They’re Making Money While They SLEEP!

so here's the big secret of strategy the hard work is to take a deep breath and say I'm going to be very focused at being the best in the world at blank an entrepreneur is building something bigger than themselves they are making money when they sleep I love that just go copy something your Life's too short to be completely original stop scaling for scaling sake it's hard to walk away from things you could do or things you used to do cuz part of you feels like you're never going to get in again Seth welcome to

the show thank you for having me Natalie it's good to see you I'm so excited for this and I've been so excited interview you because every book that you've ever written has really really changed the way that I think about marketing and as I was saying when we were diving into this conversation a lot of the women listening are about midstage in their business where their business is working but marketing is often the thing that just constantly trips them up and I know this because this was me for a really really long time and the

most common questions that I get is is this too saturated you know can I still build a community online you know how do I stand out when it feels like there's so much noise and I think that's where I'd love to St because I know when you talk about strategy you have a list of questions and things that people can think about so for those kind of questions that you get where do you start answering that well that's a great place to start at the beginning and people don't usually start at the beginning people usually

say I've invested so much I'm out of time I'm out of money I just got to get the word out how do I hustle who do I interrupt it's important it's urgent and I say you should have talked to me two years ago please because by the time it's too late it's too late we need to get to the first principles and the first principles begin with this the first one is this Are you a freelancer or are you an entrepreneur and right now talking to you I'm a freelancer and I proud of it freelancer

means it's just me and if I'm going to get paid it's because I did the work an entrepreneur is building something bigger than themselves they are making money when they sleep they are anytime they are doing the work they are making a mistake because their job is to hire someone to do the work not to do the work themselves and um that distinction is really hard for people to get their arms around Ursula burns when she was the CEO of Xerox did not make Xerox machines she did not repair Xerox machines she didn't even invent

Xerox machines her job was to hire the people who did all of those jobs so if you're a freelancer the only way to have a better business is to get better clients CU you can't work more hours you've got to say how do I become the kind of freelancer that better clients want to hire and we can talk about that strategy in a minute if you're an entrepreneur then I would like you to be very specific about who exactly are you here for and what is the change you seek to make you've got to answer

those questions because if you don't you're basically saying I'm here for anyone who wants to hire me and you're saying you can pick anyone I'm anyone and if you do that which most entrepreneurs do you're racing to the bottom and you're always going to be hustling and you're always going to be tired and what about for those listening who are Freelancers solo PR and they're listening think well that sounds great but right now I don't feel like I have the choice of clients it's kind of anyone that wants to work with me I'm just going

to go ahead and say yes right that's very honest of you so let's talk about what makes someone a better client better clients pay you more better clients demand more better clients talk about you better clients don't hire you because you worked really hard for lousy clients they hire you because you're the kind of person that better clients hire so the reason you feel pressur to take whoever walks in the door is because you're taking whoever walks in the door so that leads to you being on Fiverr on upwork on you know you need a

resume typed I can type your resume the hard work is to take a deep breath and say I'm going to be very focused at being the best in the world at blank and it can be something really specific like nobody does PR and publicity for orthodontists in New York better than me because if you can point to the work you did for three orthodontists the fourth or orthodontist is going to get on your waiting list immediately because you're the best in the world at this and when you get a client that isn't going to help

you get that reputation you need to politely and gently fire that client you need to say I get it you want to pay me for my time but I don't want to buy that I don't want to sell that I don't want to be the person who ran errands for you because I am the best in the world at this other thing and when you earn that reputation then marketing feels easy if marketing is feeling hard now it's because you're selling average stuff to average people and you're trying to out Instagram everybody else or lower

your prices faster than everybody else of course that's frustrating you deserve better than that but that's the difference between strategy and advertising with strategy and promotion strategy says I made some hard choices and I'm sticking with it because people will miss me the right people will miss me if I'm gone it's so smart that way and I already know that I can hear some of my listeners saying but I'm scared I'm scared to put myself in a box because what if I'm not the best or what if I don't get those clients and the I

say this because I've heard it so many times quote unquote I'm leaving money on the table if I'm not everything to everyone all the time okay so those are two different things the first one is really true the second one is incorrect it is really true that it is scary to put yourself on the hook it is scary to claim something and make a promise like this cuz then you have to keep it and isn't that why you signed up to be a freelancer in the first place I mean a lot of people want a

