Marketing Expert Reveals Secret For Building an Audience That Buys | Seth Godin

who are you seeking to serve what is the change you hope to make and these people you're serving what is it that they need and want from you it's not about you it's not about what you worked so hard to make it's Seth Goden is a bestselling author and marketing expert who is also the inventor of email marketing he built a $30 million company using his marketing techniques and now shares his Innovative strategies with the world if you spread out and do a lot of things you're going to do them all pretty well and if

I was pretty good at all of those things no one would care but if I only have one thing then I could be the best in the world if I can make a difference for my audience the money will take care of itself hi it's Erica Colberg and before we dive into today's podcast episode I have an exciting announcement that can help you save an extra $1,000 without having to Penny pinch or change your lifestyle on Monday I'm running my free five-day savings challenge where you'll discover simple and creative ways that you can save extra

money every month and whatever you want to do with that extra money is up to you I'll just show you how to save it the challenge is totally free to join all you need to do is go to erica.com slgo Erica is with a K and you can secure your spot by the way these strategies that you're going to discover can help you easily save money whether you're a budgeting novice or a finance expert and they're going to get better and better throughout the week but I have to tell you I'm so excited about this

and don't want you to miss out in November of last year we ran a savings challenge and had over 200,000 people sign up and on average people saved $1,005 that month through what they learned in the challenge that means our Challengers collectively saved over $200 million so trust me when I say you don't want to miss out on this one and the deadline to sign up to be part of this free challenge is Sunday 11:59 p.m. eastern time so make sure you secure your spot and get free access today again that's erica.com slgo ka.com slgo

see you inside I'm Erica Colberg and you're listening to the Erica taught me podcast I wanted to start by asking if someone comes to you and says Seth I want to become a better marketer and you can only give them one homework assignment to go home and do what do you give them to learn what marketing is and what it's not marketing used to be advertising that was it if you ran enough ads you can make enough money to run more ads and then the internet came along and some people got confused and they think

that marketing is about hype and hustle and interrupting people and spamming them and getting a lot of social media followers getting the word out getting attention it's none of those things that's not marketing that's promotion the homework assignment would be who are you seeking to serve what is the change you hope to make and these people you're serving what is it that they need and want from you it's not about you it's not about what you worked so hard to make it's what are their dreams their desires if you can serve other people and help

them get to where they want to go marketing looks really easy so when you started off your companies do you figure out the customer Avatar first I mean in order to figure out who it is and who you are serving and what outcome you're getting for them is that the first step you take in everything we do in our life we begin with who's it for right that when we are you know dealing with a dog or a toddler or another person we don't speak to that person in a language they don't understand we bring

the language they speak of course because otherwise they wouldn't be able to hear us so I've been lucky enough to do 40 Years of projects some big some small and every single project that has succeeded every single one of them begins with who is this for not what's their name not what do they look like I don't care how tall they are where they're from I care about what do they believe what are they afraid of who are their friends what does this remind them of these yearnings are why we're here to solve other people's

problems and how do you find that out is that from speaking to the customers is that because you were once the customer obviously the easiest thing to do is to make something for yourself and assume that other people have the same problem but legs panty hose was not invented by a woman it was invented by a guy who didn't wear panty hose that you don't have to be a cancer survivor to be a good oncologist and uh the toys at Lego and Fisher Price are not invented by three-year-olds so empathy is the resilient reliable thing

to do and you can learn a lot just by noticing by watching by saying why did that person at the supermarket grab this instead of grab that following people around asking them hard questions not questions about will you buy my product because people will lie when they answer that but noticing what do they do when no one is watching what are their habits where are their frustrations and developing this empathy is not something we're born with it's a skill and we can learn to do it well but are some people born as better natural marketers

and some people are learning it or you think everyone kind of starts off at the same Baseline some people are born with you know ability to read faces and ability to understand interactions more easily than others for sure I do think we've indoctrinated people over time in issues of social class and cast so that they don't believe they have the privilege to show up and make things better but I have seen people from lots and lots of different backgrounds show up and make a difference the thing about Charisma is being charismatic doesn't make you a

leader being a leader makes you charismatic people are drawn to you not because you tell funny jokes but because you have something in mind that you want to make better do you think as we're talking about how knowing your customer knowing what they want is really important do you think AI is ultimately going to be a really good thing for marketing where you just have so much more intelligence around who the customer is what their behavior is what they're doing and can tailor the marketing around that or are you worried about the future of AI

