Seth Godin | How to make sure you NEVER get fired

[Applause] I don't need to say very much about Seth you're a rockar you are such a rockar so nervous I don't need to tell you much about Seth uh his reputation precedes him but he's I guess suffice to stay a thought leader um successful author and uh it's inspired me from his very first book so take it away thank you Brian uh Brian is uh persistent and generous and intelligent and a a a real uh uh a mench and a pleasure to work with so thank you Brian um all right so I want to start

by asking you a pretty serious question I don't want you to answer it out loud but I want you to answer it honestly to yourself I want you to think really hard as we get started and the question is really simple are you a genius it's a little uncomfortable if you do a search on Google for is a genius all these pictures show up of people from all walks of life the thing is Albert Einstein sort of ruined the whole genius thing for people because we got this feeling that in order to be a genius

you have to revolutionize quantum mechanics or physics or something that we don't even understand and I'm here to talk about a different way of thinking about that and I'm here to talk about a fundamental shift in the world that we live in I did a word map of some of the writing I've done in the last two years years and what I discovered is the thing I write about the most is not uh marketing or making money it's people over the last few years I've been hearing from a lot of people some of you in

this room and what I've been hearing from people has changed and it's changed because something has changed in the world it used to be that one guy this is John Hammond the person who discovered Bruce Springstein and artha Franklin and lots of other acts one guy had the leverage to really make a difference in an organization in the world but what occurred and we're going to talk about why is we switched to a world of factory farming we switched to a world of factory factories we switched to a world where business was about Building Systems

that made money the most important person of the 20th century when they look back 500 years from now is this guy you may not recognize him it's Henry Ford what what Henry Ford did that was so important is he figured out how to build a system called the Ford system that enabled him to take a 50 Cent a day man and give him enough leverage and enough productivity that he could afford to pay that guy $5 a day Henry Ford single-handedly increased the wages of people in Detroit who had skills by a factor of 10

in one day and the line outside the factory was huge Henry Ford could afford to pay people five bucks because he was making 30 bucks or 40 bucks or 50 bucks from every day they work the system was the king the system was all about getting stuff done fast and productively that it turns out that factories a factory that sells Insurance a factory that's an ad agency a factory that makes cars a factory that raises money for nonprofits a factory that makes clothes the factory that sells clothes they're all factories factories are efficient systems to

take inputs from people and produce money because they're productive they weren't always here only 130 years ago this was the most complicated device sold in the United States to typical consumers the Singer sewing machine incredibly complex if you broke a piece you had to replace either the whole machine or get a Craftsman to make you the piece you could there no replacement parts because everything was hand fit together if you went to the hardware store in 1860 and bought a nut and a bolt and you picked up one nut and one bolt they would not

fit together everything was hand fit and in fact Thomas Jefferson and some folks in France figured out that this idea of interchangeable parts was going to revolutionize the world and it took hundred years for our culture to figure out interchangeable parts that was replaced by this idea of interchangeable people because once the system is up and running and you've got a cash register there and you've built the store and paid the rent and stocked it up you don't want to depend the whole thing on that cashier you want an interchangeable cashier right she quits you

replace her five minutes later no big deal AT&T had a deal with this in 1940 they did the math and at the rate AT&T was using operators they calculated that half the women in America would be working as an AT&T operator within 10 years so the entire model of our economy number one based on efficient factories and replaceable workers number two the biggest problem that faced industrialists in 1910 and 1920 was not what you think like today you open the paper and the problems that come up again and again are Global unrest and global warming

in those days the thing they all talked about over production they were all lobbying each other hard to make less stuff because factories were so efficient they were worried we would not be able to buy everything they made which is funny now when you look at a walk-in closet in Orange County right Mariah Cary has a thousand shoes in her closet what we did capitalists industrialists was set out to figure out how to get people to buy by lots of stuff and the second thing we needed to do was make sure that the workers were

willing to be interchangeable to be compliant to be cogs in the system so here are the two problems we got to train people to buy more stuff and we got to train people to work in a factory to do what they're told and the solution of course public school and we invented school Universal schooling is only 150 years old before it the typical kid owned one pair of shoes and one pair of pants and they went to school and we taught them that buying stuff helped them fit in and before it you worked in the