job without a boss and the problem with a job without a boss is you end up with a terrible boss who keeps you up in the middle of the night tells you you're not working hard enough undermines your confidence it's you so you got to fire that person and get a different boss the boss who says if you start small enough and focused enough you can be the best in the world at that so A simple example um there's a I live near New York City there's a a giant place there called Chelsea Market that's

filled with all sorts of stores and stuff who is the best tour guide in the world for Chelsea Market well I would imagine in about three days you could be the best tour guide in the world at touring tourists around on Chelsea Market if you were Trip Adviser would rank you number one and you could look at people confidently and say I know every person who owns every store I've done this before you want to tour the Empire State Building sorry I can't help you I'll send you to someone who can but this is what

I do and saying this is what I do is critical and your second point about leaving money on the table I have met and worked with some very very successful people and I promise you they do not work more hours than you do they got that way by leaving quote money on the table because they're not filling their time they're filling their portfolio oh that is so good and as you're speaking it makes me think about something I talk about a lot which is stop scaling for scaling sake I on social media it looks like

everyone is doing everything so well at the same time and and I know this because I got in this trap for a long time I mean I was in this for about six years before I came up for air and realized what was going on for me where I just felt like the next step was more team The Next Step was more product The Next Step was more clients and I never really stopped to ask myself why I never stopped to say is this really what I want is this who I want to serve is

this how I want to serve them and I got to a point where I was ready to burn my business down because I built it that way what advice do you have for that person who is in that place of building their business on a place of shs cuz what I'm hearing you explain is real Excellence it's picking your thing and it's going all in with it and building your portfolio I mean that's Excellence but there's a lot of noise out there what advice would you give to that person well first a word shift here

which is if you feel like you are selling your services there's a place of insufficiency and you're constantly trying to persuade someone but the people who are seeing at the best of the world and the best of the world never sell their services they offer their services and if you are offering ing Services you're saying this is worth more than it costs well those that's the only time anyone ever buys anything is what it's worth more than it costs that your motto isn't on the cheapest it's you'll pay a lot but you get more than

you pay for and then the question about scaling so you're looking at every single employee of my company right now it's me and I could spend all day on social media and instead I spend no day on social media zero on Instagram on LinkedIn Etc because my job is to do work that other people want to talk about online and so if I can take the time to produce something without an excuse saying oh I was really busy this is the best I could do and instead make something for you that makes a difference other

people will talk about it right so my job here working with you today is to help you do what you want to do which is build a podcast your listeners will tell other people about that is our work our work is not using our social media accounts to promote the podcast it's to create the podcast that other people will benefit from talking about so it comes down to this idea of not the biggest possible audience but the smallest possible audience what are the fewest number of people that if they were on your team if they

were rooting for you it would be enough cuz if we can Delight them it all takes care of itself and you should hire no more people than you need to make that happen because again the goal is not to make Instagram happy and the goal is not to build a giant organization the goal is to do work you're proud of that's such a huge reframe I feel like I needed that coming off of a day of doing so many things that was not my podcast and and that's been such that that's huge for me I

actually just hopped off of a podcast meeting where we were throwing around a bunch of ideas is and I said to my team and maybe you'll tell me you can say this is wrong or like let's dive into this because I'm I'm so curious to your perspective I said to my team this all looks good but I'm not excited about it I I know what I want to talk about and I know it's going to save my audience but I don't know that it lives in research and SEO and titles and I get a little

bit caught up with that as a creative do you think there's like a balance to that that approach or do like how would did you see that well first I'm in no position to give you advice or to give most of your listeners advice because they are creating magic all the time so with that caveat what I would say is nothing we've talked about so far is me saying you should be excited about the work nothing we're talking about is you are entitled to follow your passion you're not that it is really useful be passionate

about your work but your work is rarely what you're passionate about so the change we seek to make so in my case the change I seek to make is to help a certain group of people not that many maybe a million change the way they see the world that's my work sometimes it means I have to grind my way through copy editing something I have to lean into some endless uh interaction that's not making me happy but it's the work to get to the other side so we get to pick what we do but as

a professional we're not seeking to be authentic we're seeking to be consistent to make a promise to the people we're serving and keep it so you're absolutely right Natalie do not make a promise that you don't want to keep do not say in order to do this work I have to spend 32 hours a week in meetings about SEO and hustle and hype because if you're not ready to spend that kind of time don't sign up for it but what we have is the chance to earn trust to earn the benefit of the doubt to