and marketing I'm not worried about marketing at all most of the people who do marketing don't have a problem and I'm certainly not in charge of marketing AI is the biggest change in our culture since electricity and if you're not using it every day you're going to be afraid of something you don't understand what AI is capable of doing right now is replacing an enormous range of mediocre human work by mediocre I mean average if you're a mediocre radiologist I've got an AI that can read an x-ray faster cheaper maybe better than you but it

has no threat to somebody who can do things that most people can't do because that requires a nonlinear sort of approach that one day AI might be able to figure out but right now it can't and so all of my writing is my writing but I ask Claude questions every day I say here's bullet points can you think of a fifth one and it can suggest something to me so if you're a mediocre copywriter if you're making average stuff for average people we don't need you anymore we've got AI but if you want to use

this magical librarian and ask it hard questions why wouldn't you so how are you using AI besides having the fifth bullet point Auto populated for you well it's funny I started with chat GPT like most people well first um a little bit about my personal background I um I walked here from the center of New York and I passed the Chelsea Hotel there's a plaque on the wall of the outside that says Arthur C Clark lived there and wrote 2001 A Space Odyssey while he was in that hotel which I thought was really cool I

worked with Arthur toward the end of his career in 1983 and of course 2001 is where everyone decided to get afraid of AI so I've been studying AI for a very long time and I was eager when it finally showed up the way it did with chat GPT mostly I just argue with it I think it's arrogant and doesn't recover well from making a mistake I decided spending my days arguing with AI wasn't helping anybody so I switched to Claude claw. is Kinder and gives me better insight and what I will do is give it

hypotheticals ask it to make combinations and connections what you know here's three things I read over here and six things that disagree with it over there who's got something going on recently I gave it a 40-page business plan that had been written by five different people over the course of a year so it was was complicated and I said please read this and highlight the contradictions and the hard parts and in less than 30 seconds it gave me a two-page MBA quality memo that was fantastic so how do you become someone who is mediocre and

replaceable by AI to someone who cannot be replaced by AI the most important thing is you do things that might not work people who are mediocre aren't lazy they're afraid they have been pushed by this educational industrial complex to not make a mistake to make everything defensible to follow the leader to fit in all the way and so if you you know walk through a shopping mall you will see a whole bunch of people who are dressed in a mediocre style because it's deniable they're like well that's the way everybody else is dressed that's average

but then you will see someone who is quite Dapper that person when they left the house maybe they're thinking H maybe I'm overdressed they were doing something that might not work work and that's what leadership is leadership isn't management leadership is leaning into something generative and generous that also might not work I am really proud of all my failures more proud than my successes because the failures are hard to come by and really pay off in the long run what would you consider your biggest failures that you're proud of well there are failures of omission

people I didn't give the benefit of the doubt to opportunity that I should have seen those I'm not proud of failures of commission you know I started one of the first internet companies and I invented email marketing and I could have invented the search engine I was there but I didn't because I didn't get the joke of the worldwide web I'm like no everyone's going to be on AOL I just completely missed that I've launched projects that meant well but either the timing was wrong or the strategy didn't quite line up before there was Pinterest

and social netw works we started squido there were eight of us we grew it to the uh 40th biggest website in the US but then it went away because Google shut us down and you look at that and you learn from that and I wouldn't take any of them back because those are the things that enabled me to be sitting here talking to you today Eric what do you think today are the things that most people are omitting and not looking towards I mean I feel like AI is most people in our space at least

are into it are there things that you're looking at that you feel like people are missing so it's not hard to manufacture things compared to the way it used to be that you can program a laser cutter and come back the next day and all these pieces came out of it that you can go online and order something from 5,000 miles away and it arrives coming up with a making manufacturing Insight is not going to be easy but people are loner than they've ever been before so who's building connection real connection not the face fake

connection of Facebook but real connection who is making people feel like insiders who is creating the conditions for people to find Hope and possibility there's an unlimited market for that not enough people are doing that and that's accomplished through authentic storytelling and again understanding what people's problems are and what their desired outcome is that's a really good way to say it however the word authentic freaks me out a little bit okay um I think authenticity is way overrated no one wants you to be authentic when you're doing these shows because if you're having a bad

day they don't want to see cranky Erica right they want you to play the role of this consistent interested interesting person who talks about what you talk about that's consistency that's not authenticity what we need is someone who is willing to show up as a professional and professionals do great work even when they don't feel like it how do you do that when you are you output a lot how do you show up day in and day out and produce even sometimes when you don't want to well what we're looking for as professionals is resiliency

right so if you go to a war zone you'll see doctors who can do extraordinary output but they can't get away with that in the New York City hospital because they there's also errors but you get away with it in a war zone because people are dying right so we build systems so that if a bad day happens or if if we get you know a cold it doesn't all fall apart in my case I write three or four blog posts a day but I only publish one of them and my blog has been running

