Marie Forleo & Seth Godin: How to Show up & Do the Work (Even When You Don’t Feel Like It)

so what i'm arguing for here is not perfection nor am i arguing for uh betting everything on it working what i'm saying is the best way to do the work we want to do is to have a practice and to show up and do the work regardless of how the world around us and uh and we are feeling hey it's marie forleo and welcome to another episode of marietv and the marie forleo podcast now if you're someone who wants to get more of your creative work out in the world i gotta tell you there's no

better guide than today's guest seth godin has started successful companies taught millions of people and left his mark on our creative culture he's the author of 19 international bestsellers translated into more than 35 languages including tribes purple cow lynchpin the dip and this is marketing he also has one of the most popular blogs in the world he's also the founder of alt mba and the akimbo workshops which are online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people his latest book is the practice shipping creative work seth godin oh my goodness thank you for

coming back on for the practice i have to thank you you're a shining light and it's so nice to see you again even if it's not in person well same um and i will say this from my heart you keep getting better and better and better which i was thinking about this i was like well that is the best sales pitch for the practice right the fact that for me at least um i've read i think all of your books if not close to it and i enjoy them all and this one made a profound

impact on me i've pulled out some of my favorite pieces we'll walk through that but i just want to tell you this i was reading it in preparation for our conversation today and i got so inspired at some point i had to put it down seth and i wrote an entire kind of sales page for lack of a better word about something that's been in my heart for a while and it came pouring out of here and i'll i'll i'll tag something and it's not very long but it felt very impactful and true to me

and so i'll flag that when we get to that particular part but i just wanted to say all that up front and i know so many folks in our audience are fans of you already but if there happens to be some folks who haven't encountered your work yet i'm so excited for them to get this book thank you you made my day so first bit let's start with the quote from page 22 you write do what you love is for amateurs love what you do is the mantra for professionals i cheered i underlined curious if

you could say more so i don't remember before the internet anything but my instinct is that before the internet we didn't spend a lot of time about find your passion because it was understood that work is work and work involves a promise it involves showing up even if we don't feel like it in exchange for it being work your hobbies can be whatever your hobbies are but you haven't promised them to anyone and so now particularly in this moment of upheaval it's important that we fill our days with things that find meaning for us but

it's just so much easier to decide to find meaning in what we do than it is to go shopping around in things to do hoping we find something that gives us meaning and i'm focused on helping people get on the hook and if you say well i don't really feel like it and then you're off the hook and then it makes it hard for you to do the work that will make you feel like you're connected and you're following your passion it's a really interesting fun place to explore i found it so much with marietv

we're coming up on our 10th year of doing this and i have often shared there are many times when i sit down throughout the years to write marietv if it's a scripted episode or you know to do the things we need to do to produce the show that i don't feel like it but because i promised and it is a commitment of mine and i believe in its power and i believe in the power of the conversations we have and the ideas that we get to share like i show up like a professional and it

makes a difference and it happens and i wind up finding inspiration or something but at the very least the work gets done yeah and when we do the work whether or not the work works in the short run when we do the work we can feel engaged that's what flow comes from flow we don't get flow and then do the work it's the other way around yes creativity is an action not a feeling your work is too important to be left to how you feel today i love this one i feel like it is a

an underscore of where we started um i've shared notions like this sometimes and some of the pushback and i what's why i want to bring this up is i can hear some folks in the audience going you know especially in a year like this what if i'm ill what if i am a person who lives with a chronic disease or a chronic illness and i know that's not what we're talking about but i wanted to at least voice that because what you're writing about is so important and i'm curious if you have a perspective on

on that piece of it there's always difficulty and there's always trauma there's always injustice uh this year highlighted for us so many things that uh we didn't necessarily ask for and other things that desperately needed to be highlighted but the biggest difference is not that there was difficulty or trauma but that all of us had it at the same time in the same way and so when it's all around us it's very easy to put up our hands and say i give up that the excuses is universally understood but and it's a huge but then