create tension and to help people get to where they're going and we have tools to choose from I could hire 20 people but I don't think it would help me do my mission better than if it's just me so I don't I would love to ask more about that your choice not to hire those 20 people because I'm sure I mean I don't even need to say I'm sure I know you get inundated with opportunity after idea after opportunity after partnership I mean it must be there must be a lot coming at you 247 how

have you managed to stick to what feels authentic to you and your mission and not hire all those people and not do all those things so one of the things I write about in the book is that every yes also means a no and every no means a yes if I say yes to something I just announced I'm saying no to something else if I have chickpeas for dinner I can't have Dosa for dinner because you can't have both at the same time one or the other if I say I'm gon to give a talk

today at the New York Times building in Manhattan I can't also do something else so what we have to do no matter how many people work for us is understand the difference between a yes and a no so I say no all the time and sometimes it's really really expensive sometimes I turn down opportunities that could have been huge but I don't know that at the time and other times I eagerly say yes to something that doesn't work out I didn't know that at the time but I'm making these choices with intent and you know

Natalie how often does the podcast come out every week twice a week twice a week so how come it's not seven times a week um I just like to do it twice a week you would melt if it was seven times a week yeah right and how come it's not once a month it's not once a month cuz you wouldn't be able to pay the bills so you made choices even though you had the freedom to have the podcast as often as you wanted right these choices can be intuitive the problem with an intuitive choice

is it rarely gets better we need to talk about it out loud we need to say out loud I am choosing to do this I know it's going to keep me from doing that and then we need to have peers who can push back and say yeah you know you should invest a lot in something but it shouldn't be this it should be that and when we say yes to another line of work another line of work another line of work then we're a Wandering generality and what I'm pitching here is that the strategy of

being a meaningful specific as my friend zigg used to say is really underrated it's worth so much to be seen as the one and only and is it hard for you to say no to having a team member come on board that might save you time or might amplify your time how do you think through that so I've hired thousands maybe a thousand people in my career uh at one point uh yoyo dine had 90 employees and 52 of them reported directly to me and it was thrilling it was thrilling because there was always someone

who wanted my advice and they would do what I would say I mean like and I was running at Double speed speed and you one can do that for a while but I realized my life was going to be shallow if that's how I was going to spend it and um as the world changed and it got easier to hire Freelancers what I found is while I love the feeling of camaraderie that comes from having a team people who' got your back you've got their back I was spending a lot of time making being sure

my team was well cared for because that gave me satisfaction but that time I was spending was sometimes frustrating and was keeping me from doing the work that only Seth Goden could do and what I decided even though it's lonely sometimes is to say if I have a task and I can write a spec for it I'm going to get someone cheaper than me to do it and so I've got dozens of people who have done projects for me on up work and I've got a Rolodex of editors and things like that but every word

that I write I wrote myself cuz that's me that's what I want to do but if you said to me uh oh Seth why don't you make a collectible chocolate bar I would say yeah I'm going to make a collectible chocolate bar but I'm not gonna make the chocolate Sean's gonna make the chocolate Lauren's gonna make the chocolate I'm just going to make the rapper because that's my contribution so I guess what I'm getting at is it's easier than ever to have a team but it's more expensive than ever to have a full-time group that

is beholden to you for their paycheck and their rent and was there a specific moment in that when you talk about you had that realization of perhaps that's what you didn't want was there a specific moment you can think back to where you kind of looked around and realized this is not what I want and how did you even start that process of Shifting and and get cuz what you share now is such amazing perspective I'm thinking about the solo preneur listening and who maybe thinks they have to hire a team and they might be

listening thinking wait a minute there's another way of doing this so I'm just curious for was there moments for you in that three times this happened to me three times I I'm a slow learner uh the first time was when we sold yoyo dine to Yahoo and it was I've never been divorced but it felt like getting divorced like breaking up the family we had so much love and connection among the 90 of us and then it was all gone and it was heartbreaking and it took me a year to recover everyone else recovered faster

than me and then I kept my promise for about four years and then I built squidoo and we had nine people and squidoo became the 40th biggest website in the US with only nine employees and then one day without explanation Google shut us down and we had to break up the family again and the third time was when I built the alt MBA and a Kimbo and I built that to uh six full-time people and 140 coaches around the world and again I felt the same feeling which is this is thrilling but I'm carrying too

