Poke the Box

Seth Godin: Well my uncle has a PhD from MIT and we call him the Admiral because he was in the Navy. When he had his little kids I used to babysit for them and I was stunned, I came to their house one day and there was a shoebox-sized metal box painted battleship gray, very heavy with a big thick cable attached to it which plugged straight into the wall, and on it were two or three switches and a dial and some lights. And he plugged this thing into the mains and through it into the crib with the one year old, and if you did something like that today you would be arrested, but what was great about it is the toddler looks at it and starts doing what toddlers do, which is poking it, flicking a switch and seeing what happens, turning a dial and seeing what happens. And that, it turns out, is how we learn, and we learn by poking and what has shifted in our world is that the rewards as an adult of poking the box, of messing with the system and seeing what happens have gone way up, and the risks of doing it have gone way down. So there's this current scarcity of people willing to initiate or instigate or start, and that scarcity means these people are valuable and in a world where the economy is faltering there is an endless demand for people who are willing to show up and make a ruckus and make a difference.

Rachel Salaman: And that's what your book is all about, and I mentioned that it can fit in your pocket, it's got a very unusual format in that it's a collection of musings and some of them are just a paragraph long, why did you choose to write it like this?

Seth Godin: You see I don't get to stand in the room when people read a book and the problem I find with traditional books, if you're trying to reach people who don't read a lot of books, is that they don't work on the general population, and the reason is the author gets a whole head of steam going in one direction and if the reader doesn't buy it, if the reader is hiding or the reader is arguing, you lose them. And so what I'm trying to do here is bob and weave and dance around, coming at you in lots of different directions, the very way I would if I was in the room with you, trying the best I can to make this argument in a way that resonates. And I call this kind of writing a manifesto. Manifestos go way back hundreds of years, the Communist Manifesto was only 85 pages long and what a manifesto is, is an argument meant to be shared and the books I'm publishing with this new project are just like that. I'm trying to argue a point and my other authors that will be coming along argue a point, and if we succeed, our hope is that the reader will buy a dozen copies and pass them out to other people who might need to hear the same argument.

Rachel Salaman: And the project you mentioned, that's the Domino Project?

Seth Godin: That's right, I got tired of being a hypocrite, after my last book I announced that I wasn't going to publish books the traditional way with "real publishers" any longer, because for years I'd been criticizing the death spiral that real publishers seemed to be embracing, and soon thereafter my friends at Amazon reached out to me and said we would love to power a publishing project if you want to start one. So I put together a small team of interns and students and we are building a different kind of publishing company with different rules, and so far it's off to a fabulous start.

Rachel Salaman: Is this the first book from the project?

Seth Godin: Yes, this is the first book, we can bring a book to market in about a hundred days, the typical publisher takes more like four hundred. So this book was written in December and launched in March and we will be bringing out a new book every month or so thereafter.

Rachel Salaman: So back to Poking the Box, why do you think it's so important?

Seth Godin: Well if the world wasn't changing it wouldn't be important at all, but the only reason it's important to initiate and instigate is if we don't the rules and we don't have a map. In an environment where there is no map you don't get anywhere unless you have someone willing to go into the unknown. So we go back to the imperial age and the exploration of the new world by Europeans, the only people who created value were those who were willing to get on a boat, even though they didn't know where it was going to go, and the people who sat in their little shop and did what they did yesterday quickly became obsolete because the world changed. And I don't think anyone can argue that the world is changing slower than it used to, in fact it's changing faster. So in that world where an efficient factory is not worth very much, where we see the Range Rovers of the world and the Jaguars of the world run into trouble because they can't just do what they did yesterday, what we need are people who are willing to say oh, I'm going to try something new, because the cost of failing is small and the benefit of success is huge.

Rachel Salaman: How practical is that though really in today's business world where there isn't much room for people really to take the initiative is there?

Seth Godin: Well I'm going to assume that you're just being kind in letting me answer that question because I don't believe one word of what you just said.

Rachel Salaman: Go on.