what are you going to do now what are you going to do because as i learned from razander you can replace but with and right the world is upside down and i could make something better for someone else i've been feeling ill and i could open the door and i could turn on the light because they don't have to be one keeping you from doing the other one are you likely to run a 10 second mile or whatever that they keep track of in track no because you're under the weather because you're behind because you

almost died because whatever but that doesn't mean you can't find a way to contribute and so what i'm arguing for here is not perfection nor am i arguing for betting everything on it working what i'm saying is the best way to do the work we want to do is to have a practice and to show up and do the work regardless of how the world around us and uh and we are feeling and do you from your experience because you're one of the most prolific consistent creators i have benefited so much from the generosity that

you share with your work i know for me in my own form of practice you know it doesn't always look the same and there's some times where there is a lot of output and there's sometimes where the output perhaps is a little bit smaller the quality is a little bit different but there is there is still a consistency and i think that might also give people a different facet to look at this right it's not like the practice is you know you have to although you could write 500 words a day 750 words a day

it doesn't have to be that formulaic am i getting that right yeah i mean i think that we can define who we are by what we do not the other way around so if you want to be a runner it helps to run and if you want to be a writer it sure helps to write in fact if you write you're a writer and if you wait for perfect you're hiding one more way to stay off the hook on the other hand if you say i have a practice on the regular and you can measure

it any way you want you're taking the negotiation away you're lightening the cognitive load so tomorrow there's going to be a blog post on my blog not because it's the best one i ever wrote but because it's tomorrow and so i don't have to have a conversation with myself i decided 20 years ago there's going to be a blog post in my blog tomorrow and once you make the decision it becomes who you are and once it's who you are then you get to do the natural expression of that you write imposter syndrome is real

let's talk about how confidence isn't the same as trusting the process okay so what if you if you went to school you have heard the sentence will this be on the test the question will this be on the test means dear teacher you're asking me to give up some of my life and time and attention to expose myself to some facts i'm willing to trade those for an a and that's the only reason i'm interested that the result is the entire point and we built that trade because that's how capitalism and industrialism works you will

put something on the assembly line because it gets you an output the end and this attachment to the outcome paralyzes us because if we're not sure it's going to work then we don't want to do it so we say show me it will work prove to me that this is the way it is and then i will do it which is why so much of social media is filled with people copying other people because they did something that worked well that's what happens in the factory so let's do it here and the alternative is to

say you know what um this is work worth doing even if it doesn't work it's work worth doing because the process of me doing it the way i feel doing it the effort of doing it the chance that it could touch someone else all of those things make it worth it and if it doesn't work i'm still glad i did it now with that said we can now decode what confidence is because what confidence generally means is you're sure it's going to work but if you're leading or making art you can't be sure it's going

to work because you're leading or making art so the paradox is you got to do work you're not confident of how by trusting yourself that you have a process it might not work but what you're doing will work better than the alternative let's talk about generosity and being intentional about what you say yes to and what you say no to you right it might be that the most generous thing to do is to disappoint someone in the short run and i have often talked about that i am the queen of disappointment because i i've become

really really good at disappointing people and being comfortable in my know so that my yeses can be really full on yeses tell me what you mean or how you've experienced this form of generosity so generosity doesn't mean free and generosity doesn't mean yes generosity means that you're going to expend emotional labor which is a lot of effort to make something better for someone else not because it's a hustle not because you're going to get reciprocity and something will be better for you in return but simply because you can and we can nibble away at that

by trading it for short yeses all the time because those little yeses keep us from doing anything important so in my case please don't send me an email if you're listening to this i've answered 175 000 emails and that's a lot of emails to answer one at a time how many books has that cost me how many important uh thoughtful ways to show up in the world has it cost me a lot but in the short run it feels like i'm doing a generous thing in the long run i'm not i'm doing a selfish thing

i'm giving myself a tiny little smile a few times a day or a hundred times a day and that's my trap but other people have their traps and so what i'm not arguing for is selfishness what i'm arguing for is make your generosity count and make it count by doing something that's difficult and scary and more on generosity i love that you shared the most direct way to find the practice is generosity this idea that generosity subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else that we're getting into the part right now there's two parts

