Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  'Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.'

  Quoting the sculptor Elizabeth King, Godin says bad moods, speed bumps and a stranger's negative feedback can easily spiral into deciding the work doesn't matter. A practice carries you through, because you already decided there would be a blog post tomorrow. 'Make the decision once, then you have a practice forever.' He has written more than 7,500 daily blog posts without missing one.

• 02

  Be for the smallest viable audience, not everyone, because the internet is a micro medium.

  Nothing has become a mass medium since television. The internet is the best tool ever for reaching specific people and terrible at reaching everyone: 'there is no homepage'. Harry Potter, which made its author over a billion dollars, is for precocious 12-year-olds and people who remember being one. When a friend said his book was 'for everybody', Godin predicted in writing that it would fail. Saying 'everyone' lets you hide, while naming who it's for puts you on the hook.

• 03

  His three pillars: the change you seek to make, the possibility you see, and the emotional labor you'll spend.

  Are you here to contribute or to take, to comply or to question? Then, do you see the world as it really is? Millions read Ben Graham and almost none became Warren Buffett. Finally, do you care enough to do the hard work of learning? He flips Dolly Parton's line: 'Do it on purpose and you'll find out who you are.'

• 04

  Learning is failing on the way to mastery; education is mostly compliance.

  You can read about swimming, but you learn by doing it. The only college and business school courses where he learned anything were essentially open-book, because you had to actually do the work. At Acton Academy schools, about 50 kids aged 5 to 17 teach each other, can't ask adults questions, and get weekly reports on what they built and whom they helped.

• 05

  A sunk cost is a gift from your former self, and you don't have to accept it.

  A mason across the street had signs advertising 'quality masonry' with masonry misspelled. He knew it cost him business, but he'd paid for 50 signs. If he'd found them by the roadside, he'd never have picked them up. People stay unhappy as lawyers for ten more years to spare their parents an hour of disappointment. In relationships, ask whether the new relationship will be better a year from now, or whether you're just shopping for novelty. Used deliberately, a sunk cost can help: his blog streak gets him over the hump on a blank Thursday.

• 06

  Narrow your decisions by walling off whole categories, and design the container before the content.

  Godin calls his mild ADD both a curse and an asset. He walls off areas: no meat since around 1980, no television. Limiting inputs means a day without his real work would be a day of nothing. As a former book packager (120 books), he defines a medium's constraints first, then finds an idea that fits. He solved a podcast format in his head, lost interest, and said yes only when someone offered to fund it as a lab. It's now in its eighth season.

• 07

  Doing what you love is for amateurs; loving what you do is for professionals.

  A professional makes a promise and keeps it whether or not they feel like it: they don't miss deadlines, throw tantrums or go over budget. Godin wears a work uniform (once a lab coat, lately a Japanese firefighter's happi coat) to signal 'do your work'. The phrase 'permission marketing' came to him in the shower because he vowed to stay until he had a name, with only a 40-gallon hot water tank.

• 08

  Quality means meeting spec, so define the spec and ship.

  Following Deming, quality isn't luxury. Under an electron microscope a Lexus is full of defects, all within spec, and the original target was a standard deviation better than Mercedes. Good enough is a definition, not a slur. He left a symbolic logic exam with unlimited time after three and a half hours because he'd met his spec, while one student stayed 18 hours. Miles Davis made Kind of Blue in four days. Would four more have helped?

• 09

  Useful criticism comes from someone with domain knowledge who isn't seeking status by hurting you.

  Most criticism comes from people who'd feel better if you felt worse. Diane von Furstenberg had great taste but couldn't explain why things worked, so Godin says you should hire people like that, not work for them. Two book-industry veterans were the first to explain to him in words why books succeeded, and that taxonomy shaped his career. Coaching is different from criticism: it helps people see what they're capable of, given what they say matters to them.