family business if there was one you know JS Bach his kids grew up to be classical composers if your father was a farmer you were going to be a father a farmer if your father made Pottery you were G to make pottery but instead we built this system to teach people to fit in and the reason is because if you fit in they can ignore you if you fit in you become a compliant Cog in a giant machine right could I just ask anyone who's using a camera to turn it off because they I have

a lot of problem with lights and flashing stuff and even video I would really help me out a lot I would appreciate it um okay sorry I lost my train thought yes the other thing though is this system was brand new for 50,000 years you human beings did not have an idea that you would leave home move to a city and work in a factory so we had to train people to believe this stuff here's the truth about electricity when they built the first homes with electricity they thought the only thing anyone would do is

have a single light bulb and so the only thing in your house that had electricity in it was the light bulb then they invented the washing machine now washing machines were a boon the problem is there was no place to plug them in so every washing machine came with a 30 foot long extension cord you put the washing machine on your porch and you ran the extension cord in your house and you screwed it in and hundreds of people a year died from washing machine accidents because you would either like jolt yourself or the machine

would move a little bit on the porch and it would wrap around your neck and it was not good so they had to train people how to deal with this new system so what's the problem the problem is this is adjusted for inflation the wage of the compliant worker in America basic unskilled labor 1960 to 2005 totally unchanged for 45 years and why not we keep making more workers and they're all the same they're interchangeable you're an insurance adjuster you're a senior vice president for international Affairs whatever your top title is the whole idea was

give me a resume make sure I can scan it in then once I scan in the resume I'll be able to compare the keywords and figure out the person who's the most compliant for this position and hire them so let's look at the evolution of where we've been so far the first thing was we were Hunters we were hunters for a really long time then a lot of people became farmers and then a lot of people moved to the city and became compliant cogs in the industrial system and my argument my plead to you and

the reason I came here tonight is because now there's a new class of person and artist and when I say artist I don't mean artist the way you might think of artist when I say artist I mean somebody who does human work unpredictable work makes a connection with someone else and changes them for the better so you can be an artist if you're a painter but maybe not but you can also be an artist if you're a receptionist and you can be an artist if you're a troubleshooter and you can be an artist if you're

a fundraiser that what art is is the opposite of being the compliant COG so here's one way to think about it Picasso is on a train in the on going through the plains of Spain in the 1930s and there's another guy in the compartment with him and he recognizes Picasso and screws up his courage and he goes to him he says excuse me are you the great artist Pablo Picasso Picasso not shy says sure that's me and the guy goes on and on about how big a fan he is at Picasso he says but you

know my wife she doesn't like your work so much and say what do you mean my wife she wonders why you paint such weird paintings why can't you just paint things as they are P says that's interesting your wife what does she look like and the guy pulls out his wallet and put and shows a picture of him and his wife here she is and Picasso looks at and says wait a minute she's very small and flat too that what Picasso did for a living was he did not become a replacement for the camera we

had cameras we didn't need someone to become a a system who would just paint things as they were he painted things as he saw them and that what painting became what Art became what plays became is the work of a human being who's doing something that someone else couldn't do right the first guy who installed the Ural into an art museum was a doist a master the second guy who does it is merely a plumber right and the difference in the way we value those people is is extraordinary when Steely Dan came out with this

record it wasn't like anything on the market at the time you can hear two notes from one of these songs and you instantly remember it it's not like all the other stuff because they did something tricky they did something scary if you go to per restaurant in New York you'll wait two months for reservation you'll pay $250 to eat there but the person who made the meal who designed the pottery who thought about your experience was an artist and so is the receptionist at an extraordinary company one who actually makes you feel welcome as opposed

to just someone who's doing their job or so are the fellows at the Acumen fund people who come from all over the world to spend a couple months thinking about how to lead social organizations artists aren't necessarily people who can draw there's a village in China called dothin and dolphin according to one estimate creates onethird of all the oil paintings in the world and what happens true Chinese style there's lots of people there the sun rises everyone runs outside and starts painting oil paintings and I own one it looks a little like this um I

bought it on eBay for $60 now the thing is that if art if painting is your job it's not art it's paint by numbers and that's an interesting item but it's not one that we value very highly because anybody could do it right this on the other hand is a photo from the recent Mars Lander to visualize what it would take to send something to another planet take photos and send them back there was no manual for how to do that people who can figure it out are worth something so if I had to boil

it down to just just a few words it's this simple if I can write down what you need to do if I can give you the map then I can find someone to do it cheaper and I will and I don't care what your profession is if you're a radiologist as soon as x-rays become digital they just did I can send that x-ray anywhere I want why will I have you read it just because you're nearby there's a McDonald's near here where when you go to the drivethru and you call in your order through that