for a long time because it's resillient because I didn't establish that have to Sprint all the time right and saying no to a lot of things is part of the secret to being able to show up as a professional professionals say no all the time for my content creation it's quite hard balancing between trying to stay consistent but then also staying inspired because sometimes if it's just purely about consistency I feel like I can put out subpar work that I'm not that proud of and I never want to put that out but at the same

time waiting three weeks for inspiration to strike and having one good idea that I'm really proud of does not allow me to have that consistency in those multiple touch points so how do I think about that these are great questions um social media builds things up and then destroys them and you know the Gangdam Style video from Sai has been seen three billion times where's his next one I don't know right because every there's a hit mindset you can't simultaneously chase a hit and be consistent that you know maybe Billy Joel could have done it

a long time ago the doie brothers but even they can't keep doing that forever and now it's so much harder so one mindset is to say there are two things that I do I professionally show up with gems about personal finance and big ideas and thoughtful consistent work but there's a lot of spaces in between where I'm having a different voice and that's the voice of here's something new here's an experimental idea here's you know a short form or a different platform and by balancing those two going back and forth you have the chance to

put fuel into the The Arc of what you're doing you know so in my case I said no to Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn I don't use those platforms for my work so the blog is there it's only once a day that's it but then I can show up on a different platform like streamyard and say I'm going to do a live conversation with somebody I'm not promising you when I'm coming back what made you even as you saw after your blog started you saw YouTube and then Tik Tok and Twitter what made you feel

like you wanted to stick with the medium of blog writing it's pretty simple um if you spread out and do a lot of things you're going to do them all pretty well and if I was pretty good at all of those things no one would care but if I only have one thing then I could be the best in the world at it that's the only reason it would I knew because I saw Twitter like you know six weeks after it started to pick up speed I knew if I showed up on Twitter I could

have a lot of people following me but then am I going to be be great at Tweeting or mediocre at tweeting if I'm great at tweeting I'm going spend all my time reading the comment I don't want to build that life for myself so these are choices we have more agency than we think and what's interesting you and I have been talking for a few minutes we haven't talked at all about tactics we haven't talked at all about hype or logos none of this is what's important it's who trusts you who gives you the benefit

of the doubt and what's your strategy for making the change you want to make happen so now there are I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people who are being more careful and thoughtful with their money because of you that's a big thing to have accomplished you should take credit for that it's extraordinary and you don't work for Tik Tok Tik Tok works for you and the minute it stops working for you you should stop using it something I've been thinking hard about is just as my social media background I started off on

YouTube and I was I think a very mediocre YouTuber it took me 6 months to get 2,000 followers one video per week and then after about a year I switched to Tik Tok and within 30 days I had five million followers on Tik Tok so I realized okay mediocre YouTuber but pretty good short form 60-second Video Creator but now I'm after it's been two years now I have 21 million followers across these short form platforms and and I'm realizing that the depth of connection that I create can create on these short form sites is quite

shallow yes and so now I'm almost thinking about going back to YouTube where I can have these 10 15 minute videos and have these really deep insights around personal finance that I can't accomplish in a 60-second video but at the same time I know I'm a mediocre YouTuber and an excellent Tik tocker so what would you do here okay this is such a useful generous question because lots of people are watching this think about this you are not a mediocre YouTuber what is true is that you weren't serving the YouTube algorithm in a way that

they rewarded you either through luck or skill but has nothing to do with whether watching one of your videos helped somebody right so the challenge we've got so many people are busy throwing coal into the Tik Tock fire without think about why they're even doing it so we need to keep coming back to who's it for and what's it for so the big number doesn't mean anything it's just noise what matters is are you building trust the benefit of the doubt and are people taking action in a way that benefits you so we haven't talked

about whether you're going to make money from this I'm putting that aside can you make a difference with this because if you're going to put on a clown suit and get more views from that well yeah but why did you do it and so what we know is that there are certain kinds of interactions that yield a lot that the relationship between uh a lawyer and her client that lasts for seven years has way more impact than that same lawyer talking to somebody for seven minutes over seven years via Tik Tok so that doesn't mean

you should go back to being a lawyer God forbid what it means is you need to think about what's the smallest audience that could sustain your mission anybody more than that is a bonus and we need to stop putting on a show because the show isn't serving us it's not nutritious so I don't know if I have Clarity on the answer then well what do you think well I C I do have impact with my Tik toks I know that oh for sure each one of them is designed to be actionable I want people to

