180 Seth Godin: How To Be Remarkable

# Podcast Interview: Seth Godin with Sumantha

**Total Duration:: 34:13

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Sumantha 0:00

Welcome to another episode. Now, how do I even introduce this one? Meeting Seth Godin. Having him as a guest, having the opportunity to interview him was a bucket list moment for me. If you've ever heard any of his stuff before, you'll know that it really doesn't matter what the topic is. He has so much value to share, and the thing I like about him the most is that he always shares things that make you think, so. He doesn't necessarily give you the answers, but he asks the right questions and that makes you think about your situation and mold advice to suit yours, which I think is really powerful.

Sumantha 0:45

Now, if you've never heard of Seth Godin, have a listen to this episode, and what I would suggest is afterwards look him up. He has just released his new book and he has loads of other books. He is on different podcasts. He's on YouTube, he's been on TV. Just look him up and you will find something that resonates, that's really interesting, that challenges your thinking and kind of flips things upside down because that's what he does. So without further ado, thank you for joining me and listening to this episode. I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Sumantha 1:25

Seth, firstly, thank you so much for being here. You've been such an inspiration to me, one of my most impactful teachers. I've been a small business owner full-time, part-time for about 20 years, and I'm really looking forward to continuing learning from you today. So huge. Thank you.

Seth 1:42

Well, thanks for doing this. It's a pleasure.

Sumantha 1:45

Thank you. Well, I feel like a good place to start is by diving into one of your core principles of how being remarkable is essential to marketing. Would you explain to me, to my listeners what you mean by being remarkable and why it's so crucial in this day and age to successful marketing?

Seth 2:02

Okay, I'll do my best. So remarkable just means one thing. Worth making a remark about. It's not a gimmick, it's not a hype or a hustle. It's simply does someone else benefit if they talk about you, what's in it for them to talk about you? Well, why is this important? It's important because attention is precious and scarce, and they're not making any more of it. So you're not going to be able to interrupt enough people to market yourself. You're not gonna be able to quote, get the word out there, unquote. 'cause the word doesn't wanna get out if it's not remarkable. On the other hand, what modern marketing is, actual marketing is building into the product or service or the course or whatever it is you're building from the beginning. A reason for people to want to talk about it, a service to your folks, to your customers, because people want to connect. They want to talk about what they're interested in. If you give them something to talk about, they'll talk about it.

Sumantha 3:12

And let's say, because I know some of my listeners are in this position, let's say that you offer something which is very competitive, so people don't want to share that they've discovered you, that you know you are someone who offers something great. What would be your advice to them?

Seth 3:28

All right. Well, there's so many things to decode here. First of all, you only make a commodity product if you want to. If you think it's a commodity. It is a commodity. So if you begin by saying, I'm in a space that's very competitive. Well, who chose that? Right? Who decided that you were gonna make something that was in a space that was very competitive? You make hammers and there's 20 hammers in the store. I'm gonna buy the cheap hammer because it's quote, very competitive. I keep saying quote, I don't usually talk that way because it's very competitive. That's not the way you need to be. You have so many choices. How can you be the creator of something that we would miss if you were gone. 'cause what it means to be missed if you were gone is you're doing something that isn't competitive. You're doing something where you are in a category of one. That doesn't mean you have to make something completely unique. It means you have to solve the problem in a way that makes people insist on your solution instead of somebody else's solution.

Sumantha 4:38

So when you, when we tie this into being remarkable, being worth, you know, people talking about the thing that you offer, um, you know, some of my listeners, I know that they support children who are preparing for very high stakes exams and parents will often use them, but they won't want people to know that they've used them or they won't want to talk about it with other people. So in that situation, would you rely on making clear to your audience why what you offer is remarkable?

Seth 5:07

This is a great example. I'll begin with this. We know that test prep works because tests are stupid and poorly constructed, so therefore they can be hacked with test prep. Is your test prep demonstrably better statistically than other people's test prep? Probably not, but that's not all you're selling. What you're selling is peace of mind. What you're selling is status. What you're selling is the story. Someone gets to tell themselves about what they just did. For example, if you make cars and your car costs more than 20,000 euro. Every bit above that isn't about making a car. That's better being a car. It's still gonna drive, it's still gonna be safe. What you paid extra for is the status and the feeling, et cetera. So when we think about which community you're offering these tests to, and you realize that your user and your customer are two different people. Customer is the parent, the user is the kid. How do you build into the course itself? Implementation that makes the course work better if people bring their friends that make it work better. If it becomes a circle of people, that's what's missing from your question.