little box it goes by ISDN to South Dakota where someone in South Dakota speaks to you like they're inside the McDonald's they type in your order and it goes right back to the McDonald's you're seeing in it's cheaper for McDonald's to do that than to hire someone in California to do it for them and as soon as South Dakota gets too expensive it'll go to someone who speaks even better English in Bangalore right so we look at this and we get really nervous because it's one thing to give something away and it's another thing to

say wait I worked really hard on this I need to charge extra and what the Market's going to say to you is you know what you can try to charge extra but if all hugs are the same I'll take these hugs thank you very much this guy's in trouble part of the challenge here is this you don't want to try to get ahead in bowling and the reason is the best you can do in bowling is 300 it's an ASM totic function you you can't Bowl 320 you can't be a bowling Superstar because there's so

many people who are so close to perfect what are you going to do if you're in the bottled water business make your water more boring more wetter what there's nothing left right or maybe there's a little bit left but not a lot and so let me get a little economic geeky on you here because I think that there's an important inflection point in our world and you're present for it and it's either an opportunity or a bane or an curse this is Carl Marx one of the Marx Brothers the least famous and that's Adam Smith

Carl Marx and Adam Smith saw a machine it's a pin making machine Adam Smith writes about it in the first chapter of his book before the pin making machine those little metal things they put in the shirt right they put two in when they make it and when you buy time you get it they've reproduced and there's 18 all you know a talented pin maker could make eight pins a day and so you paid them a fair amount because it wasn't easy to make pins after the pin making machine was made four untalented people with

10 minutes of training could make 10,000 pins a day so Adam Smith looked at this and said this is great go buy a pin making machine and Carl marks looked at this and said careful because if you work for a guy who owns a pin making machine you're in really big trouble and they were both exactly right that what happened is two classes of people Orange County is filled with a lot of people own machines and systems and factories right and there are a lot of places in the world including Orange County where a bunch

of people are just stuck two teams owners workers Mark said that's lousy we need worldwide Revolution because the system won't go away without it and Smith said go buy yourself a machine so something just changed and what just changed is this anybody with 800 bucks or access to a public library now is both you own the machine it gives you access to the world class tools of the internet it gives you access to every consumer in the world gives you access to world class writing tools world class connection tools you can create something in 3D

uh cam software and send it over to China and get prototypes right back it changes everything because now there's a third team and the third team are the people who are both workers and owners and I call those people Lynch pins those are people who are artists those are people who are doing stuff we can't live without those are people who are taking intellectual risks not doing physical labor those are people that in the future are going to be glad they made the choice to be those people here's the thing you can't be a coal

miner without a coal mine and very few coal miners own their own coal mine but you can be a recombinant DNA scientist for 300 bucks you can order it on the internet and do the science on your kitchen table so something fundamentally has shifted the wall has come down between owners and workers right that what happens is the internet this massive connection of everything means two things are going on one if you're average there's a race to the bottom hint you cannot win a race to the bottom and if you're an extraordinary person there's a

race to the top which is a lot more fun so let's say you want to make a video or write a book or start a radio station or sell handmade crafts here's the bad scary thing no one can say no to you anymore you don't have to say I got rejected by that publisher the FCC won't give me a license I can't get to the crafts fair no one on NBC will put my Show online just do it you can go there's no one to blame it on anymore so shepher a brilliant artist has built

this career out of pointing out to people you really don't have to obey anymore we don't have an obedience shortage right I would like to argue that obedience is largely for dogs I have one of the world's largest collections of cafeteria lady photos and um this is my favorite one I think they're prison cafeteria ladies I'm not sure so the thing is it really sucks to be a cafeteria lady cafeteria ladies are abused by the customers they're not paid very well they have to wear the attractive clothing they don't get free haircuts at The Company