listen to the 30 to 60 seconds and then think oh I can take action on that or I feel empowered by this I totally agree I didn't mean to diminish that one bit I thank you for letting me clear but it's not deep enough like I want to change people's lives I want to help people get to Financial Freedom and I don't I'm starting to believe less and less that a 60c Tik Tok is ever going to get them there I right now the the way it works is I have to get them truly into

my email list or into my podcast but you know I can get millions and millions of people to watch 60-second videos to get them to watch a 1hour podcast episode that is with the best person in the world it is much more difficult but is it better to put my focus there then on changing a small number of lives or is it better to go why that's I'm just still conflicted right well we're we're talking about here as enrollment enrollment isn't the mandatory enrollment in public school enrollment is someone who is voluntarily exposing themselves to

effort and to emotional labor to get to where you hope to take them if they sign up for that it is much more likely that they will respond so if you put up a billboard in Time Square it will be seen by a million people that's great but the real change is only going to happen among the few who go to the next step and the next step and the next step so the opportunity for you is to realize that there is a funnel here and the funnel is a is very very leaky 22 million

eyeballs going at the top well to per person 44 million eyeballs go at the top and most of those people bounce off but maybe a million consider signing up for your podcast and maybe 100,000 actually do and maybe 50,000 listen to more than one episode so now we're down to 25,000 whose lives have been transformed you got to put 44 million eyeballs at the top to get 25,000 people at the bottom that's actually great because it didn't cost you a lot of cash at the top of the funnel so when we think about this the

answer is not put more at the top of the funnel the answer is make the funnel more efficient make it so that people who have a glancing interaction with you are more likely to send you an email right what's the email address you want them to send a note to to get to sign up do we know what it is support er.com so what when they write to support er.com what do they get back an an answer to their inquiry whatever they so are you reading these emails sometimes well so we need a different email

address okay one that when someone writes to it they get a note back that just says thanks for finding out all about Erica here's my podcast here's my YouTube channel here's my book then they can just go to erica.com okay but erica.com is different than writing an email because if they go to erica.com they could bounce right off of that but if they go if they send you an email or a text which is really cool you make teach twilio to do this now they instantly get it back in the same medium and you can

follow up next week to say how'd that go what did you like and now permission has been granted it's not broadcast it's relationship and what we're trying to do step by step is find subscribers they don't have to pay you at first but subscribers are enrolled they're saying oh this is part of who I am now it's not what comes up next on my feed it's Erica reached out to me with home delivery and so when newspapers worked for 150 years they only work because of subscribers not because of news stand sales and right now

you are winning at news stand sales but you don't have enough subscribers so you got to say how do I build these offers these opportunities these chances for people who care to enroll okay now you're a teacher you can teach them things but you can also offer people status and connection those are the two things all human beings want affiliation is who's to my left who's to my right did I dress right am I using the right language who am I with and we have affiliation in so many areas of our lives and status is

who's up and who's down am I winning or am I not so you're ticktock about buying a Tesla versus buying Tesla stock the person who buys a Tesla that person isn't evil or lazy they just got more status in the short run by being able to drive the car around the other person got more status in the long run by making $400,000 in stock right so you can adjudicate and award status to People by giving them Levels by saying look you made it this far you achieved this you and merit badges are a real thing

or it could be something less public than that that they're internalizing and when you build these arcs the way Dave Ramsey did you can find people who will stick with it and you can change their lives you can also make a living doing it but that's not the primary objective the objective is can I undo all these years of financial indoctrination that have pushed people to be consumers to help them find what they're actually looking for with Finance it's going to be really hard to do that with just a 30 second video I think I'm

starting to understand the answer to this which is that yes it's okay to have more people in the funnel but what you really want is a more sealed funnel that you don't have to put millions of people into it to impact the lives here right I see YouTube as a more sealed funnel if people can get on to your YouTube channel and watch a 10-minute video with you that's the equivalent of them watching 20 Tik toks with me so I'd rather have them into YouTube so is that my answer that I should go back to