that where i was reading it seth i literally closed the book and opened my computer and i just started going and it was particularly around an idea um for my next book that i don't i don't know if it's going to be the next book or not but i'm like this has to come out of me and it was specifically for that piece focusing the work on someone else i'm like if i don't get this out of this noggin and out of this heart i'm stealing i'm like taking my own advice focusing the work on

someone else this is something you are so so good at can you tell us more about how that helps us create the practice first i'm so thrilled this is best news of the day that there's a new book from you you have not you've been you've been hiding it from me i'm really excited um i think this particularly resonates with your audience for a couple reasons the first one is for good reason we don't want to hustle other people no one wakes up in the morning wanting to be hustled and so it might be easier

for many people to speak up on behalf of someone else than to speak up on behalf of themselves because it feels like we're taking and how do we decode that and move forward in a way that lets us be productive and for me the answer is is someone going to benefit from this is someone out there going to get touched or connected or helped to level up from this because if you don't bring this to them as you just said you're stealing and we don't want to be thieves so the the the challenge is uh

how do we act like a lifeguard right the lifeguard doesn't jump in the pool to save someone so they'll be a hero they jump in the pool to save someone because they need saving and we need the people who are listening to this to show up we need them to make things better and it's not about a race for credit it's about a race for contribution i want to talk about the power of being inauthentic this was one that again i highlighted and i thought it was i don't believe i've ever heard you speak into

this before and i certainly haven't seen it in many books you know in a world where my goodness we have been just bombarded with this notion of authenticity and people have asked me so many times like marie you're so authentic how do you be authentic and it's i was like oh my goodness that this is such a beautiful gem you write we can only deliver what our audience needs by being consistent by creating our inauthentic intentional crafted art in a way that delivers an authentic experience to our audience as they consume it break this down

for us well you know who's authentic all the time are toddlers because data's don't have a lot of executive function but after you're done being a toddler you're busy calculating all the time if i do this i might get that so you might authentically feel like standing up marching into the kitchen of the restaurant knocking the chef over grabbing the food and going back and sitting down you don't do that you don't do that because it's not going to work that what you do is you moderate your authentic impulse to do something that sounds like

you that sounds like you as a civilized productive contributor to society and if you go to see a concert you don't want the authentic musician you want that musician to give the best performance of their day their week their month you if you need surgery i hope you don't you want the surgeon to ignore the fact that they had an argument with their spouse and to bring the best version of themselves there that's what we want in almost every interaction with very few exceptions so if you're in one of those other interactions where there's really

value to be had by stripping away the promise and being emotionally present then that's fine but that's hobby work that's personal work if you want to be a professional get past all this authenticity stuff because what i think people mean when they say well i was just being authentic is what they're actually saying is i did something and it didn't work don't blame me and well if it doesn't work you should think hard about why it didn't work because our work is at some level for other people yes you also wrote of my 7 500

blogs half of them are below average compared to others on any metric you'd care to measure popularity impact morality longevity the practice embraces that simple truth and i've often talked about this one of my favorite shows i love saturday night live and i love it because a lot of the stuff doesn't work a lot of the sketches don't work but they go on and every once in a while you get these breakaway hilarious moments that it is so soul moving and they stand the test of time many of them um gosh seth 7 500 did

you say 20 years is that what i heard you say that's it's so all right this is just me asking a curiosity question when you started blogging did you go okay today's the day i'm gonna start and i'm never gonna stop like was it that intentional or did it grow there was a day you just were like there was a day that that happened it wasn't the first day um it wasn't the first it wasn't the first day no the it started as an email newsletter to explain to my uh extended family what i was

doing for a living in 1996 so that was more than 20 years ago and then i met joey ito at the same conference where i met justice breyer queen noor of jordan my dear friend jacqueline novogratz all on one day which was pretty cool and joey was playing with this new thing called typepad and i thought that's beautiful i would like that to be my handwriting and he was on the board so he got me in fairly early and i was blogging a couple times a week and then i was blogging three or four times