Store all these things but guess what they all grew up playing a board game called Candyland that from the time they were two we've been training kids to pick a card move the pieces and work their way through the whole game that is the entire set of rules of Candyland right there is no judgment calls there's no imagination pick a card move your thing next person's turn and it's so much easier to give a kid Candyland or TV than it is to give him a block of wood and say go do something creative right go

play in traffic go start a fire go go do dangerous things with the microwave oven we don't do that you know why cuz our parents didn't do that our parents raised us to be compliant cuz that was the system and it worked for a long time for a long time a guy one guy I mentioned in the book in Denver was making $80,000 a year as a middle manager moving pieces of paper from one pile to another for a Fortune 500 company and the Fortune 500 company got under price pressure so they laid him off

with 10,000 other people all of whom were innocent because they followed instructions and now this guy makes $12 an hour working at the 7-Eleven where did the $70,000 difference go right well it went because he was complying it disappeared he didn't change what changed was the system speaking of the system two interesting things happened in the 1770s one a guy invented a magic trick called The Mechanical Turk and what the Mechanical Turk was was a chess set where the king would come out and move and the Machine would move magically and it was a sensation

in Europe all the kings stuff we busy playing chess with it the same year they started the encyclopedia britanica and $100 million later the encyclopedia branica made its way through 200 years of building the world's most important reference book with hundreds of editors checking all this stuff doing exactly what they were told and then guy named Jimmy Wales came along and using what I call the law of the Mechanical Turk built Wikipedia for free right because if you can break a task into sufficient small little bits you can get people to do each little bit

basically for free so Jimmy Wells didn't say write the article on Abraham Lincoln he said edit the third sentence of the second paragraph of the article on Abraham Lincoln and anyone could do that for free about the time Wikipedia was gathering Speed Amazon started a service called Mechanical Turk and what Mechanical Turk does is it lets you go online and register and do little tiny tasks for a nickel or a dime or 50 cents in the last year the percentage of people who do Mechanical Turk tasks who live in the United States has doubled that

there are endless people who are lining up here's a picture of people who do Mechanical Turk a guy posted on Mechanical Turk I will pay you 25 cents if you write on a piece of paper why you use Mechanical Turk take your picture and upload it right it's one of the many little tiny brainless tasks that you get asked to do on Mechanical Turk my point is they were turning every job into a mechanical chk job that's what the owner of the factory needs to do because his competition is doing the same thing so my

friend Jessica would draw it like this so I think there's a hierarchy here and it's a hierarchy you might be familiar with the lowest thing you can do to get paid for is lifting anyone can do it then there's hunting then there's growing stuff producing stuff selling stuff which is really hard because people are afraid to do it connecting other people because that takes the work of the heart and finally creating and inventing stuff which no one ever taught us how to do and school is the problem school is a scam school was built by

industrialists to train our kids to buy stuff to fit in and to follow instructions so true story I don't know if you know this bird have you ever seen this bird thing right so what happens is the bird dips into the water over and over and over again so I'm sitting with five kids 12y old 13-y old 14y old 15y old and I say put the bird down I set it up how does Bird work I say awkward silence Rebecca turns to me and says I don't know how does it work ready to take notes

I said Rebecca we don't need people to take notes anymore the answer is in Wikipedia who cares When the War of 1812 was I can look it up you don't need to memorize anything anymore and it was a half hour of pain before I got these five kids to ask enough questions on their own to figure out how the drinking bird did its job over and over and over again and my guess is most of your kids can't do that same thing bring home the bird and say how does it work and let them figure

it out not tell you what they learned not regurgitate the textbook but T they figured out the problem is we want kids to fit in and we encourage them to go to abber cromi to buy more stuff so they can fit in even more and the problem with fitting in is that all it means if you get Aid is that you're good at school and you don't get to do school after you're done with school right the boss doesn't say we're going to have a test on Friday I want you to regurgitate everything you learned

for the last four weeks that's not what happen my friend Ben Xander has written a brilliant book called The Art of possibility with his wife I you you should all go read it immediately and in it there's an essay called give yourself an a Ben teaches very stressed out type a violin students he's the conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra um yeah Boston philarmonic one of the two anyway he teaches these type a violin students and they walk into class shaking because they're straight A students and he's a tough guy and he wants to teach

them to play with their heart so he says the first day everyone in class give yourself an a you all have an A all you have to do is write an essay one page long of dat it on the last day of class but hand it in today why what you did to deserve the A and if you give me the essay you get your a and it takes all the pressure off and then people can play I think the book is great but I think you should give yourself a d I think if you

give yourself a d and acknowledge the fact you already failed now maybe you could go do something interesting what do you got to lose you're already failed and it's really scary to give ourselves a d here's the problem the problem is that if you spend your time following instructions you have to work 14 hours a day for not much money Richard Branson you know him the multi-billionaire guy he only works five minutes a day the rest of the time they parade him around to do stuff but it's only five minutes a day that he does