YouTube then if it is I see YouTube as a more skilled funnel so for example one way that people can get deeper with me by going on my email list is going to for these 5-day challenges that I have so I have a 5day investing challenge where I teach them how to go from knowing nothing about investing to being a confident investor I have a 5-day free savings challenge where I teach them how to save money but in order to get them into this challenge to get them to subscribe it takes a lot if I

get 10 million views on a video promoting my savings challenge maybe 20,000 people sign up yeah so it takes a lot of views to get my 100,000 people to sign up right whereas I think on YouTube the conversions are going to be higher so is that my answer well let's break it down in the emotional mindset okay it's very unlikely that a Tik Tock from you is going to make someone uncomfortable because it's going to be over in 30 seconds so let's just go on to the next thing but learning always involves discomfort learning means

acknowledging you are incompetent on the way to discovering you're competent first you have to oh I didn't know that and now I do right so a 10-minute YouTube isn't 20 times better than a Tik Tok it's 200 times better because what you did was you created tension and in that tension in that discomfort someone grew you didn't have the chance to do that in Tik Tok you're just entertaining in a carnival whereas in YouTube so it's not do you belong on YouTube it's do you belong in any medium where someone's going to experience discomfort on

the way so you know in New York they have the marathon they don't promise that you can run the 26 miles without getting tired in fact they insist that you will get tired and the only difference between people who finished the marathon and people who quit at Mile 20 is the people who quit at Mile 20 don't know where to put the tired and what you're doing is teaching people where to put the discomfort so that they can do these things because it's not like you're having breakthrough thoughts that weren't buett never thought of you're

just teaching a generation how to deal with their discomfort about personal finance to get to the other side so it could be that it's an email once a week it could be they have to fly to Dubai and sit with you in your office it could be that they have to watch the whole video maybe they have to buy your book I don't know what that thing is but whether it's on YouTube or not is not the point now YouTube offers you the chance to have some subscribers that you have a better ability to go

and alert when the next video so it becomes more generative step by step by step you can build on it but by itself it's still going to get you back into the same rut which is YouTube is going to reward videos to get engagement right at the beginning which is how do I eliminate discomfort not create it right and it's pretty trendy and as someone who has trended it's easy to get hooked on trending right so what I did and I'm not saying you should do what I did what I did is I refused to

look at any of my stats I refused to do any SEO of any kind for a while I was the number one uh match on blog if you did a Google Search and then I wasn't and I didn't care because I wasn't paying attention to that what I was paying attention to is did somebody subscrib to my blog and did I get a note from them 3 4 6 months later not easy to send me a note that would say this is what I learned from you I never ask anyone to do that but when

they do that I'm like I am doing something that is working here that is what I keep track of not how do I get more readers because I don't want to do writing to get me more readers I want to do writing for my readers and if my readers want to share it with other people that's great but that's what I am focused on when I'm doing my online work and it leads to the fact that when I write a book enough people buy it that I could write another book it's like I don't have

to hustle to go get that first group of people because the pattern has been established I'm not racing around saying how do I get the word out and one of the challenges you're going to have on Tik Tok is you can't possibly grow as much in the next two years as you grew in the last two years because otherwise you have every person on the planet watching you that's not going to happen so now it's okay how do we make the funnel not leaky how do we make it empathic and generous so people want to

stick with it and go down this journey and if people don't get the joke good for you thanks for checking this out I'm not angry at you you didn't get the joke it's fine not for you and do you think for the next two years looking forward what got me here is the same things I should do or should so for example I have a Playbook I know exactly how to create viral content about around personal finance but I'm finding that if I just repeat that Playbook over and over and over I'm going to get

very bored but it helps a lot of people so that's ultimately good thing but what should I be looking forward into for Content creation should I be creating content that I want to create should I be creating content that I know goes viral should I be creating content that I know will help the most people or all of the above well I don't know what you should do should is a tricky word so we we'll leave that aside Jay levenson who I worked with years ago uh said you shouldn't change your logo when you get

bored with it you shouldn't change your logo when your spouse gets bored with it you should change it when your accountant gets bored with it and professionals like the uh professionals who do uh corneal implant surgeries over and over all day should not stop doing it because they are bored they are good at it and they are saving people's Vision you're a professional you should do this if it serves the mission even and especially if you're bored with it that doesn't mean you should spend your whole day doing things that you're bored with but this

is the work of the professional is not to be a Wandering generality oh look a puppy but instead you're saying this is what the market needs in order for it to respond to join my funnel so that's what I'm going to do and that's okay but for your creative self for the one that wants to be on the frontier you're going to have to find a platform or an interaction that scares you and and that will let you up the way this lit you up two years ago but you can do both when I look

at your career or in my space someone like Dave Ramsey's career that has spanned so many decades and continues to have the mission at the Forefront helping people when I think about myself I want to be 30 years from now still someone people think about with helping them with their personal finances but a lot of content creators have very short career spans three to five years what do you think I need to do differently to ensure that 30 years from now I am a Susie Orman or a Dave Ramsey still helping people with their finances