a day and i only had 100 200 readers because every podcast including yours including mine starts with 50 or 100 people that's all everyone and then i wrote a post called the provincetown helmet insight about how people on cape cod ride bikes together and that was one of the first blog posts that sounded like me that sounded like this is a blog for other people not just whatever the hell i felt like writing that day and i said i'm gonna i'm gonna focus on this then i got notes fascinating notes from people who said you

know when you write three times a day it makes me feel bad would you please write less and i was like you know they publish newspapers in other cities you're not reading you're not writing letters to them please don't publish the newspaper just skip them but i heard that from like four people they just like we wanna we wanna go on the streak with you so i moderated it down to every day and then i said there needs to be a practice here because otherwise i will talk myself out of this and i didn't want

the cognitive load of saying uh do i have a good excuse to skip today because i always have a good excuse to skip today and now that i know that discussion is off the table it's off the table that's so cool and by the way i'm going to ask i'll ask a few more questions on this because i know we have so many writers aspiring writers people who imagine they could be writers they aren't writing yet so i think that even just this discussion is so incredibly valuable and if i ask anything you're like i

don't want to answer that we can just move on um so has i mean over these past decades i'm curious from even the logistical standpoint if like the practice like hey i'm going to write today even if i don't publish this blog post i'm going to do my practice and i have travel coming up i am going to a speaking engagement i am doing a workshop somewhere so i have kind of pre-created things but i'm still showing up for my practice like i'm i'm just curious about the actual logistics as someone who runs the company

yeah right so i don't talk about the logistics much but i'm happy to do so uh i have written ahead and every night i read tomorrow's blog post and i often replace it but at some point people started noticing i had a streak and at that point i didn't want to accidentally break it so yes i write ahead uh this is different than morning pages so let's talk about julia cameron's morning pages for a minute because they're so misunderstood i've heard people talk about the fact that you know they've written in their will that no

one is to read their morning pages and blah blah just throw them out the purpose of morning pages which i do thanks to my friend brian koppelman is not to write anything good nor is it to write anything you're ever going to read again the purpose of morning pages is the same as the purpose of brushing your teeth that you wake up in the morning and you brush your teeth because you always brush your teeth and now your mouth tastes minty fresh and you wake up in the morning and you write a few pages of

whatever it doesn't matter you're clearing your throat because now for the rest of the day you don't have to write the first thing of the day you already wrote the first thing in the day it's over with and now you're in the flow so my morning pages are worthless there's nothing in them i could ever publish that's not what they're for yeah same here i i love morning pages and they've helped me so much and uh i haven't thrown mine out i have like i have some stacks of them and i was actually looking at

some um from some earlier years and i was like wow and for me they've been really cool because i can see some recurring patterns of how i torture myself oh yeah like oh that conversation still marie's still very interesting so but back to the original where i got the 7 500 blog post it's like i love that you shared that with us it's like hey part of the practice we're not trying to put out the best things every single day in this level of pressure about the outcome as you um so eloquently share it it's

like no it's about the practice and if seth godin is here telling us like hey half of them are below average it's like we have to give ourselves permission to keep creating and to develop that's right and for math people who are listening of course half of them are below average that's what average means and and the other half of it is every single time not everything most times that i have a blog post it takes me five days to write it doesn't resonate and other times when at the last minute in less than six

minutes i wrote a blog post yeah whatever so i never i never know so since you don't know since this is mostly about luck what you do is you show up at the right place at the right time with your best effort and then you hope that today's a lucky day but if you're sitting there trying to reverse engineer luck then you're hiding again and so we're back to trying to put ourselves on the hook i have a friend who um was shopping around a book and she's a lovely writer and her i think it

was her agent there was someone who was supporting her was like can you write a viral article another i was like it doesn't work [Laughter] it just it made me laugh so hard another favorite part of my book page 71 shun the non-believers you're right a key component of practical empathy is a commitment to not be empathetic to everyone i want you to unpack that because this is really important this is the other piece that got me to close the book open my computer and and right away okay so there's four levels here the first

one is this uh if our work is professional it's for someone else it has intentional action who's it for what's it for what change do we seek to make how will we know if it's working if you can't answer those questions then you're just putzing around number two once you have a who's it for you have to acknowledge it's not for everyone nothing important is for everyone it's for someone that's critically important now there's someone who it's for they don't know what you know they don't believe what you believe they might not even want what