the stuff he gets paid for you're laughing he doesn't fly the planes he just invented the idea of having the planes that only took five minutes the rest of it is the detail work but you've been brainwashed into thinking that you have to wait for someone to show up and hand you an assignment uh my friend Melissa said look just because the tide is out doesn't mean there's any less water in the ocean and the economy goes out and the economy goes in and if you say when the economy's out oh I better hunker down

and fit in or I'll get fired you should ask the 20,000 people at Ford Motor Company who hunkered down and fit in and got fired right because it's gonna happen if you fit in enough will just replace you you're not looking for a path if there's a path then everyone's on it you're looking for choices the scarecrow at the crossroads the more choices there are the more chances you have to do something interesting and remarkable all right shifting gears a little bit this is Charles krak he's the short guy United States Marine Corps he invented

kac's law what he realized is that World War I and World War I were won by generals generals who figured out strategies who built the factory of war and the wars that we're unfortunately in right now are W are being won by the man in the street the woman who's knocking on the door the lowest paid person in the entire force is the one who's winning or losing the battle and if you think about your company your organization the places you go to buy french fries or dry cleaner or anything else the whole business is

built around the lowest paid person in the whole thing kolax law says it's the one who's interfacing with the public that's where remarkable experiences are made and that's the challenge because we spend all the time saying to those people you're replaceable you're paid as little as possible you don't like it leave and then we expect them to be amazing then we expect them to do art to connect so I'm not here to say You must be an entrepreneur I'm not here to say you have to start your own business guy on the left is my

friend Sasha auman fund he's a fundraiser he's an artist this guy's Jay Parkinson you can Google him he's Reinventing medicine the whole thing by himself right because he's not waiting for some Central authority to say this is the new rules of medicine he's saying in my own little way I'm going to practice medicine differently and if I practice medicine differently and it works the word will spread and if the word spreads people will show up and other people will copy me they are what I'm calling Lynch pins people we can't live without people who take

real risks not Financial risks but emotional risks they're artists so what do I mean when I say artists well maybe Andy Warhol was an artist though he really paint I'm going to argue Warren Buffett is an artist Warren Buffett doesn't have to tell us all the stuff he tells us he could just be this Anonymous billionaire but he's not he's sharing stuff he's teaching us stuff that what artists do in addition to changing people is they give gifts art is based on the idea that there's an exchange of gifts not a financial exchange and here's

the reason when I sell you something we're done even Stephen you give me money I give you the thing it's over we're now farther apart what art needs to do is bring us closer together right art is this connection that comes from one person making a gift to another that doesn't mean that people who do art get nothing they get lots of things in the long run but in the short run you must be willing to give something extra so if you fly jet blue from Long Beach to New York you are paying to get

from Long Beach to New York for free you get smiles for free you get a flight attendant who spends an extra 10 seconds to make you glad you're on the flight for free you see the pilot come out and Soo a kid who's got a stomach ache right that's not part of the thing and no one stands up on the flight and say what do I owe you for smiling at me it's the Art of Doing it when you're not required that makes a difference there's a coffee shop in London called proof Rock Coffee and

they have one of those frequent buyer cards that you've seen everywhere they punch it but theirs is different in order to get a free coffee at proof rock you have to get it checked off at their eight biggest competitors right so what they've done is they've given a gift to the competition they say to their customers go try all our competition once you try them all come back and we'll be happy to give you a free coffee that's transformative I went to see Levon Helman concert uh a couple weeks ago and I noticed I recognized

the guy playing the piano who made a hundred bucks that night Walter from uh Steely Dan on the piano Donald Fagan I'm sorry not Walter Donald Fagan on the piano working for free what's that about shouldn't he be charging a fortune no he wasn't doing it to make money he was doing it to make a difference he was doing it to pay back Levon Helm he was doing it to be in front of the artist that when an artist realizes they have abundance that they're not going to run out of ideas that they're not going

to run out of smiles that they're not going to run out of the idea of connection they realize wait I better give some of this stuff away or it's going to spoil that this idea of abundance instead of scarcity flies in the face of owning a factory factories are all about scarcity why would anyone buy something if they didn't need it but what people who make art realize is that the more they give away the more they touch people the more they change people the better they do so this idea of days work for days