that maybe other people who have short life short Creator lifespans aren't doing the shorter simpler answer is don't hustle that personal finance people who say buy nfts buy nfts you get rich tomorrow they're GNA be go away and you know the fact is someone's going to win the lottery it's probably not going to be you but if you're out there saying I won the lottery I must be smart you'll you'll get some traction that's not what you're interested in that's the short answer that's Broad in the sense it works for people who want to teach

about health want to teach about Cosmetics want to teach about anything just don't do that thing where I got lucky therefore I'm smart that's not helpful the bigger uh analysis is this Dave showed up when Spectrum in radio was available to people like him and he overinvestment employees to support that from that piece of spectrum he was then able to build the Outreach programs he has in the other parts of his funnel you don't have that ability with Tik Tock because Tik Tok owns it you don't he owned his show and his show as long

as it was on the station station owned he was fine and you know we can go all the way back to the Reverend Sheen who was on television when Ed Sullivan was on having a slice of spum in whatever form it is is something that lasts for a very long time so what I taught people in the book permission marketing is you can build your own version of spectrum it's your email list it's something that you control that no one can take away from you and if you can figure out how to use that next

to the more ephemeral YouTube or Tik Tok thing you can then start building something that's longer so that's the end of that PR pareses and then I would say content wise we know that everything you need to know about personal finance you can write on five pages of paper so that's not what this is about this is about what do I tell my friends what do I tell my spouse how do I talk to myself when I feel like going off the path what is that cycle like so in Warren Buffett's case he's just an

icon even bigger in China than here but Warren Buffett has basically said I'm living by example just do what I do and that's a hard way to live a life that much in public right but there are other ways you can do it basically what you're seeking to do is build a non-spiritual religion one that says these are the precepts these are the handshakes these are Where We Gather this is the way we do things around here culture is People Like Us do things like this and what you have done on Tik Tok is established

for a whole generation of people people like Erica do things like this you're not Erica but you want to have a model like that will Erica make a mistake sure she's a person but this is the method and this is what it means to be part of it but the Step Beyond it is where are the uniforms where are the phrases where are the Gatherings what does it mean to stick with this who gets a prize for never having missed a week kind of thing those are all buildable I think when I look at someone

like Dave Ramsey it's apparent why he has been very successful he has very hard and fast rules the baby steps that everyone needs to follow no matter what my style of personal finance is a little less concrete I truly believe that personal finance is personal if someone asks me a question like should I pay off debt or should I invest first my answer is well it depends it depends on tell me more about your circumstances but I find that in in marketing and in general the people who are successful at building big brands have very

like hard and fast rules that you have to follow so do you think that if I want to go towards the path of being relevant still in 30 years and helping people in 30 years I need to create more these are my 10 steps to follow for to get to Financial Freedom so there's a little false evidence appearing real here um the singer Peter Gabriel the entrepreneur Jeff B and me all have no hair but there's no evidence that being bald LED any of us to succeeding having hard and fast rules isn't why Dave Ramsey

succeeded and other people didn't there are plenty of people in personal finance who have hard and fast rules that you have never heard of hard and fast rules is insufficient Dave Ramsey has succeeded because for the audience he seeks to serve he is great on the radio and you you can listen to his show for weeks and not get bored that has nothing to do with hard and fast rules that has to do with the medium the distribution method yes there is a funnel and his funnel is beautifully shaped and he is very clear who

it's for and who it's not for those things are way more important than hard and fast rules and so we need to think about the people we're serving what are they afraid of what do they seek what keeps them up at night what are they yearning for and what do they tell their friends and it's true the Atkins diet spread because the rules were really hard and fast but the main reason it spread is it made you lose weight quickly for like three weeks and you had to eat like a weird person at restaurants so

you'd show up at a restaurant with your friend and they say you look great and you say thank you and then you'd order butter with bacon and they say what and You' talk about the Atkins diet and you could talk about it with four sentences and be done so yes the the strict rules helped but what mostly helped is the butter and the bacon and the conversation not that there were strict rules but if there weren't strict rules it would be hard you wouldn't have those conversations that would be harder if the answer is it

depends it's harder right the fact is if you want to be a jazz musician I can't teach you when you're standing on one foot how to play like Miles Davis it's complicated right it depends but there's still Jazz and there's still jazz in a lot of places even though it's complicated so that doesn't kick you out of the game it just means the opportunity is not quick Erica come up with hard and fast rules it's figure out what it's like to be around Erica and figure out how to multiply that I think from all of