you want and you have to be able to say that's okay because if you can't say that's okay then you can't approach them they're not going to come to you but if you can't work with someone who doesn't know what you know or doesn't believe what you believe you're toast and that leads to the last part which is practical empathy is the work of going to people who you hope to connect with to build a bridge forward to open the door for who's who are a specific group and take them somewhere they're enrolled to and

if it's not that person they're a non-believer they aren't there for you they don't speak the same language as you they're not going to the same city as you they're not enrolled in the same journey as you shun them ignore them wish them well buy them a slice of pizza and then move on because it's not for them and you know my mom uh was on the board of the aubrey knox art museum in buffalo new york the one of the most important painting for painting contemporary art museums in the country and she pioneered the

modern museum store and she was a docent so i grew up in a contemporary art museum i was there once a week and you'd stand there and listen to people talking to each other about jackson pollock or talking to each other about you know degas or whatever they were in the wrong building you could just hear that they were in the wrong building and the answer is not to somehow justify marcel duchamp the answer is to say there's uh the buffalo science museum is down the street because it's not for you you just it's not

about class it's not about uh status it's just do you see it do you want to go on this journey or not yes that was the piece where something when i read that particular entry in the book i i my body was compelled to shut it and so much that came out it was so clear and i shared a little bit of my writing with a friend of mine she's like this is amazing i'm like it was it was channeled when i was preparing for my seth godin interview so if that's not a pitch for

everybody to go get practice i don't know what it is all right and i also love the follow-up to this you know in terms of shunning the non-believers but maybe it needs more work you write if there are only non-believers maybe it's not as good as you think if you define good as work that is resonating with the people you seek to serve and i think that this is so valuable too because it might not be good enough and that's okay too it probably isn't good enough and you know in the in the creators workshop

which is what i based the book on the book is based on the workshop so i've seen 500 people exchange 50 000 500 000 backs and forths about their work um this is endemic which is uh authenticity because it's a trap makes people feel entitled that if they are authentic they should succeed and i'm just decoding each piece of that no authenticity isn't a guarantee and even if you're being a professional there's no guarantee that if we look at you know miles davis's 50 records 30 of them were pretty bad and he's not entitled to

have kind of blue show up every time and we as the audience don't have to listen even if he worked really hard on it and so if we begin by saying you know what this probably isn't as good as it could be we now open the door to make it better whereas if we show up saying how dare you not get this joke i worked really hard on it this is my authentic self you know i quote adam driver in the book adam is the actor from star wars and uh the spike lee movie and

stuff and um he gives this quote something like yeah but when an actor gets criticized it's really personal no it's not you're an actor you're an actor they're not criticizing adam driver they don't know adam driver they're criticizing the thing you did and you can learn from that and do it better next time or not but you're not entitled even if you went really deep for the audience to say you got it exactly right and i'm going to reiterate this if we feel like we're returning i think it's a good thing uh you know what

does good mean how do we define good why good needs to be defined before you begin what is it for and who is it for what is it for and who is it for it's like even just those two questions i feel so many of us who do creative work so many of us who are freelancers business owners entrepreneurs coming back even if you've been in the game for 15 20 years i experienced it like a laser beam of focus and clarity what's it for and who is it for is that part of like if

you're thinking about a new workshop if you're thinking about everything yeah every single if i'm making dinner for you guys when you come over next time it's the same thing right it's oh marie doesn't eat gluten well that's who it's for it's for marie she's coming over for dinner don't make pasta it's that simple right yes yes it feels like the the best way to get started with any new book any new program any new offering any new service so good let's talk about there's no such thing as being blocked because being creative or creative

is a choice okay so writer's block is real and my writer's block is made up now when i say block i don't just mean the writing of a book we've all experienced something we call a block but no one gets plummer's block nobody nobody gets talker's block or bicyclist block and we don't wake up one more and say i don't think i'll be able to ride my bike today because i just i'm not in the mood so what writer's block actually is is fear of bad writing we are afraid to see the bad writing on