pay is bogus that what we need to do instead is figure out how to have this POS posture of change and posture of generosity so why is this so hard because 80% of you think I'm completely full of it it's hard because it's scary it's hard because it flies in the face of what we think will work it's hard because people might laugh at us right and there's a reason biological reasoning and it's this the lizard brain why why did the chicken cross the road because its lizard brain told it to if you look at

the evolution of the brain it's really straightforward lizards and chickens this is by the way the deluxe rubber chicken America's number one rubber chicken a lot of rubber chickens are really stiff and they'll abaid your skin this is a good rubber chicken anyway the the lizard brain in the chicken is in charge of Revenge fear anger and reproduction that's all it does and we have one too it's right near the brain stem near it includes the amydala and other parts of our brain it's the first part of the brain that develops in the fetus and

then the other parts develop on top of it so we got a brain that wants to make music and we got a brain that wants to have a conversation and then we have a brain that wants to run away and we have a brain that wants to fit in and a brain that wants not to be laughed at and a brain that wants to get revenge and a brain that wants to have kids and anytime that brain wants to speak up the lizard brain it wins because if it's what got us here and here's the

bad news the bad news is the thing that protected us from saber-tooth tigers keeping us from getting thrown out of the village the reason that we're here is now wrecking Our Lives it is sabotaging our ability to do the work that's actually going to work my friend Steve pressfield calls it the resistance the resistance is that voice that says I'm afraid of public speaking that voice says I don't want to have that honest conversation with that guy I work with because it might not work I'll do it tomorrow the resistance is the one that says

I better go check Twitter instead of writing that essay because someone might have said something on Twitter that would really be helpful if I do that I'll build a bigger social network and then when I finally write my outset it will go fine the resistance is the one that's responsible for writer block do you notice no one ever gets plumbers block right you call up the plumber you shows up he says you got any whiskey I don't think I feel like plunging that toilet that's not what happens but writer block we go oh of course

it's so hard you have to hold the pen so in addition to my cafeteria lady photos I have the largest collection of baseball bats flying into the stands photos now this my favorite is like here's the big baseball hero ducking Down Under the dog gu the bat's way up here but the lizard brain says uh oh this is really bad news and and we don't have any choice we can't help it we're hardwired here here's the good news this one the bat didn't really hurt anyone in this one it's a the lens difference anyway the

thing is that it's pushing us to fit in and there are no bats flying at you I promise that most of the time that the very thing you're scared of is the very opportunity that you have to make a difference okay true story I fly from boss from White Plains to Boston it's a 14 minute flight or something finish the the thing and I fly back but there's fog in White Plains so I land in Albany albany's 110 miles away from White Plains we land at 8:00 at night it's raining it's clear this plane is

going nowhere they it's a 16 passenger little toy plane and we we pull up to the gate the airport is basically closed and they're not letting us off I don't know how long they were hoping to hold us so they say you know it might be two or three hours we hope to be able to fly to Boston soon so I've got this little modem thing for my thing so I can go online wherever I am and I go online and check out Avis and I check out Google Maps and I realize Avis has a

car I reserve it I can get back to White plaines in in two hours so I put my laptop away I stand up and I say to the flight attendant I need to leave this plane and she says well you can leave but you can't come back on I that fun with me and then I turn I'm wearing a suit and I turn to everyone on the plane and I say hi my name is Seth I'm wearing a suit I just rented a car from Avis I'm going to drive to White Plains I'll be there

in an hour and 50 minutes the car is empty anyone want to come it's free and I stand there for 15 seconds and no one says a word and I leave and Drive by myself right why is that because of the lizard brain if you stay you get to blame United right if you stay and you have a miserable time it's United's fault but if you stand up and leave that plane you can't come back on then it's your our fault and that's what we want we want someone to tell us what to do we

want to be more average than average the lizard brain says whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa you're talking about things that could get me in real trouble and what I'm saying is think about every successful person and I've studied a lot of them what do they have in common successful singer successful entrepreneurs successful middle managers the only thing they have in common is they are success successful that's it that what they have done is figured out how to go to the edges how to connect with people how to make a difference and how to deal with

the lizard brain and if you have a name for it the resistance the voice in your head then you'll hear it when it shows up and when it shows up you'll be able to say to yourself Ah that's a signal I'm on the right track should Bob Dylan have made that Christmas album really you know and the thing is yeah he should because if Bob D Dylan doesn't get booed off stage once a decade he's doing something wrong right people still go to Bob Dylan concerts no one goes to monkeys concerts because the monkeys keep