Seth Godin: Let me give you five examples off the top of my head. When I write a blog post, which I get to do every day, and put it in front of a million people around the world, if I'm wrong I've wasted a few minutes, but I get to do another one tomorrow, whereas when I write a book and have to spend a year on it, if I'm wrong the stakes are much higher. If I am doing customer service at Zappo's and the phone rings and I answer and talk to the person on the phone without a script and discover a new way to delight a customer, that's worth a lot to the company, but if I'm wrong the cost is awfully low. If I work in bioengineering and recombinant DNA research, it used to be a four year project to come up with a way to test a new kind of bacteria against something, now using software that's as easy as Microsoft Word I can recombine a new form of DNA on my laptop and generate it in a petri dish in a day. And the same thing is true with the way they make cars, you can reprogram a robot to try a different kind of car design in an hour, whereas it used to take a month. So in all these examples, what we see is that the cost of experimentation is tiny, whereas the upside of getting it right is huge.

Rachel Salaman: What about the chain of command though in some of these organizations? Some of the people who might be poking the box might not have the authority to do it?

Seth Godin: Exactly and that's the objection that I call, my boss won't let me, that a lot of people will hear this and say well my boss won't let me do that. My first answer to those people is well if what you're saying is you want your boss to take the blame if you fail, but you want the credit if you succeed, of course your boss won't let you, she's not an idiot and all the success that we've seen comes from people who are willing to take responsibility for the work that they do and this difference between responsibility and authority is huge. Responsibility is taken, authority is given and you can get a lot done if you are willing to take responsibility and accept the blame when you're wrong, that when we see people who are building great careers, that's what they're doing, they're making lots and lots of small changes which could lead to small failures, I'm not saying they would, but when a small failure occurs, if you take the blame, you get to play again and that cycle is what leads to success. So if I look at what Sir Richard has done with building Branson in one place after another, that's all he does and this mindset that says I don't need authority in order to fail a little is very valuable. Now it's entirely possible that you work in an industry or for a boss where you have absolutely no ability to take any innovation or any instigation whatsoever, and I think if you have that job, you have no excuse to work there because what you've basically then said is I'm willing to give up my autonomy and my future in exchange for a pay check at an organization that will certainly fail one day soon. And I don't want to hear that whining, I would rather have you set out somewhere where you are actually expected to be a human being doing art that changes things.

Rachel Salaman: So do you think there's no place for the kind of, and I hesitate to use the word, rules, but structures that monitor and guide this kind of creativity?

Seth Godin: Oh there's totally room for it, if you work on an assembly line that makes pacemakers, I dearly hope that you will follow the instructions to the letter as you put the batteries into the pacemaker, just don't expect to get a big raise at the end of the year because you're such a great employee, because you're not, you're just a replaceable cog on the factory line. But we all get choices, you can choose to work in a job where we need compliance and I hope some people do make that choice, but judging from how people are valued, too many people are making that choice and not enough people are making the choice to get a job where they have to draw the map. And if we look at every brand that has grown in the last ten years and every career that has flourished, they belong to people who make a map for a living and as individuals, because we don't live in Stalinist Russia, we get to pick where we're going to do our work and my argument in my 85 page manifesto is, don't pick to do work in a place where you're a cog. And the other half of it is you need to reject the tyranny of being picked, that authors who wait for an agent and an agent who waits for a publisher, and a publisher who waits to get on Charlie Rose are waiting to be picked, and what the internet has done is handed everyone a microphone and you should use it. If you think about J K Rowling and her career, she was one day away from not being able to publish Harry Potter, it had been rejected by every publisher in the world except for one who eventually took it. Now if it had been rejected by that last one, we would have had no Harry Potter and today that's inconceivable because if you really believe in your work, you publish it, you pick yourself and you can pick yourself if you're an architect and you can pick yourself if you're a systems engineer, you can pick yourself if you're a programmer, and it's that act of picking yourself that opens the door for people and calls their bluff and says well if you're good, show us, go.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you say that poking also requires tact and you have a chapter called the Semmelweis Imperative, can you tell us about that.

