Seth Godin

Most people try to win.

The real question is, “at what?”

If you focus your sights on winning the local bowling league, the effort can consume you, and you will be aware of your progress and your competition.

Or, if you turn the poetry you’re writing into your game, with the goal of winning that next stanza–not in the eyes of a publisher, an editor or a reader, but in your eyes–you can turn that into your thing.

If, instead, your goal is to raise more money at a higher valuation in the Valley, then that’s the game you’ve chosen.

Or, perhaps, your game is to bend others to your will, to prey on yet another human you see as weaker than you are…

Often, we choose games we can’t possibly win. That approach might be working for you, as it lets you off the hook because you won’t have to work out what to do if you win.

And sometimes, we choose games where we can’t win unless someone else loses. And these games can often have long-term, toxic after-effects.

As you can see, modifying a game you’re already playing because you don’t like how it’s turning out isn’t nearly as useful as picking the right game in the first place.

The list of reasons is nearly endless.

We need all of them to explain the shortcuts, phone-ins and half-work that we’re surrounded by.

All of them are pretty good reasons too. We’re in a hurry, the system is unfair, the market demands it, no one will notice, it’s not my job, I was handed a lousy spec, the materials are second-rate, the market won’t pay for quality, competition is cutthroat, my boss is a jerk, it’s actually pretty good, no one appreciates the good stuff anyway…

On the other hand, there’s only one way to justify work that’s better than it needs to be: Because you cared enough.

Loosen the constraints on a system and the system will almost always do better in the short run.

That’s if we define better as the visible outputs of what the system does. And short run as, “the stuff that happens before we have to live with the side effects.”

So… if you remove environmental regulation from a factory, it will probably make more stuff faster. For awhile. But then the river is sludge and the workers are dead, so in the long run, not so much.

If you stop paying taxes, you’ll have more money today. But the civilization you depend on to enjoy that money will soon disappear.

If you stop taking medicine because you don’t like the stomach ache it gives you, you’ll definitely have a better day today. Until you stop having a better day, because of the illness that comes back because you stopped taking your medicine.

All side effects are more simply called “effects.” And getting clear about the time frame we live in is the first step to leaving things better than we found them.

Accountability is done to you. It’s done by the industrial system, by those that want to create blame.

Responsibility is done by you. It’s voluntary. You can take as much of it as you want.

Best I can tell, most of the folks in the organized crime industry care a lot more about the ‘organized’ part than they do the ‘crime.’

Organized as in: who’s up and who’s down. Who gets to decide. Who’s in charge and who has power.

The crime is simply a shortcut.

The same is true for people on Wall Street. The money is simply a means to keep score of the organized part.

When people are willing to sacrifice their principles to take shortcuts, when they’re willing to bully or cheat or lie to get more status, we are understandably disdainful. Because the boundaries matter. Because we can see that once someone is willing to cheat a little to win, they’re probably willing to cheat a lot.

If you start a book, you will do better if you have a plan for finishing your book.

If you take the time and spend the money to go to college, it’s worth considering graduating as well.

Aretha Franklin died without a clearly stated will. As a result, her heirs will waste time, money and frustration, because Franklin was both naive (a will doesn’t make it more likely that you will die) and selfish.

If you’re born, it pays to plan on dying.

Every year, millions of people needlessly suffer in old age because they didn’t spend twenty minutes on a health care proxy.

If you’re going to take a job, everyone will benefit if you think about how you’re going to leave that job.

And if you start a company, you should realize that you’re probably going to either sell it or fold it one day, and neither has to be a catastrophe or a failure.

Beginning is magical. So is finishing. We can embrace both.

Civilization depends on the apology. When humans interact and something goes wrong, the apology builds a bridge that enables us to move forward.

But apologies are failing more often. Two reasons: First, organizations aren’t humans, and organizations often seek to avoid or industrialize the human work that civilization needs. And secondly, the apology is a complex organism, one with many structures and purposes, and our culture models (or fails to model) how it’s supposed to be done.

Consider that we can say, “I’m sorry” at a funeral even if we didn’t murder the deceased, but we also say, “I’m sorry” when we bump into someone in a crowded train station and “I’m sorry” when we get caught shoplifting. Three different situations, with fundamentally different amounts of complicity, blame or guilt.

When someone accidentally bumps into us, we don’t expect compensation or punishment, but we very much want to be acknowledged. On the other hand, acknowledgment is insufficient when someone sought to profit from our pain.

We can start by asking, “what is this apology for?” What does the person need from us?

• To be seen
• Compensation
• Punishment for the transgressor
• Stopping the damage

The first category is the one that most demands humanity, and it’s also the most common. A form letter from a company does not make us feel seen. Neither does an automated text from an airline when a plane is late. One reason that malpractice victims sue is that surgeons sometimes have trouble with a genuine apology. This non-human behavior is getting worse and is being celebrated in parts of our culture (mistaking it for strength), which leads to a demand for the other three.