making the same record over and over and over again and Bob Dylan's risking getting boot off stage every single day there's this word there's a word for this uh people in Tibet call it Sha sha is instant anxiety shampa is the siren in the back of your thing uh oh I get pulled over and he's going to realize my insurance is expired and then he's going to notice something under the glove compartment and then I'm going to get arrested I'm get accused of a crime I didn't commit I'm going to get convicted I'm go to

jail for the rest of my life oh my God and you've all got sha in your life right the inner office phone rings and you see the extension is your boss's boss right and all anxiety is is is experiencing failure in [Music] advance that's not good that'll wear you out and so you know what we do we seek reassurance please tell me it's going to be okay please just tell me it's fine that I'm not going to get in trouble tomorrow that no I can't give you reassurance because you know what there's never enough reassurance

for the lizard brain the lizard brain will not be happy until it's all over and we're dead that's the lizard brain's job to not be happy so where would Philipe be if he let the lizard brain win right I've know I don't know if you've seen this movie or read his book it's extraordinary here's a guy who broke into the World Trade Center while it was under construction and using a bow and arrow shot a cable between the two towers and walked across them tight rope walking and you look at why he did it and

how he did it and the the course of his life and it's simple all he does is ignore the lizard brain walking across the tight rope that high up is exactly the same is walking across a tight rope this high up except for the wind right and and once you get good at the Wind part you'll be fine I took I took a CrossCountry skiing lesson from a guy who was in the Salt Lake City Olympics and what Matt taught me I don't know if you've ever seen skate skiing it's when they do it like

this you know what he taught me is the person who wins is the person who leans forward the most that's the entire sport because you don't move until you start leaning forward and as you leaning forward you go I can't Lean Forward anymore and you start moving and so people aren't good at it don't lean forward very much and people who are great at it lean forward so much they often fall on their face until they're really good at it and if you're going to compete against someone like Matt you better be prepared to lean

forward so what do we need to teach our kids in school I think we only need to teach them two things we need to teach them solve interest problems right why does the bird do that thing we need to teach him to look at something no one's ever looked at before and come up with an interesting way to solve the problem they might not be right all the time but they're way better than the people who refuse to solve it at all and the second thing we need to do is teach them to connect and

to lead and to stand up and say follow me and that's really hard because it requires labor a different kind of labor than this emotional labor the labor of doing things you don't feel like the the labor of looking someone in the eye and telling them the truth the labor of being willing to be laughed at and this emotional labor is what every single person here who doesn't dig ditches for a living gets paid to do and most of us aren't very good at it we've been sliding by and I'm arguing that we have no

choice but to dramatically raise our game if you want to win a marathon what you have to do is figure out what to do with the tire that lots of people run and some people get overwhelmed by the tired someone like Mary Decker figures out a place to put the tired she puts the tired aside finishes the race and she wins what we've got to do is not figure out where to put the tired we got to figure out where to put the scared where do we put the resistance where do we set it aside

and realize the thing we got paid to do is work that matters that's all we're getting paid to do and there are plenty of people who are way cheaper than us who are willing to do work that we're told to do and we look at this and we laugh a little bit we say well that's pretty silly but I think it's important to understand that's all there is that's the new economy the industrial era is over one of the ways we deal with it is what I call Pet Sur prise fighting the pet Sur prise

as you know is what they give to people in journalism and P Sur prise fighting is the irresistible urge to go to an arena where there's lots of competition and there's prizes right so journalists could write lots of different things but lots them want to work for the New York Times because that's the right thing to do and filmmakers can make lots of different kinds of films but they wanted to be at Sundance because that's what the industry pushes them to do and so we see clumps of people I can have the most Twitter followers

or I can have a Blog that's the number one of this or we we we've run with the pack because then you can't blame us we're doing what everybody else did but if we look who's successful in any industry that's changing it's someone who did the opposite there is no prize for what I do they say I'm going to go do that because doing it first might get me laughed at but it also might make a difference it also might create art so let me tell you seven different ways that lynchpins do what they do

and they're very different one they create a unique interface between the customer and the organization if you've got someone in your organization who's the one like Dolores who serves more coffee at a certain 7-Eleven in New York than any other 7-Eleven in America because she knows the name of every single customer you think they're going to lay Dolores off anytime soon she's indispensable she's Irreplaceable number two is you bring a special kind of creativity to situations that your co-workers can't figure out how to do right that's a skill you can learn it you're not boring