much this is hurting my soul to have people depend on me like this and so when the itch came again and I did the carbon Almanac I was very clear I'm a volunteer you're a volunteer this project does not last forever and I am not going to be able to pay your rent because I just take it very seriously that if you're people are depending on you for their livelihood the word livelihood has a word inside and you don't want to be the person who takes it away from them right that I love being in

sync with other people I found that being a boss was something I took to personally thank you for sharing that perspective because I I see the trend of Solo preneurship or freelancing um really exploding right now and people starting to celebrate the fact that they are doing the thing that they love whereas a few years ago all I was seeing was I have X amount of team members is if that was the badge of honor for Success so I just so appreciate that perspective of of it three times and deciding you know what this is

the way to go and I want to I want to go back to something that you said that was just so powerful about being a Wandering generality just I just think that's such an easy place to drop into in the beginning of your business when you get in and you think I think this is where I want to go there's opportunities in multiple different places let me try them out and test and and just kind of Follow That versus coming up with that hypothesis in the beginning so in terms of strategy what would you say

to that person who feels like they maybe have fallen into being a little bit of everything to everyone and they're not sure how to distill that thing or what it is really that they are great at and can serve people best with so here's the big secret of strategy for someone in the shoes you're talking about I'm lowering my voice because it's a secret the secret is you don't have to be original in fact you should steal one you should find somebody in a slightly different industry who is living a life like you'd like to

live who is doing work like you'd like to do and then you should say how did they do that who exactly are they serving so in my case I met guy Kawasaki and Tom Peters both when I was 24 years old 23 years old and I saw that it was possible to make a living going to a conference and giving a speech and I said to myself there's a model here and it took me 10 more years to get to the point where it started to happen but I was just copying right I didn't want

to be the next Tom Peters we already had a Tom Peters but I saw that there was an industry there that could use someone like me when I was in the book business before I was an author I understood that someone could make a living coming up with an idea for a book and selling it to a book publisher so I met with those people and I said you know hey uh John Boswell how do you do that let let tell me show me and people will be incredibly generous about this and I understood how

that was working um so many of my books are filled with stories of people who made a strategy work just copy it right so like today in AI um my friend Dan shipper is building a newsletter business teaching people what AI can do he didn't invent the newsletter business he's just doing a newsletter about a different thing and so to show up and say this is completely original I'm starting a restaurant where the lights are off all the time and we also sell candles during the day like great that's fantastic but it's not going to

work because it's never worked before just go copy something it's your Life's too short to be completely original I think that's such so freeing for people Life's too short to be completely original I think it's so freeing I can even feel people just exhaling listening to that yeah I mean you don't have to I'm sorry you don't have to copy someone exactly CU it's too late to be the next one of them but it to rhyme and the rhyming shows you understand their strategy I love that and So speaking of taking that big exhale one

thing you mentioned was about not spending time on social media and I constantly have this guilt about not being on platforms I'm not on Tik Tok I'm not on this I'm not on that I just do I know one platform and I do it well and I've stuck with it and I don't really want to go out out there but I get guilty and I I can kind of talk myself around it and I have to really consistently reel it in I want to know know how you think about that of feeling like you need

do you need to be on every platform how do you decide which is the platform for you you know as new ones pop up how do you make those decisions and have that discernment because before we know it we can be on 10 different platforms and we don't even do our job during the day yeah don't feel guilty Natalie you're changing lives all the time there's nothing to feel guilty about um it comes back to who I'm seeking to to serve and what are people relying me on so if someone says what I represent is

the canary I show up in every coal mine as soon as a piece of New Media shows up you can count on me being one of the first users well if that's your reputation then when a new one shows up you got to do it but then you got to leave the old ones because you can't do them all in my case I saw that my blog was the center of how I could communicate with people and so if a social media platform shows up that I can plug my blog into I do and I

never go back there again but when Tik Tok showed up I'm like oh I get this if I want to engage with 15 year olds and 20 year olds I got to start being on Tik Tok I have no choice but to do that I have to figure out how to make my content work in 60c bits and I got to start making it and I thought I can't do everything and the chances that I'm going to be a star there are zero unless I build a big team and start over so I didn't stay