Seth Godin: So here's what happened, a few hundred years ago Ignaz Semmelweis figured out that doctors washing their hands, as amazing as this sounds, after delivering a baby could save lives, because what doctors would do is they would deliver a baby and then they would go and eat lunch and they would then deliver another baby and then pull a bullet out of somebody, without ever washing their hands, and he was able to prove with a capital P, that if they would just wash their hands, lives would be saved, mothers would not die. And 20 years later, throughout Europe, no doctors other than the doctors in his ward were washing their hands, his idea did not spread. And it's not that he was wrong, because he was right, it was that he was a jerk and that being a jerk, yelling at people, screaming at people and cursing them out, did not incent doctors to embrace his idea and so they didn't. The idea couldn't be separated from the man who was carrying it and my argument is that just because you're right doesn't mean we're all going to follow you or let you initiate, that part of what I'm talking about here is we gave everyone a microphone, but if no one is going to listen to you because you're not charismatic enough, or you're not pressing the right buttons, you're going to fail. So this isn't going to be easy, but the path is simple and clear, which is that if you are generous in your art, if you draw a map and share it, and then you work hard to have people follow you, they will, and the magic here is that once people follow you, making money and a career takes care of itself.

Rachel Salaman: Now as we've been hearing, your book urges people to start things, but you don't talk about finishing them in your book, or even continuing. Aren't those things important as well?

Seth Godin: Actually, maybe you missed a page where I go into great detail to say if you don't ship, if you don't intersect with the market, if you don't finish, then it's as if you didn't even start.

Rachel Salaman: Well I thought the shipping was the starting.

Seth Godin: I'd like you to think that, that's great, yes. Once it's shipped, once the work is out there, it's fine with me if you go and make another thing. If Bob Dylan was still singing what he was singing in 1966, we wouldn't be better off. The point here is not that we need you to then turn your shipped notion into a repeated enterprise, there are plenty of people who can do that for you. Steve Jobs does not spend a lot of time on the keyboard shape of the MacBook Pro, because they need him to do something harder than that, and I guess what I'm arguing for here is, if you're just a person that's starting things, the person who has got that workshop filled with half-finished projects, you are failing, but if you finish it and if it touches another human being, it is in the world and then yes, go poke something else, that's fine.

Rachel Salaman: So this idea of poking, of instigation actually includes the idea of following it through?

Seth Godin: Right, because otherwise what you're doing is hiding, you're just hiding in a different way. You and I both know people who have six unfinished business ideas and 12 unfinished novels sitting around, because they get the excuse of well I'm an artist and I can't be bothered, but really what they're doing is hiding from the marketplace, because if no one has seen it how could it be criticized.

Rachel Salaman: And what about planning, how much planning should someone do before they start this whole process?

Seth Godin: The way that I've been playing this game for 25 years is this, my goal is to fail more than anyone else and if you think about it, you don't get to do that unless you get to keep playing, that if you've failed dramatically and you're out of the game, that's only one failure, the goal is to chalk up as many failures as possible. So the point of planning, it seems to me, is to choose your projects in such a way that if they succeed they're worth doing, but if they fail you still get to play.

Rachel Salaman: So can you give us an example of that?

Seth Godin: Sure, well this Domino Project, this publishing company I'm starting, because it's powered by Amazon, I'm not going to end up with 50,000 unsold books in my garage I have to pay for, they are. They can afford to take the risk like that, I can't and that lets me play this game and publish the kind of work that I wouldn't ordinarily publish if it was just me, because it might wipe me out. I'm not going to start on the other hand, a cable TV network because I think I have a good idea for one, but if I'm wrong, that's three years of my life disappeared, so I'm looking at an appropriate scale for what I do, whereas if you worked at General Electric or Wal-Mart, the kind of little projects that I do aren't even worth your time, you need to look for a bigger project and you need to look for a bigger project and you need to have an organization that's going to reward you for being wrong. And I really mean the word reward, that what I say to managers and leaders is, if you're serious about innovation, you must never use the sentence failure is not an option, because if failure is not an option then success is not an option either.