the evidence that I have seen though and of course the three bald men doesn't equal success but from all of the evidence that I've seen in the personal finance space the people who truly make it and have a very long career do have essentially A playbook that can be followed they're okay they're okay saying that it's not for everyone fine let's figure out so like let's figure it out okay let's figure you have a sister yes all right you're writing a letter to your sister okay and you're saying sis I've been doing this for years

and I've boiled it down over and over again it turns out there are five things that if people would just change their mind about these five things it would make a big difference what's the first thing save more than you spend okay what's the second thing invest part of your savings third thing don't get into bad debt fourth thing educate yourself fifth thing be smart about taxes okay I'll add a sixth one tell everybody body else because when you tell everybody else it keeps you honest great there are your rules perfect those are my six

steps yeah and they were vague enough that I don't think there's anybody they don't apply to yeah right it's save more than you spend unless it's an emergency close parenthesis right you're not being that strict but the fact is the principles aren't that hard what's hard is sticking with it when your friends are all flying to Aruba for a bachelor weekend that's the hard part that's what you help with Switching gears how much of your time personally do you spend on the actual content creation and the thinking that goes behind it versus the marketing and

the business operations and the revenue generating Parts okay so I don't usually talk about me as an example because it lets people off the hook because they oh well he did that so he doesn't but I will tell you that if I am awake I am thinking that's my hobby and I spend no time on the business part of it I have no employees at all and the The Arc every single time I've leaned into how can I hack this system and make it work better for some metrics I have not been glad I did

that because doesn't fit the change I'm seeking to make nor does it make me sleep better or make me happy right the smallest viable audience like everyone's a hypocrite I'm a hypocrite too but I'm very clear about this serve the smallest group that you can live with and ignore everybody else because when you get jealous about the biggest group you could possibly serve that's infinity and you will never be done and instead you know I have this online community I have these uh courses I've run I have these opportunities to talk to people I don't

do any Consulting I don't do any coaching because I could make a living doing that but I don't wouldn't find it generative for me and blog posts if you know you're there's going to be a blog post tomorrow you're going to have more than one having a daily blog is really useful because I don't have to say is this good enough to blog today I say today is Monday day there has to be a blog post so whatever the best one is is the one that goes out okay let me let me take a step

back so throughout your career you've had many employees to now just yourself what decisions LED you to decide that being just yourself was the optimal life you wanted to create hardly optimal but anyway um there are Freelancers and there are entrepreneurs this is lost on most people a lot of Freelancers call themselves entrepreneurs because it sounds sexier it's French but in fact they're very different Freelancers you and me we get paid when we work we have to show up in person entrepreneurs built something bigger than themselves usually using someone else's money so Tim Cook has

never written a line of programming in his life but he runs apple right that when you're are an entrepreneur your job is to hire people to do all the jobs that's your job if you are doing the work that people are paying for you've made a mistake because you've hired the cheapest best available person you to do the work instead of scaling so yeah I've built companies and when I have done it I almost burned myself out the first time because I had 50 people reporting directly to me and I was basically a freelancer on

performance drugs that was a bad idea and I've also been an entrepreneur where I have created the conditions for other people to do work that I couldn't do or I wasn't able to do great so if you're a freelancer it's totally fine to hire people on upwork to have an editor somewhere else where you're giving them tasks but if you start thinking the best way for me to grow is to hire more people you're trapped the best way for a freelancer to grow is to get better clients because you can't can't work more hours but

better clients they demand more they pay more they talk about you more so if a freelancer is listening to this that's what I would say to you is I'm a freelancer and proud of it what I found in this day when I can Outsource most other things is employees were involved a promise that was harder and harder for me to make as I get older which is that I'll take care of it and that we'll make this thing happen and as a freelancer I can say I have this many hours to day where can I

put them in a way that will fuel me and the people I serve and if I have work that needs to be done I got to someone editing an audio in Pakistan right now I will never meet him he's not an employee there's a task to be done so that's the distinction I think and that all comes down to get better clients get better clients with all of the different courses and programs and speaking events who do you consider your clients I gave a thousand speeches around the world for 30 years the client is who

is hiring me to come give a speech there are the local Kanas Club good for them says will you come for lunch you can Hawk new business when you're there we don't pay anything and I'll get there and there'll be like a little Podium and 40 people eating chips they're not a good client for me given the work I seek to do right whereas there were I don't know 27,000 people people in the auditorium that Zig Ziggler and I worked in Wisconsin that was a good day because they were professionals I was a professional I

had a chance to do my craft how do you work your way up that speaker ladder that's part of how you get better clients I used to have a record label one of the groups on the label lived in a van they were very talented married couple and they would drive to a new town and when they get to a new town there's always a coffee shop coffee house that will take unknown to Talent pay you 15 bucks and you can play and they would leave and go to a new town I like guys get