away from Tik Tok because I was afraid I stayed away from Tik to because I had confidence that maybe it would work and then what would happen right so the problem is we live in a comparison culture that every year when Forbes publishes its list of the 400 richest people in the world they make 399 people really unhappy because all the billionaires are keeping track of is who are they ahead of right if you have $6 billion dollar why can't you just think you're the big richest person in the world it's you have all the

same resources but you got suckered in to measuring something that doesn't matter well you know what doesn't matter it doesn't matter how many Instagram followers you have it doesn't matter if you get 42 million views on Tik Tok because 42 million views on Tik Tok does not change anyone's life and it's you also can't make a living with it so focus on what you want not what Mark Zucker wants you to want So speaking of that focusing on what you want and maybe not what zuk wants you to want it makes me think about the

algorithm and I will say for me with boss babe I kind of fell upon something that worked I was putting quotes out there for ambitious women it was very tongue and cheek and I was saying a lot of the things that they wanted to say but felt like they couldn't and they share it on their platform and my strategy hasn't changed I'm still doing the same thing but I'm doing it in different formats now more of a long format but it hasn't really changed and so when people ask me for advice on social that's generally

what I say I say you know the trends and stuff are great but it's more about is this sharable is this something that someone will see themselves in and I'm curious how you think about that because I'm as I was going through your book I I can't help but see vir viral content I'm like goodness that's viral that's viral that's viral and the way you write is like that and so I'm just curious how you think about virality and think do you agree with what I shared and how do you think about virality generally so

you know why does a video like size uh Gangdam Style video got seen by three billion people why did it go viral is it because people like him is it because people wanted him to be successful I don't think so so this book here this was the book that saved my career I had been kicked out of book publishing so I had no publisher and a dear friend of mine died in the helicopter crash and I wanted to dedicate a book to him but I didn't have a book or a publisher so I wrote Purple

Cow and then I printed it and put it in a milk carton and only made 10,000 of these and sold them for $5 each and it turns out when people got the milk carton they put it on their desk they didn't open it take the book out throw out the milk carton they put the milk carton on their desk why would you do that are you trying to promote Seth no you did it because if your boss saw it and she asked you about it your career would get better your status would go up your

workplace would get better so the insight for me is that what people really need from me from me is for me to tell them things they sort of already know in a way that they can tell other people so that's how my blog got from 100 readers to a million not because I promoted it but because someone reads a blog post and forwards it to someone else Susan Kane's Ted Talk which you've probably seen it's one of the great TED Talks has been seen more than 20 million times Susan did not promote it Ted hardly

promoted it the way it got seen that many times is that people who are quiet or shy saw themselves in the video and forwarded it to other people to explain themselves that's what makes something viral is people share it because it helps them not because it helps the person who made it so your reputation was built on your generous ability to give people ideas that they would benefit from telling other people oh that is so powerful and just helps me reframe the way we talk about creating whether it's podcasts newsletters social how can you create

it in a way that gets Shar and so how how do you think about distilling that how do you think about creating something that people truly will want to share even without you asking them or telling them to I really like hanging out with people I like hanging out with people who are curious and who are trying to make something happen and I will say things to them sometimes I'm on stage sometimes we're having a cup of coffee and and I'm watching them and if their eyes light up and this is one reason why you're

such a great interviewer Natalie is that I can tell when I say something to you that landed and I noticed that so I do more of that it's that easy how can someone think about what those threads might be in their business so just an example um one part of our business is see your mama and we create content that on entrepreneurial moms want to consume and I would say it's the easiest part of my business because I I'm in the thick of it and I just have to name one part of my day and

I know that those women are like oh my goodness finally someone sees me and I've never had content be engaged with as much as that content because I'm really giving voice to just a daily experience nothing special I'm not thinking too hard about it um and that's the I would say I found in that part of my business do you think there's a secret or a way of looking at your business and seeing what's that thread what's that sharable topic or pillar that I can talk about do you think I would be good at talking

to that audience the way you are no of course not you are doing it intuitively because you are them and they are you you're doing it intuitively because you have natural empathy for those folks and it's possible to do it non-intuitive that you don't have to be a cancer survivor to be an oncologist you don't have to be a three-year-old to be a toy designer so what we seek to do is be able to articulate the fundamental principles of what we think our audience is going through so one of the great uh parenting books of

