I…” Don't think that's your customer. I think your customer is her mother-in-law. I think her mother-in-law is the one who is making the decision about what hospital she's going to give birth to the grandchild in.

And you could just see everyone in the room, like I'm some stranger, some white guy who's never been. What am I? And they're like, of course, of course!

Everything they did after that shifted, and it dramatically changed the enrollment in the hospital because they understood something about strategy. And that's what we're trying to do here. If we're doing good work, like I hope—people who are doing evil work don't read this—but if you're doing good work, you need to see that because otherwise you're going to waste all your time marketing to pregnant ladies.

Yeah, that goes back to the business on the business, the just awareness of this, and potentially one of the biggest strengths of the cover of your book, in addition to this awesome photo of you in the middle of the "O" of Godin. And I think, you know, how many books you got? Like 19 bestsellers now, is that right?

Something like that. But I like that your name is large, but this little line right here in the middle—for the people who are listening instead of watching, the subhead is "Make Better Plans. " To me, this is the punchline.

If we're going to draw a circle around what matters in this book and what matters to you as to why you would care about reading this book, can you imagine if you are working—or the analogy you often use or have used in the past—if you are climbing the wrong mountain? You're doing great at climbing, but if you're climbing the wrong mountain, what are you doing? Yeah, this idea of making better plans: who are you at your core?

What is your vision? What is your mission? Who are you serving?

You start answering some of these questions and making plans that are in line with what you really want to do, who you really are—that makes all the difference in the world. I don't even know how to say it any more bluntly than that. That is why you have to get this book because if you're climbing the wrong mountain right now—and many of you who are listening or watching are—I have climbed the wrong mountain many times in my life, and I've done it as recently as, you know, six months ago.

I was climbing the wrong mountain with a different book that I was writing. I've climbed the wrong mountain; I know how freaking painful it can be. And this making the right plans to climb the right mountain is transformational.

Wow, thank you by the way. Yeah, thank you for writing this book. "Today is your best chance to improve tomorrow.

" There's another winning thing from the back cover here. And the last one is one of my faves: "You're not stuck in traffic; you are traffic. " I was literally gonna say that!

My takeaway here is this: think about that again. You're not sitting in traffic; you are traffic. Seth, anything else where you'd steer us?

Because I know that you’re always doing independent Renegade things with your books. Where do we get this? What's the best place for if you’d point us to any?

So many Renegade things that were fun to do on this one! I made a collectible chocolate bar with our friends at Askinosie Chocolate. The wrapper alone is worth the price, and a strategy deck.

Anyway, you can find them all at seth. blog, which stands for "This Is Strategy. " And I really, truly mean it: I am not in the book-selling business.

It's fine with me if people never buy one of my books; I just want them to talk about it. And that's why the real worthwhile work is writing a book good enough to be worthy of sharing because if I can have a conversation like this with you, and other people start having this conversation, that's my role—that’s my calling. One of my favorite people in the whole world to talk to is Seth Godin.

Seth, thank you so much. I cherish every one of our conversations. You've been a guiding light to me in so many ways.

If you've read my new book, you know that Seth is in there two different times, giving me massive insight and transformational awareness of stuff that's sitting right in front of me, but Seth sees it when I don't. Thank you for being a friend, a mentor, and for writing this brilliant book—your 24th, I don't know how many books you've written, but "Make Better Plans: This Is Strategy. " Seth Godin, everyone.

Thank you so much, Seth, for being on the show. You're always welcome here. And to everybody out there who has the book—you don't have this version—I'm just going to say: look at my.

. . You are the only person on the planet who has that version.

I think I, a couple of times, just sent you snippets I like to read in the morning before my day gets away from me, and there are so many beautiful, beautiful riffs in here. Thanks for being a guest on the show. The book is "This Is Strategy," Seth Godin, everyone.

Appreciate you, friend. Thanks for being on the show!