Compensation is the ancient tradition of seeking to make a victim whole. Unless the injury is solely financial, financial compensation is insufficient, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t tried to build systems that use money to atone for ills.

Punishment is different from compensation. Punishment allows the victim to feel seen, because he or she is now aware that the transgressor feels some pain as well. (Punishment is unsatisfying to the victim if he or she is unaware of it). Punishment is economically suspect, though, because other than the second-order feeling of being seen, the punishment doesn’t directly help the person who was injured. It also can spiral forward, leading to ever more damage.

And finally, stopping the damage, which often co-exists with the other three needs. This is the affirmative act of making sure it doesn’t happen again. This is correcting the website so that the next person who reads it won’t see the same error. This is fixing the railing so the next visitor won’t trip and fall. This is the organization investing time and energy to actually improve its systems.

Compounding these totally different sorts of apologies is the very industrial idea of winning. Victims have been sold that it’s not enough that your compensation is merely helpful, but it has to be the most. That you won the biggest judgment in history. That the transgressor isn’t simply going to jail, but is going to jail forever, far away, in solitary confinement. We’ve all ended up in a place where one of the ways to feel seen is to also feel like you came in first place compared to others.

There’s an old cartoon–an irate customer is standing at the complaints desk of a store, clearly not mollified by the clerk. She then asks, exasperated, “well, what if we shut down the store, burn it to the ground and run the owner out of town… will that be enough?”

The challenge that organizations have is that they haven’t trained, rewarded or permitted their frontline employees to exert emotional labor to create human connection when it’s most needed.

The traveler goes straight from, “my flight is overbooked,” to “I want a million frequent flyer miles and a first class ticket on the next flight.”

The patient goes from, “the scar on my leg isn’t healing,” to “I’m going to sue you.”

And the most common unseen situation is the customer who walks away, forever, because you have a broken system and you’re not hearing from your people about how to fix it.

Organizations that refuse to see the pain they’re causing because they’re afraid of being held responsible have missed the point. You’re already being held responsible. The question is what to do about it? You can stonewall, bureaucratize and delay, and hope that the system will suffice…

The alternative is to choose to contribute to connection by actually apologizing. Apologizing not to make the person go away, but because they have feelings, and you can do something for them. Apologizing with time and direct contact, and following it up by actually changing the defective systems that caused the problem.

“Yikes, I’m sorry you missed your flight–I really wish that hadn’t happened. The next flight is in an hour, but that’s probably going to ruin your entire trip. Are you headed on vacation?”

“You’re right, you booked a front-facing seat, but you got one that’s facing backward–and I hear you about getting motion sickness, my sister does too… I know that Amtrak has been having trouble with our systems, but I have the hotline number of the head of ops–I’m going to call and let them know.”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t have written that review. I was in a bad mood when I wrote it. I apologize. But, to set the record straight, I’m going to delete that review and write a new one, just as loud, but this time telling people about how much you care.”

Consider that an effective apology has a few elements to it:
1. You know what sort of apology you’re offering.
2. You share your story with the aggrieved as well as hearing their story, thus becoming human, and then taking the time to help them feel seen by you.
3. You engage with the person who was harmed and find out, beyond being seen, what would help them move forward, noting that it’s impossible to make complete amends.

[It’s worth noting that these are not the same steps you’d take if you’re simply hoping the person will shut up and go away, without you seeing them. That’s not going to happen, and acting as if it will, will only make your problem worse.]

Empathy –> Connection –> Trust

It’s not that they don’t know the truth (they might, if they stopped to think about it.)

It’s not that they want to know the truth, either. Information is available if they looked for it.

No, they fear the truth.

And being part of a mob is a good way to hide from that fear.

It’s the blockbusters that get all the hype. The home runs, the viral videos, the hits.

It’s the sudden shifts, the ideas that change everything, the fell swoops.

Fell swoops seem like they’re worth chasing, but a hit isn’t a strategy, it’s an event. Nice work if you can get it, but hard to plan on or build on.

It takes patience to avoid planning on swoops. It’s more productive to live in a house that’s built out of bricks, one at a time, day by day.

Here’s to a swoop-free journey.

With enough top-down energy, it feels like the creator of an idea can broadcast it, anytime and anywhere. That enough hype/promo/media/leverage ought to allow a major publisher or network or candidate to bend the culture simply by yelling.

If you follow this road, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

For 500 years, this hasn’t been true for books. And now it’s not true for anything.

Ideas spread from person to person. Horizontally. Because someone who encountered an idea cared enough to spread the word, to talk about it, to insist that friends and colleagues pay attention, if just for a moment.

If you can figure out how to embrace the true fans, they’ll go ahead and spread an idea–not because you want them to, but because they want to.