Rachel Salaman: Now failing is clearly a frightening prospect for a lot of people because of phrases like you've just mentioned, what do you think can help people feel better about failing, feel more comfortable with failing?

Seth Godin: Well let's understand that when you were in kindergarten you had no problem with this, that when you were in kindergarten raising your hand isn't an issue, telling a joke isn't an issue, playing with a stranger isn't an issue, we're born to poke and then we get brainwashed out of it. And the reason we get brainwashed out of it is the industrialists of the 1700s and 1800s desperately wanted compliant factory workers, and the easiest way to make a factory worker compliant is to teach them that disobedience is fatal. So part of what we need to do is un-brainwash ourselves and un-brainwash our children and un-brainwash our co-workers. And we can do that in ways that don't seem serious to someone who was raised in the industrial mindset, but are really serious, and they include things like actively rewarding yourself for failing, keeping a log of how many times you've failed, and if you can't write down three times you've failed yesterday, you're not serious about innovation. I failed three times before breakfast and that is a challenge, but once you get into the habit it's not that hard to keep it up.

Rachel Salaman: And it's not depressing when you start logging your failures?

Seth Godin: It's awesome because you're still here, you get one step closer to Superman when you do that because these bullets are flying at you and you're still here, and you did that thing that frightened you and you're still here. Pema Chodron tells a great story of Trungpa Rinpoche who was walking with three aides in Tibet past a graveyard and there was a horrible junkyard dog foaming at the mouth, barking, straining against the chain he was on and when they were about 25 feet away the chain broke and the dog sprinted at them, eager to bite someone, and the three aides screamed and ran away and Rinpoche looked at the dog and ran straight at him, and the dog was so blown away by this, it put its tail between its legs and ran away. And if you think about what is Rinpoche's life like after he does something like that, it makes you fearless, it makes you aware of the fact that fear is really over-rated as a survival technique.

Rachel Salaman: Which brings us onto an idea that crops up in quite a lot of your work which is how people can overcome their lizard brains. Perhaps we could just talk first of all about the lizard brain, what is it?

Seth Godin: I didn't make it up, psychologists have been talking about it for 55 years, it's your amygdala, it's a part of your brain just above the back of your shirt collar that is responsible for fear and anger and revenge and sexual reproduction. Basically it's supposed to keep you alive and help you have kids. It's the one that freaks out if the chief throws you out of the village, because the saber tooth tiger might eat you and it's the one that has you stop working on your laptop and start screaming when your plane hits turbulence, even though rationally we all know that screaming does not keep the plane in the air, so it short-circuits our better self. The thing about the lizard brain, it has a voice which Steve Pressfield calls the resistance and the resistance is responsible for writer's block, and the resistance is the one that's busy telling you I don't know what I'm talking about as I'm sitting here rattling along on this stuff, because it's afraid, and the voice of the resistance is our enemy. And what I argue in this book "Linchpin," which was the book before this, is that you need to learn to recognize this tone of voice. When you hear the resistance speaking up it always sounds the same and what I've managed to do, not in every part of my life but in some, is that when I hear its voice, I do exactly the opposite of what it tells me to do. The success factor for this economy is that when the resistance is afraid, it's your compass telling you that's exactly the right thing to do.

Rachel Salaman: So how can you recognize when it's your resistance talking to you?

Seth Godin: There are things the resistance is afraid of like rollercoasters and such, or a first date, or raising your hand at the end of a lecture. You can listen for its voice, the resistance is the one that never speaks up and says oh yes you should go do that new thing, it sounds different in your head, at least it does in my head, and once you can distinguish the voice, then you're onto it and that's the magic of it, it's viewing it as an ally in helping you identify the hard work, because everything I'm talking about today is simple, but it's really difficult.

Rachel Salaman: Right, there's the simple concept but it's difficult to execute?

Seth Godin: That's correct.