our way to getting the good writing and if you tell me you have writer's block i will say show me your bad writing and you will not be able to do so but if you have enough bad writing some good writing is going to slip through it just will no matter what it is that you do and acknowledging to yourself that writer's block is just a myth makes it so less so much less powerful it takes its hold off of you because you're not looking for external validation you know that writing and bicycling are in

the same category you just do this thing you might not do it well yet but the only way to do it better is to begin yes yes yes yes before we get to the end part that i want you to read was there anything else there's so many juicy incredible mind-opening heart-opening things in the practice did i miss anything that you feel like we should have underscored well you are a model for a key part of what i'm trying to teach and this model is it works better together that the idea that you're in a

cabin in new hampshire by yourself and you're going to somehow bootstrap your way into creativity you might be able to muscle your way through it but it works better together and so the reason it's worth making a book and not a blog post is if you find two or three other people and you read it together and you form a support group and you form an accountability circle your work will get better and we need to i mean ironically we're in this age where we're all separated we're all dealing with drama and where we're all

more connected digitally than ever before by a lot but we're using this glass between us to hide and instead if you can find people who are enrolled in the journey who are committed to giving and getting feedback that's actually useful that will change everything and chip conley did that for me in 1983 he completely changed my life amazingly he's also a best-selling author who knew when we were both 23 that that would be the case but the fact that he got five of us together in a room every tuesday night in the anthropology department to

brainstorm new business ideas i remember that all the time and the only thing about it that makes me sad is it didn't occur to me to organize people i needed chip to do it and so i've been trying to do it ever since right that that's what b-school is that's what the alt-mba does it in the folks at akimbo running all these workshops they are about doing it together and i just needed to say that out loud because you've been modeling that for a really long time oh thank you thank you i i get i

know we probably share some dna here just like seeing incredible human beings that have so much to share and so much to contribute and to see it happen from where it was like oh i think this is an idea i don't know and it's actually a reality they're engaged it's going it's moving it's going to have a life of its own my goodness there's no better feeling so um i had i had reached out to you before to see if you'd be willing to to read a little bit from the end and i think it's

the perfect way to wrap this up um for anyone before we go into that bit of it you have to get your hands on the practice it is brilliant for you and as seth shared for your friends and for people who are on this journey get a few copies and talk to your friends about it and um support each other so the bit i was going to ask you about is from page 255 to 256. [Applause] thank you marie for letting me do this it means the world to me um you know how lonely this

work is and to see how i can land with somebody it's very special so thank you where is the fuel to keep us going anger gets you only so far and then it destroys you jealousy might get you started but it will fade greed seems like a good idea until you discover that it eliminates all of your joy the path forward is about curiosity generosity and connection these are the three foundations of art art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who

will use it to create the next thing human connection is exponential it scales as we create it weaving together culture and possibility where none used to exist you have everything you need to make magic you always have go make a ruckus seth godin thank you so much on behalf of myself our team our audience you embracing your practice for all of these years has made such a huge difference to so many of us uh our episodes together we continue to get emails and notes from people there's some folks favorite so thanks for making the time

today adore you um and i can't wait to see what generates from your practice as the weeks and months and years go on thank you hugs to everybody we'll talk to you soon see you thanks come on isn't seth just the best of course he is now seth and i would love to hear from you i'm super curious what's the biggest insight or aha that you are taking away from this conversation and most important how can you put it into practice meaning how can you put it into action starting right now leave a comment below

and let me know now as always the best conversations happen over at the magical land of marieforleo.com so head on over there and leave a comment now while you are there if you're not already join our email list and become an mf insider i send these amazing emails every single tuesday they are fun and positive and encouraging and i don't want you to miss out until next time stay on your game and keep going for your dreams because the world really does need that very special gift that only you have thank you so much for

tuning in and i'll catch you next time hey you having trouble bringing your dreams to life well guess what the problem isn't you it's not that you're not hardworking or intelligent or deserving it's that you haven't yet installed the one key belief that will change it all everything is figureoutable it's my new book you can order it now at everything [Music] everythingisfigureoutable.com