Your ability to reach a tiny group of committed fans is essential. But the work spreads because of the fans, not because you figured out how to spend money to interrupt more and more strangers.

“You do it like that?”

Every day, we’re at our machines, clicking and swiping and typing.

And it’s entirely possible that the methods you’ve developed are costing you at least an hour a day in wasted time.

That your desktop isn’t supposed to have 2,000 files on it.

That you don’t need to click the same sequence over and over to get through your inbox.

It’s possible that the ‘I’ll learn it later’ shortcut you took a few years ago is now a significant time tax on your day, every day.

The solution is fun and simple: find a smart person and have them watch you use the computer for an hour.

She’ll share ten shortcuts and principles that will amaze you.

And then you can return the favor.

It’s much more difficult to use a computer than it should be. But that’s mostly because they’re powerful, and power brings choices, and you may need some help with your choices.

We have so many forms of “this will only take a minute” inputs.

We have Slack, which is optimized for, “yep, I saw that.”

We have email, which is optimized for, “I cleared my inbox” or possibly, “I’ll do this later.”

We have Twitter, which is optimized for wasting time.

And we have Facebook, which in only a few minutes, can make you feel left out.

But we don’t have a convention for important inputs that might take hours of work to respond to.

We don’t have a pre-sorted inbox for, “I’m ready to think deeply and work hard and change my posture and truly engage with this idea now.”

This is one of the best things about a good non-fiction book. It’s not for wasting time, it’s for depth when you’re ready to go deep.

If you spend your whole day browsing, then what happens?

[Typo update: There are typos on this blog now and then, and I apologize for all of them, the past ones and the ones yet to come. I usually fix them within an hour of publication, so if you’re ever wondering–yes, Bo Diddley was 1955, not 1995–just click on the title of the post and you’ll see the latest version, here, on the blog itself, almost certainly corrected. Thanks for your forbearance and patience.]

In 1955, Bo Diddley released his first record. It became a #1 bestseller.

The name of the track? “Bo Diddley.”

It was a song about a singer and his work.

That’s what it sounds like when you own it.

When you sign your work.

If you’re going to step up and create, it helps to own what you just did. You’re not simply another in a long line.

You’re you.

There’s the forever of discomfort. Sasha Dichter taught us about this. The feeling we get during a temporary situation that feels like it’s going to last forever.

It’s one thing to tolerate a bumpy landing on an airplane, because you know it’ll be over in ten seconds.

But, a car-sick toddler doesn’t have that perspective. He’s wailing and sad because he thinks that this is the new normal, a permanent situation.

Too often, we quit in the dip. Not because we can’t tolerate discomfort for an hour, a week or a month, but because we mistakenly believe that it might last forever.

There’s the forever of plenty. This is when we erroneously assume that the stuff that’s good is going to stay good. That this moment, this leverage, these resources–we can squander them because they’ll be here tomorrow.

This sort of forever leads to heartbreak, because, inevitably, it doesn’t last. It can’t.

And there’s the forever of never. The dominant narrative of society is that you’re stuck with what you’ve got. Stuck in your status role, stuck in your skill set, stuck in your situation.

If you believe it, it’s probably true.

If you believe it, you just let yourself off the hook, which is comforting indeed.

And if you believe it, you’ve made life easier for the systems that would like to pigeonhole you.

But, even though it’s certainly harder than it ought to be, it doesn’t have to be forever.

[PS today’s the Early Decision deadline for the altMBA. The word continues to spread, person to person, with more than 3,300 alumni in 74 countries.]

“Gravity’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”

A truth is a useful, reliable statement of how the world is. You can ignore it, but it will cost you, because the world won’t work the way you hope it will. You can dislike the truth, but pretending it isn’t true isn’t an effective way to accomplish your goals or to further our culture.

Most of the kinds of truth we experience are about the past and the present, and these are the easiest to see and confirm, but there are also truths about cause and effect.

Identity is the truth of description. A circle is round because we define a circle as round. You can say, “a circle is rectangular in shape,” and all you’ve done is confused us. Words only work because we agree on what they mean.

Demagogues often play with the identity of words, as it distracts us.

Axiomatic truth is truth about the system. The Peano axioms, for example, define the rules of arithmetic. They are demonstrably true and the system is based on these truths. Einstein derived his theories of special and general relativity with a pad of paper, not with an experiment (though the experiments that followed have demonstrated that his assertions were in fact true.)

There were loud voices in mid-century Germany who said that Einstein’s work couldn’t be true because of his heritage, and many others who mis-described his work and then decried that version of it, but neither approach changed the ultimate truth of his argument.

Axiomatic truth, like most other truths, doesn’t care whether you understand it or believe it or not. It’s still true.

Historic truth is an event that actually happened. We know it happened because it left behind evidence, witnesses and other proof.