all time is What to Expect When You're Expecting and it was written by a couple of nurses and they had spent enough time with nervous pregnant moms that they understood deeply what people needed to hear what they needed to see what they needed to understand and once you can articulate what the top fears desires needs are you can make a a checklist and you can start working your way through it again and again and again and my argument is just do it on purpose don't wait for inspiration do it on purpose and then do it

again and then do it again and so you know if you cut enough hair when someone walks into your hairdressing salon for the first time you know exactly what three sentences to say to them to be able to guess what they're going to need that's practice and it's easier now than ever to practice but too often we say no I want a shortcut how do I just get done with this but for me the juice of it is learning where you know I've been a teacher my whole life and when you watch someone go from

confused to not confused and see that light go on that's what teachers thrive on that's what I'm always looking for and to go back a little bit to cuz I I really love how in this episode we're doubling down on I think it's excellence and just doing fewer things better that's really what I I hope people are taking from this is doing fewer things better and being quite Unapologetic about that and feeling knowing it's okay to leave money on the table and owning what it is that you want your business to provide for you how

you want to show up and being Unapologetic about that so kind of going back to the tangent we were on around how you prioritize and how you think about these things um we talked about platforms we talked about Tik Tok how do you discern between all the emails coming at you and the inbound the texts the calls the emails how do you decide I'm going to reply to this I'm not going to reply to this this is a yes this is a no do you have a system for that I definitely don't have a system

I'm very easily distracted um I would say what I keep coming back to is this if you're not in my audience then I will be respectful of you but I'm not going to spend a lot of time with you because like if someone sends send me a note saying why isn't your blog in Italian I would really like to read it in Italian I'm not going to change my mind my blog is not for people who don't speak English it's I I I answered that question for myself 10 years ago I could have hired translators

I just no I'm not doing that I'm not revisiting that but if I hear from someone who's come to a couple of my conferences who's interacted with me by email over the years who is working on work that I think is important and they asked me a question I'm going to take my time to answer them because that's my work is to be there for someone who is in that position who is doing that and it's hard to walk away from things you could do or things you used to do because part of you feels

like you're never going to get asked again right so I got a a note yesterday will you come to Bali and give a speech and people who give speeches for a living it's ridiculously lucrative and I can't believe it's an actual way to make a living but 4 years ago I stopped flying for work so it's really hard to drive my car to Bali so I'm not going to be able to make it and so you I write back and say I'm sorry I can't come now what I just did by saying no is in

addition to honoring my commitment to not fly I got five days of my life back so now I'm on the hook to do something really productive with those five days because I could have spent them in Bali given this speech and I'm not so we got to just keep coming back to I only get tomorrow once who do I want to offer it to is this additive or am I distracting myself what made you decide that rule of I no longer fly for work well I gave a thousand speeches around the world and at some

level it's thrilling but I was always a little sick and uh between covid and my work on the climate book I realized me not flying isn't going to save the planet but me not flying is going to improve my health and also encourage conferences to have virtual talks and so I do virtual talks all the time and if more of that happens I'm keeping lots of plain people from flying and it multiplies forward uh if other people want to fly I'm not going to argue with them and there's a whole new generation of speakers coming

along and I'm wishing them the best but I don't get tomorrow over again and I don't want to spend it on an airplane is that a decision you feel like you would have made before you hit a certain level of success or is it when you hit a certain level of success you said Okay I I get to make these decisions now every single person who's listening to this has already hit a certain level of success you have the freedom to listen to a podcast you have the technology to connect everyone in the world you

have a roof over your head and enough to eat but it's easy to get hooked on the but just one more but just one more but just one more so you know I failed pretty hard for the first the second 10 years of my career and after that I had to tell myself the truth which is if I never get paid ever again I'm not going to start to death and most of us probably can't go 40 years without getting paid ever again but if we changed our lifestyle we're not going to start to death

so we have to keep making these choices about when I come home to my family am I a better person than I was when I left did I leave footprints that I'm proud of have I earned the benefit of the doubt from people who I respect that feels to me like a useful way to spend my day and you know if Zoom hadn't come along it would have been much harder for me to retreat to my little town because then I wouldn't be able to talk to you and I wouldn't be able to talk to

