Why Strategy Always Beats Talent (w/Seth Godin)

strategy says doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction and figuring out where the prevailing winds are figuring out who we're trying to help 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 and 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 [Music] them Seth

Goen you're on the podcast again thank you for joining me joining us our audience uh 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 cafe in uh set somewhere on the upper west side with the slippery floor yeah with the slippery floor and uh you beaming went into your backpack and pulled out a stack of paper and

the stack of paper I have that stack of paper with me right here um for the people who are who are listening you can't see this but it is a what is this uh 17 by 11 y yeah 17 by 11 print out of your new book before it was published and this is one of the most generous um to me your most generous offerings I when you said you were writing a book on strategy it I was like I was very baffled I'm like what is a book on strategy about and then I'm you

know 25 pages in and it all flicks for me that this is 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 uh writing a book isn't what it used to be it's this uh five minutes of inspiration followed by a year of slog and uh part of they don't tell you 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 and 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 it demands to be rejected or absorbed or discussed and what I found like you I have peers and friends who ask me questions 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 uh philosophical questions that

were strategy questions or whatever their frustration was strategy says doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction and figuring out where the prevailing winds are figuring out who we're trying to help 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 skip it 7-year-olds skip it and 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 a clear lens as I've ever heard on concept of strategy especially that it's relevant to you know whether you're seven or 70 and whether you're a billionaire or you're just trying to get your own you know your 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 uh 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 ax is a good tactic yeah 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 H hundredth from the last Tree on Easter Island Because by the time there's only one tree left it's probably too late and 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 this is 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 and

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 I have this they have this camera and

they're really good or further along in their Journey than I so I need to have that type of camera or they're having you know they're doing these kinds of media uh and therefore I need to do these kinds of media and so it's very much like a culture of mimesis where we're just imitating other 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 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 rule book 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 it 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 F first realize that you're excited about these

tactics and then press pause and say okay let me zoom out 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 then 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 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 emyth Revisited and uh what he means by yeah looking for it while you're talking when you work on the business you are being the

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 and as someone who's been a freelancer often on for 40 years particularly when times are tough we find ourselves leaning in to 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 and I just save 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 uh there's a section on time and my new book and time comes up consistently and here's the so I I this is sort of my favorite artifact this gigantic print out that I've got here and this is gonna I'm gonna this is actually going to be on my

bookshelf and I've course I have the the actual book which is beautiful and I love the little debossing that you've got on the front great job it's beautiful uh and as I I 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 small business owners we have a pretty um I might use the word toxic I'm going to try it out and see how see how it lands kind of a 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: in the morning we know we need to be sleeping but our you know that that unhealthy part of our brain is telling us that we're not doing a good job um I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the relationship between uh us as solopreneurs entrepreneurs creators and and time it's a really consistent theme here you 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 um so let's try this thought experiment it's 2024 write a letter to the U of 2019 5 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 5 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 5 years from now the you of then can write a letter to you today what will be 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 and 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 I said these guys are onethird of our revenue and they are turning us into the kind of group 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've all we all have things like that right to me this is the uh the fundamental

there's let's keep poking at this time thing this 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 that that your relationship with that client creates time feels one way and I'd imagine when you and the team freed up from that worked 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 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 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 ask S as opposed to your craft your art and making a change happen so strategy begins with a very simple two part two questions one who exactly am I here for and 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 bar that looks like it's out of a movie called The Green Mill and I'm not sure if Patricia's still there

but for years and years on Mondays this bar basically gave themselves over to Patricia Barber Patricia Barber is a worldclass jazz pianist and her Trio would come and play for five or six hours every Monday and the time I went there the guy sitting next to me had flown in from Mumbai for the show now there's 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 and there are

other Jazz musicians maybe who have plenty of skill who 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 cuz she picked her customers and they didn't when you pick your customers you pick your future it feels there's someone listening right now for whom that feels like 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 this 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 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 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 go find a nonprofit and say I'm going to do a portfolio shoot for you and 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 and 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 weeks ago and they had a standard Long Island DJ uh I don't know why and um 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 happens to me 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 I it hit me like a truck it's like this this is the it's basically a road map 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 I 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 um 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 a weekend of just non-stop working or we're halfway through with the project or we're halfway through and we haven't even like 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 how do we like 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 and the first one is empathy that 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 that