Rachel Salaman: Right. One of your chapters explores the ideas of flux and risk and that was particularly interesting, could you talk us through the difference between those two things?

Seth Godin: I would be happy to. Flux is what happened in physics in example when a hot object and a cold object sit next to each other, the energy moves and we call that movement flux. We have been taught that change is a bad thing because change, if you're a caveman means that the crops might not grow or the animals might run away, that change at work, a new boss, often means bad things are going to happen to you, or at least we think so. So we fear change which is why companies like AOL for years were frozen in the face of the internet because it represented a change. Well flux is different, flux is just the flow of things moving forward and if you visualize a river with all the water flowing through it, a rock in that river that's fighting the flow is actually under more stress than something that's just floating along with the river. So we're now living in this world of flux where things that we call change are happening every day, where the internet shifts and the economy shifts and corporations shift and politics shifts, and if we fight those things and say no no no, please bring back the status quo, we are going to be stressed and we are going to fail. But if we view this flux as an opportunity, as a chance to ride the rapids, not only are we going to be more successful but it's more fun.

Rachel Salaman: And you explore the difference between flux and risk don't you?

Seth Godin: That's right because risk is something that can be quantified, and there are some risks that are worth taking and other risks that aren't worth taking and we confuse them all the time. It is not risky to raise your hand after a lecture and ask a question. No one has ever been injured doing that, it's not life threatening, and yet our heart beats faster and we get nervous because we're hard-wired to think of that as a risk, and what the economy is doing right now is rewarding people who take those safe steps that feel like risks, and that window is not going to be open forever but it's wide open right now.

Rachel Salaman: Another chapter that resonated with me was the one about polishing relationships and about your friend whose phone chimed at him whenever he had a new tweet to read.

Seth Godin: Yes, I think that if the guys in the old days who represented their Communist threat had come up with a secret plan, and the secret plan was to build a piece of software that distracted every efficient productive member of society and got them to focus on whether strangers liked them or not, we would have shut it down in a heartbeat. But in fact, that's what we've got, I've got all these photos on my wall here of executives staring at their hands all day long, what are they staring at, they're staring at their Blackberries, they're polishing these relationships most of which are unimportant, they're seeing if maybe, just maybe everyone likes them. And the question is, when you reach that spot, that moment when everyone likes you, then what happens? Is that the end of the game, do you get a prize, is it going to stay that way forever, and if it's as transient as I think it is and as worthless as I think it is, then the question is why are we spending so much time trying to get everyone to like us?

Rachel Salaman: So where do you see things like Twitter going, what do you see the future of that type of social media?

Seth Godin: Well talking about Twitter is like talking about the telephone, some people use the telephone to make crank calls and some people use the telephone to do business, some people use the telephone to blow their money on pay per call services. There's lots of ways you can use social media and things like Twitter, many of them are vapid and ridiculous wastes of time, but on the other hand it's a really powerful tool for organizing and leading groups of like-minded people in subtle ways, so I think it's all good as it goes but if you are using it to hide from difficult work and if you're using it to figure out if you can fit in even more than you already fit in, I want to beg you to maybe try something else.

Rachel Salaman: So finally, do you have three top tips for people who want to be more effective in their workplace, based on your own experiences perhaps?

Seth Godin: Sure, top tip number one, don't look for top tips, it's probably deeper than that. Top tip number two is establish an environment where you can make small efforts that fail and get in the habit of creating these small steps that fail. And number three is when you learn from that, make bigger steps and realize that your life is nothing but a series of projects and projects are nothing but a series of poking, and that the more you poke and learn and grow, the more valuable you are to all of us and we desperately need you to go start.

Rachel Salaman: Seth Godin, thank you very much for joining us.

Seth Godin: Rachel, an absolute pleasure, be well.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Seth's new book is "Poke the Box," subtitled, "When was the last time you did something for the first time?" You can find out more about him and his work at www.sethgodin.com and if you're interested in his recent book "Linchpin" which he mentioned, you can listen to our review of it in the Book Insights section of Mind Tools. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then, goodbye.