with it the third one is you know how to manage product projects of great complexity right think about that person in your office doesn't matter how many inputs there are they can get that movie produced they can get that project out the door they can get that conference pulled off those people are really hard to find and important to hold on to the next one is leading customers figuring out how to establish a tribe as Brian talked about today and take them somewhere the next one is inspiring staff that person at any level in the

organization almost never the CEO who the rest of the staff will follow to do almost anything it's hard to live without that person too and the sixth one is deep domain knowledge The Geek The Uber geek the person who knows everything about black ink and the 12 different kinds of panone cells and the different specific weights and measures of the whole thing there aren't very many of those people and it's really hard to become one and the seventh one is the one you came in thinking was the only one and that's being really good at

the thing anyone recognize this guy this is the most famous in Australia talented over-the-top Sportsman who ever lived his name was Donald Bradman that chart at the top shows how good Donald Bradman was at Cricket compared to everyone else he was three times better at Cricket than Michael Jordan was at basketball he was four times better at Cricket than Tiger Woods was at golf this guy was the greatest Cricket player who ever lived on average the rest of the top 50 would get about 50 runs he got 99 three standard deviations five standard deviations higher

than the norm here's the news flesh you are not Donald Bradman you will never be you will never be the Donald Bradman of anything so stop letting the lizard brain tell you you're not good enough yeah none of us are as good as Donald Bradman that's okay you will never play the clarinet as well as Benny Goodman that's okay because what we're really looking for is Passion right that what what really matters is being willing to stand up and make it happen to ship this idea of shipping of getting it out the door is so

much more powerful than it used to be because it used to be that there were all these people could say no it's not ready and all these people used to say no we have to wait but now it's so easy to get to Market that shipping is what matters Steve McConnell wrote a book he used to work at Microsoft about the science of software and what the book says is the typical software product runs late Duke Nukem eight years late before they finally cancel the video game for this reason here's what happens you come up

with a cool idea and there's only one or two people on the team and things are going really great the amount of thrashing is really low because everyone knows what's going on and then you get sort of a lot going on and more people come to the meetings and then you get more four people coming to the meetings and the CEO shows up and says wait a minute we have to redo this I hate this interface and so you're going back here and as it gets closer and closer to ship date more and more people

want to weigh in and then the lawyers come like here and they say oh boy the lizard is freaking out what Steve McConnell says is ship on time by thrashing at the beginning that if you thrash early if you get all the ideas on Post-its before you start putting it into photo shop and eventually into HTML your website will be great but if you don't show the website to the CEO until the day before it goes live because she's too busy your website's never going to go live this takes enormous discipline because this is scary

and the lizard hates this hates it a lot so David raikov has this great little essay he was at the movies and there was almost no one there and he's sitting there and this woman this well-dressed woman comes down passes eight seats walks right up to him and says excuse me is this seat taken and she wasn't pointing the seat next to him she was pointing to his seat is this seat taken and he almost burst into tears because it's so easy to look at your job or your passion or whatever it is that you're

spending all day on and realize you're taking up the seat right that the question I want to ask you is do you do your work because you got to it's an obligation or is it an opportunity is it a platform for you to do art if it's a platform for you to do art then you can say in every moment in every exchange what do I do in this three minutes that makes me earn my whole day's pay what's the scary Insight that I come up with the thing that has nothing to do with a

map and so if we think about these things of Art and making a difference and shipping all of a sudden all of a sudden the economy feels a lot better right because if all we're looking at in the economy is please give me a job just like my last one but for more money and please tell me what to do and please reassure me that everything is going to be okay well then of course it feels like this it's over but if we look at the economy and say you know what there's this platform here

like nothing has ever been before right a platform that's got nothing in it but opportunity so here's the question I want you to think hard before you answer it and I don't want you to say anything I just want you to do something if the answer to this question is yes stand up Bravo Bravo have a seat thank you for standing up so for those of you who like to take notes for those of you who want a map here it is this is what I need from you this is what the world needs from

you this is what your family needs from you this is what your boss needs from you and if these don't sound hard to you then you're not telling yourself the truth because there are other people who are working harder at this than you are right so that's where it ends where it ends is it's all up to you that the success of the Next Generation including you including your kids is going to come down to one thing are you a legant are you doing work that matters go do it thank you so much