this is the painting I made and I'm going to paint it and a collector should buy it I am projecting on other people what they should want and 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 and the second part of it which goes with the first part is T 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 create the conditions with empathy for people to feel the tension that causes them to say yes M so if you're a a graphic artist and you uh are waiting to get picked by a gallerist on in SoHo in New York so you can be famous they're not going to pick you because they got a long list of people who know how to paint in

front of you and they're not going to pick you on the other hand if you're shepher fairy and you start putting uh 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 and so Shephard'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 in like I mean let's just let's just be real like you you write in these like the most poignant like laser beam and this is one of my favorite I'll just give a little context here so the book has no page numbers folks it has only stories essentially um what would you call them would you call each one of

those a story or how you riffs okay riffs yeah riffs so they're all there's uh they're they're numbered by riffs and each of these 297 of them 297 that's right uh 297 of them and each of these riffs it if you think he just writes like that then you have a conversation like this and you realize that Seth talks in in riffs that are every one of its own could be an entire blog post or an entire podcast episode um can you tell me why you decided to just you know if form follows function or

function follows form like what what's 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 cafe and in 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 all right so context there what why uh 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 need 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 uh for your amazing book for my book for lots of books more than half the sales are either Kindle or audiobook M there are no page numbers on the Kindle and there are no page numbers on an Audi book so how are you going to talk to somebody about the 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 um systems for example systems thinking I I think of you as a very systemic thinker like when we have a conversation there's almost always a framework for that conversation there's context there's know all this scaffolding around it which you know I think this 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 when you think think of that there's 299 riffs like that 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 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 in you know I've had conver 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 and 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 is like this is we're tired of the former yeah like this for 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 is positively uninteresting and I will just say like I 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 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 like 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 on a good day I see myself as an optometrist or an optician or something like that uh there's a book Keith jstone wrote in the early 1960s called impro and I strongly recommend it Keith uh who just passed away a couple months ago uh was a teacher of theater and he articulated a thesis his thesis is every interaction in the theater is like every interaction 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 hand shaking 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 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 and 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 uh an example uh there is a uh 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 uh 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 in created a hospital where the price list is

right on the front door when you walk in it's spotlessly clean and it cost about $25 to have a baby and their outcomes are extraordinary it's an obvious choice so I got there when they were about 2 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 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 your 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 they 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 like of course like of course and they 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 cuz otherwise you're going to waste all your time marketing to pregnant ladies yeah that goes back to the in the business on the business the just awareness of this and potentially uh 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 Goden um and I think you know how many books you got like 19

bestsellers now is that right something like that but that I like that your name is large but this little line right here in the middle for the people who are uh listening instead of watching the subhead is make better plans to me this is the punchline that if we're going to draw a circle around what matters in this book it's and what matters to you as why you would care about reading this book is you can imagine if you are working or the analogy you often use or you have used in the past if you

are climbing the wrong Mountain you're 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 like 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 like I can't say it any more bluntly that that is why you

have to get get this book cuz if you're climbing the wrong mountain right now and many of you who are listening or watching are I've climbed the wrong Mountain many times in my life and I've done it as with like as recent 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 clme 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 another winning uh thing from the out from the the back cover here um and the last one is one of my faves you're not you're not stuck in traffic you are traffic I was literally gonna say that my then the takeaway here this is like you're not say think about that again you're not sitting in traffic you are traffic Seth anything else where you'd steer us because uh I know that this is you're always doing independent Renegade things with your books uh where do

we get this what's the best place for if you'd point us to any uh so many Renegade things that were fun to do on this one I made a collectible chocolate bar with our friends at Asin noi chocolate the rapper alone is worth the price and a strategy deck anyway you find them all at seth. blog which stands for this is strategy and um 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 work the worth while work is writing a book good enough to be worthy of sharing with Chase 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 that's my calling one of my favorite people in the whole world to talk to is Seth Goden and Seth thank you so much uh I cherish every one of our 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 like massive insight and transformational awareness uh of stuff that's sitting right in front of me but Seth sees it when I don't um thank you thank you for being a friend a mentor writing This brilliant book your 1928 24th I don't know how many books you've written but make better plans this is strategy Seth Goden 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

you're just gonna say look at my just got you have the you are the only person on the planet who has that version I think I I a couple times I just sent you Snippets I like to read in the morning before my day gets away from me and there's so many beautiful beautiful uh riffs in here thanks for being a guest on the show the book is this is strategy Seth go everyone appreciate you friend thanks for being on the show