Experimental truth may not have the clear conceptual underpinnings of axiomatic truth, but it holds up to scrutiny. The world is millions of years old. Every experiment consistently demonstrates this. Experimental truth can also give us a road map to the future. Vaccines do not cause autism. The world is not flat. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising.

If you want to challenge an experimental truth, the only response is to do a better experiment, make it replicable and show your work.

Personal experience truth is the truth that’s up to you. How you reacted to what happened can only be seen and reported by you.

And finally, consider cultural truth, and this is the truth that can change. This is the truth of, “people like us do things like this.” Which is true, until it’s not. And then people like us do something else.

It might be the biggest misconception in all of advertising.

The Super Bowl has reach.

Google has reach.

Radio has reach.

So?

Why do you care if you can, for more money, reach more people?

Why wouldn’t it make more sense to reach the right people instead?

To pick an absurd example, you can use a giant radio telescope to beam messages to the billions or trillions of aliens that live in other solar systems. Worth it?

I read an overview that pointed out that one of the cons of Amazon advertising was that they didn’t have the reach of Google.

This is wrong in so many ways.

Reach doesn’t matter, because your job isn’t to interrupt people on other planets, with other interests. Your job is to interact with people who care.

Running an ad on the most popular podcast isn’t smart if the most popular podcast reaches people who don’t care about you.

Perhaps it makes sense to pay extra to reach precisely the right people. It never makes sense to pay extra to reach more people.

It lives right next to lifelong learning.

Lifelong learning is the mindset of possibility. It is built on the idea that we can grow if we simply show up, ready to learn.

Lifelong learning is never finished, and achieving the mindset isn’t easy, because the existing bias toward competence makes it socially unattractive. It requires us to acknowledge that we don’t know enough on our way to learning more.

And lifelong connection? That’s our commitment to engaging with people who will help us see what’s possible–and that in return, we’ll support them on their journey.

This is not the easily monetized connection of digital social networks. Those networks seek to maximize a simple metric (likes, friends and followers, all three of which should be in air quotes because the words don’t mean what they appear to mean). It’s more difficult than that.

We founded the altMBA (and the other Akimbo workshops) with a focused commitment on lifelong learning. I believe that it’s our urgent obligation (and precious opportunity) to learn more and make things better for those around us.

What we’ve found, though, is that it’s the lifelong journey of connection that powers that learning. That surrounding ourselves with others on the same path is at least as useful as learning something new. To that end, we’ve spent the last year building an online community called Forward Link where the more than 10,000 alumni from our workshops are connecting with and challenging each other on the way forward.

At the end of each seminar, we invite our students to join with the others who are already part of our growing circle.

Drip by drip, day by day. It’s not dramatic, but that’s how we get there.

Industrialism is based on scarcity. So is traditional college admissions. In fact, much of the world as we know it is based on hierarchies, limited shelf space, and resources that are difficult to share.

This leads to a common mindset: if it’s yours, it’s not mine. Sharing is something we teach to little kids, but in real life, we’re much busier keeping track of who’s up and who’s down in an endless status game.

But some systems are based on abundance. A language, for example, is more valuable when more people know it. The network effect helps us understand that for connection-based systems, more is actually better, not worse. Interoperability is a benefit. Cultural connection is an asset.

Wikipedia is more valuable than a traditional encyclopedia. That’s because there are unlimited pages and room for ever more editors. The system works better when more people use it.

The cultural turning point of our moment in time, the one that’s just beginning to be realized, is that education is an abundant system, not a scarce one.

Space on the Harvard campus is highly valued and also scarce.

But if we can break education out of the campus/scarcity mindset and instead focus on learning, learning at scale, learning that happens despite status not because of it–then we can begin to shift many of the other power structures in our society.

The more people who know something, the more it can be worth, because knowledge permits interoperability and forward motion. Knowledge creates more productivity, more connection and then, more knowledge.

It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

The incoming is coming to you because a while ago, you did something brave and generous and risky.

Incoming is great. It’s a reward for your impact. It’s a chance to serve and to make a difference. And it enables you to go to work every day.

If you spend all your time dealing with the incoming, though, you’ll have no time and no energy to create the next thing.

Every successful organization that has ultimately faded away via irrelevance has failed for this very reason.

Innovation is essential, but it’s rarely true that we do something that’s truly never been done before.

And that means that our work is toward something. We’re making decisions, taking risks and expending effort to get from here closer to there, where there is a place that’s been visited before.

Are you spending time in the gym trying to be more like Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Dwayne Johnson? Do your policies push our country to be more like China or Denmark? Will this policy create a place that looks like Bakersfield or Portland? Are you investing in the style of Warren Buffet or Mary Meeker?

The role model’s image brings with it all of the nuance that’s missing from a dry discussion of tactics. It forces us to get real and to look further into the future.

Are you really trying to be a Kardashian?