out of the van stay in one town go from the $15 a night to the $50 a night to the $200 that's how you work your way up not racing around taking the little ones right so I've had lots of different clients that's interesting to me ultimately people who pay me with their attention are my readers I'm not seeking to get $15 from them or $100 them I'm seeking to make a difference for them because if I can make a difference for my audience the money will take care of itself do you have to I

know you've talked about this before but how do you or do you have to suppress the thoughts of what if like what if I had a team of 20 people could I have more impact and reach and money like do you suppress those thoughts do those thoughts not exist for you the wh ifs around SC scaling oh Erica there's so many wh ifs if you get started on the wh ifs when are we going to stop right what we're dealing with now is a world where each one of us has so many more options than

we used to and if you want to be paralyzed my friend Steve pressfield calls it resistance all you need to do is look at how many things you could be doing today each one comes with an opportunity cost because if I do that I can't do this if I do this I can't do that if I do this I can't do that and you're just in this endless cycle and my model is this there's a dip in any project that's worth doing and the dip happens when it gets really hard when you've made 40 Tik

toks and not one of them is caught on and you feel like quitting the time to quit is not then either quit before you start totally allowed or quit after you've made it to the other side but to quit in the dip gets you in this endless cycle of being a Wandering generality so my analysis is yes I could go do that and am I willing to go through the dip and give up all the other things that were require to get to the other side of that right could I get elected to the local

school board probably would I then want to get elected to this and get elected to this and become the governor God forbid no but there's a dip there and we can see what it is before we start and could I start using Twitter yeah and it would be fun for a little while but do I want to stick it out to get to the other side so I guess what I would finish this with is uh Steve's book The War of art strong recommend also Ben and Roz's book The Art of possibility which has a

similar title both books will change your life then I'll have another do you think question so do you think that you would have been able to come to this conclusion you have now about the optimal lifestyle workstyle that you have without having tried everything because you have tried everything in terms of the big teams the being the entrepreneur versus the freelancer well part of my work is to tell people things I learned so they don't have to do it themselves but the journey is priceless to be 25 or 28 or 35 and fail and fail

and learn from the failing not to take it personally but to say there's a whole bunch of keys on this key ring there's a lock this key did not open that lock that doesn't mean I'm a bad person it just means this key did not open that lock and that when I can find a truth from some of that that I can share with people that's part of my work the impact that you've had on the marketing space over these decades is not in my humble opinion in proportion to the money you've made from it

for the impact the impact that you've given people you should have billions of dollars I don't believe you you have billions of dollars in the bank how do you how do you think about that or reconcile that is that an okay position that you're in or do you feel like you weren't compensated accordingly for the value that you've brought to the marketing world or I is a great position to be in what's the point of competing against other people to see who could make the most ridiculous amount of money if you're going to do that

you have to focus on doing that and I haven't focused on doing that I am so lucky to live the life I live it's an art project followed by an educational project followed by an experiment followed by what do you think about this and I don't have a board of directors and I set up a very low overhead life there's no private jet there are no Butlers what would that wouldn't make me happier I know people who have an enormous amount of money they are not happy that is not the point it is a symptom

it is not the cause and so if you're going to keep track of more money than you need you better have a good reason to do so and I haven't wrestled at all with like email marketing is a whatever it is $50 billion year industry I owe none of it fine great that's terrific it would be better than if it was a zero billion dollar industry and I was wrong great I'm fantastic and so that philosophy works even if you're not in this line of work I think what we've done is we've increased the amount

of resources everyone on this planet has that anyone listening to this has more resources ources than the last king of France did but we have an increased happiness so instead of focusing on trading our happiness for stuff it makes more sense to say what do I want to do in the first place for my audience what would be their homework what book would you want them to start with or what blog post I think the best thing you can do is find three other people you are willing to talk to to about this that if

you check in with three friends once a week about what Erica is teaching you if you check in with three friends once a week about what you read on my blog I don't care I'm not keeping track but I am keeping track of the change you are making and it's very hard to do it by yourself find a few other people and do it together we have a closing tradition so the podcast is called Erica taught me but today is all about Seth taught me so what do you want people to walk away saying Seth

taught me this Seth taught me that I'm enough if I just decide not to work for a system that doesn't have my best interests at heart and instead lean into the possibility I can create for other people thank you so much that was beautifully said thanks Erica if you've enjoyed the episode please take a moment to leave a review it really helps support what we're doing thanks for listening and I'll talk to you next Tuesday on a brand new episode of Erica taught me