audiences and things like that but the combination of Zoom turning 60 covid and everything else it seemed like a very easy choice for me I love hearing this there's a part of me that just feels Freer listening to that because as a mom of a toddler I don't ever want to leave her and work used to be such a big part of my life and it's not such an important part of my life anymore I enjoy it but it's not the most important thing in my life um and so just hearing that feels really freeing

and I'm curious do you feel like it's helped or hindered success at all making putting in place rules for yourself like that so constraints are not a problem constraints are the point problems always have Solutions but the reason there are problems is that people aren't comfortable with the constraints so if you can loosen a constraint you might be able to solve the problem the problem with work life balance is there's no such thing there's just life and you can't loosen the constraint and expect that life will be the same so I always had the constraint

that I would stay wherever I went as little as possible and be home for dinner and that commitment cost me money but it was totally worth it because if I hadn't had the constraint and I know people in my field who have done this I would have one guy I knew had a a secretary and five suitcases and he lived on an airplane and the suitcases would just get FedEx to the next hotel each time and he did you know 100 plus gigs a year well where else you got to stop sooner later right my

point was if I can't be home for dinner I'm not going and now it's I'm not going but you still have to have constraints constraints about your time constraints about your ethics you know if you want to take a vaping company as a client go ahead but you can't compromise your way into that you got to say that's okay with me or it's not and everyone's going to make their own choices but you should make choices that's beautiful I totally thought I was going to come on here and talk marketing with you but I feel

like I've wanted to ask you so many things outside of marketing which is so awesome um well but you but you know Natalie I'm sorry to interrupt all we've been talking about is marketing tell me more about that well marketing is what's the story we would like to live that we can tell to other people that they'll share with others can we do that storytelling and make a living we are proud of that's what marketing is marketing isn't advertising or hyper hustle or social media those are symptoms of some certain kinds of marketing but how

we show up how we see ourselves in the mirror the promises we make to people the people we decide to make those promises to that's all marketing is that marketing because it like it's how we show up it's the stories we tell how do we think about that as marketing as business owners or in our careers the way we live our life how do we think about that as marketing because I'm hearing you and I'm like okay but how how how is this marketing okay so if you're an accountant you do nothing but work with

accounts that's why it's called accounting and if you're a marketer you work with the market and the market has a choice if you have a job the market is your boss and your boss's boss and if they decide to give you a promotion or a good project because you did good marketing to them they're the market if you're in the world selling popcorn at Yankee Stadium the market are the fans at Yankee Stadium and if you show up in a way that makes them want more popcorn they're going to buy it from you if it

touches the market it's marketing that makes so much sense wow you're really making me think a lot about just things I want to implement after this too I think I've definitely had myself in a box of what I consider marketing or appropriate or the right way to do something so that's that's really been Illuminating for me so thank you um thank you and I'm curious why this book why this book now what what led you to want to write this so here I am talking to this person who's got a lot of experience a lot

of success is insightful and smart and yet we just talked about a whole whole bunch of things that hadn't occurred to you because people don't know what strategy is they think strategy is for NBAs or generals they think strategy is maybe I need a plan that's guaranteed to work it's none of those things it's a philosophy a philosophy of becoming and it's been a long time since I sat down to write a book I only do a book when I feel like I have no choice but I do write every day and after I had

written you know 30 or 40 of the elements of this I thought oh I'm writing about strategy and then I just kept going but it's not a careful plan on my part that the next thing I should do is X Y or Z it's just spending time with my audience and discovering this is something that I think they would like to hear and so do you make that do you make writing decisions based on what your audience would like to hear versus what you feel like talking about what I feel like talking about is usually

what I think my audience wants to talk about when I am being selfish and cranky I want to you know yell at a hotel that would did something stupid or rant about something else in the universe like an old old man and those never you never see those because that's not consistent that's not the brand of Seth Goden so those disappear I find I am the best version of myself when I having a conversation like this with you that makes a lot of sense and I think that goes back to my question I was asking

around the podcasting around talking about maybe things I'm told to talk about versus what I feel like talking about because I often feel like what I say is what my audience are also feeling and wanting to hear do you think that is a a good strategy is it a strategy to say I about what I feel like if your if your audience were jockeys and you're not a jockey and you hate horses you should probably not make your podcast about what you feel like talking about you should spend more time with the jockeys in your

case pretty much you are your audience so you have this intuitive sense as to what they need to hear in my case I was a struggling freelancer and entrepreneur for 20s something years so when I want to empathize with many of the people I'm talking to I reintroduce myself to that guy because I'm certainly not writing for people who have written bestselling books or given speeches because there aren't very many of those people and they're not the people who are reading my work I'm looking for universalities among my people and I am relentlessly ignoring everybody

else if someone comes to me and says I hate your blog CU you never write recipes like yeah because I would love to share my recipes but my blog isn't for people who want my recipes so what advice would you give to someone like me who has a podcast or a platform and really wants to go all in and double down and think about what kind of strategy would support that okay so if we're going to get specific and I'm if I'm going to give you a free advice that's worth what it costs I would

say that uh the single best area to create value among audiences like this and get paid for it is when you connect people to one another that it's tempting to be in the media business where you broadcast to everyone but what people are eager for and which there is a scarcity of is being in the room being in the room with the right other people and it can be a virtual room like I run a community called Purple dospace that has uh thousands of people from all over the world and that costs money or it

can be a realtime space where three times a year your people get together it can be you being the Hub of peer-to-peer coaching it can be you creating an app just for them to be able to connect with one another because what we know is when you assemble group of people a cohort who want to be connected they stay connected so if I was the CEO of your company that would be something that I would explore and invest in um and then the second idea I would share is real opportunities show up when the world

changes so when podcasting got invented things changed because you didn't need NPR to give you a contract you could make your own show so so we need to look for what is going to change systems and right now the two biggest changes of our lifetime are climate and all the things that are going to come with that and Ai and AI is going to wipe out a whole bunch of jobs that were mediocre because it can do them faster and cheaper but it's going to open up all sorts of extraordinary opportunities that will allow people

the same way podcasting did to stand for something but not have to build a giant team to do it I love that thank you and yeah I love I love that uh the way he talks about AI there too because I've noticed the amazing team members that I have they've just gotten so much better with AI they have not resisted it they don't pretend they don't use it they they put their work out there and they're so proud to say I did this in like a fifth of the time I normally would have with AI

and I just think that's amazing um I love that um I love your book it's incredible and one thing that I wanted to call out to um my listeners that I really really love the most and I'm wondering what you would say is the best way to use this is you have questions that lead to strategies and I actually was writing I was writing a new a memo for the brand I was talking about see your mama with someone on my team and we sat and went through all of these questions and it was so

powerful what came out of the other side so firstly thank you because it's really been a needle mover in my business um but secondly for someone who is let's say that in the let's say they're listening to this in the early stages of their business and they're realizing oh I really need to start doubling down and I need to narrow my focus would you say this is one of the best places to go and action something from the book these questions like put them in a Google doc and start to answer them you have to

do one step before that okay um but first thank you that was really kind of you to say um the step before it is you need to find a buddy or two buddies you cannot do this by yourself and that's why I needed to go through all the pain of making a book because if someone just reads a blog post and go oh yeah then it's not GNA make a difference but if there's a book it demands a different reaction so it's super simple and it's free just find two other people and meet every week

on Zoom or in person for half an hour and you're on the hook to tell these people the truth about your strategy to answer the questions out loud that alone is going to change everything so yes this list of questions is a great place but if you do it by yourself you'll just skip over some of them when they're hard yeah the you're doing if you're doing it with someone else you got you can't you're not allowed to say and then a miracle happens right they I'm going to get with the woman I went to

high school with and we're going to start a Duo and play at this coffee shop and then we're going to have a hit record oh really what happens between the coffee shop and the hit record a miracle yeah that's not a strategy a miracle is not strategy I'm going to make a quote out that um I love that anyone that's listening if you grab the book go and post this inside the podcast channel in society because I bet there are so many women listening right now that are just wishing to hop want to call like

that and have that accountability I think that's incredible and yes you do need someone because when I was doing this solo I was skipping some of the hard ones good call um Seth thank you so much for being here this conversation so took so many amazing turns that I feel like I needed to hear today so I'm really grateful um where can people find out more about you I'll put the link for your book in the show notes as well well thank you Natalie um if you go to Seth that blog which is hard to

say but fun to read there's 9,000 free blog posts there and there's information about the book and stuff I'm not in the book selling business I'm in the idea sharing business and if these ideas have helped it was totally worth the time to talk to you thank you for doing amazing thank you so much [Music]