Seth 6:21

So if I think about in the US Alcoholics Anonymous, which I believe is Worldwide Alcoholics Anonymous, you can't do it by yourself. And so people talk about it, even though it's supposed to be anonymous, you talk about it 'cause it works better if you do. So if I had no choice but to be in the business you're describing, the courses I built would include peer-to-peer practice work. So the only way to be in the course is to have at least one other friend who's in the course if you don't have one other friend who's in the course, who can't be in the course. And then I would also consider how do I raise the status of parents who are in the course? How do I. If you had no choice but to increase your price by a factor of 10, what would you add to the course? So you could justify increasing it by a factor of 10, because there's almost certainly a market for a luxury course, a status course, a course where it costs 10 times more because the parents who are buying it get to tell themselves a story that they bought the most hands-on course, the most customized course, et cetera. So the trap people get into is they try to be just like their competition. They try to play it safe. They follow all the genre rules and then they're surprised after they do that that it's a commodity. Well, sure it is. 'cause you're doing what everybody else is doing.

Sumantha 7:43

Yeah, I remember hearing you speak. It was about ideas that spread. And you gave the example of hotels and you said how sentence it was some, I've written it down actually. You said the sentence was, they're all the same. Take the cheap one. That's a real threat. And so our job in a way is to really tap into that kind of human-centric approach of how do you create something that relies on someone else or other things for it to work. I know that's something I've heard you talk about that quite a lot as a small business owner, when you are wearing all the different hats in your business, you don't have a marketing team, for example. You don't have access to focus groups. How would you advise someone to actually approach this kind of creative thinking?

Seth 8:28

It is not that hard, but it's really difficult.

Sumantha 8:32

Yeah.

Seth 8:33

When I point out to people that every hotel room at two o'clock in the morning is dark and quiet, so therefore they're all the same. They go, yeah, of course. Now I understand why I wanna stay in a nicer hotel because it's the lobby and the status and the feeling and the peace of mind and all those other things. It's easy to see it when we talk about the Patagonia clothes or the microphone that we're using for our podcast or all the ways we are human when we make these choices, until it comes time for us to make something. And when it's time for us to make something, we're afraid of being criticized. We're afraid of being rejected. We're afraid of going outside the lines when we're coloring in the book. It's only fear that's keeping people from doing this. It's not a lack of insight. It's not selfishness, it's fear. So when we can adopt the smallest, viable audience, what's the fewest people? And you get to pick them, that if you had them, it would be enough. You get on a new hook, you get left off the old hook and you put yourself on a new hook. 'cause if I can't make this so that 50 parents would happily eagerly pay $10,000 for this, just 50, then I fail. Okay? But now you know who the 50 people are. 'cause you got to pick 'em. Go get to know those people. You don't need a focus group. You need empathy. You need to show up with practical empathy 'cause you don't have the money to buy a $10,000 course. But they do and they want to, but no one's offered it to them in a way that felt like it was worth $10,000.

Sumantha: 10:20

Yeah, I mean, you know this whole, when I first came across your concept of being remarkable, I did a bit of a deep dive and I read Purple Cow, and I remember when I first read it. My initial thought was, oh, there you go. My initial thought was, right, so that means I need a gimmick. And then I read your blog post and you said, well, no, because if you run down the street naked, people are gonna talk about it. That doesn't make what you offer remarkable worth talking about and of value to the people you wanna make it valuable too. And it took me a really long time of thinking about this for that light bulb moment. And I had it when I was listening to Rory Sutherland in a podcast, I think it was, and he said how he was telling the story of Unilever and how they were tasked to make instant soup, so they made it. It's in powder form. You boil the kettle ad hoc water, you've got instant soup. But there was one inventor who became really obsessed with the fact that, well, it's not instant if you have to wait for the kettle to boil. And he was the one who discovered or invented the instant hot water tap, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I'm thinking about your concept of being remarkable of connecting with other human beings is it's not focusing on the what. It's not focusing on that idea that everyone's gonna talk about. It's focusing on asking the right question and focusing on the right problem that you want to solve.

Seth: 11:42

I think we're gonna muddy the waters if we bring remarkable into the conversation about the hot water tap. So let's set that aside for a minute. Once you have a roof over your head enough to eat in healthcare, you don't need anything else. You just want stuff. And everyone who goes clothes shopping isn't naked, and everyone who goes to a restaurant has food in their house. So we get hung up on needs when we should be focusing on wants. The instant hot water tap is a brilliant invention for people who already have every other one of their problems solved, but they want to have a new problem to solve. When you go to someone's house who has an instant hot water tap, now your kitchen is broken and for the rest of your life, every time you go into your kitchen and you see the hole where the instant hot water tap should be, you feel bad. And you can solve that problem for 400 euros by going and buying an instant hot water tap. So people who seek that feeling and have those resources do so. The hard work was deciding that that non-existent problem was a problem you could create for people who were looking for a problem. And that's tension in. Intentionally causing tension, not stress. Stress is bad. Stress is wanting two things at once. I gotta go. I gotta stay. I can't be here. I have to be here. Stress tension is if I wanna shoot a rubber band across the room, I have to pull it backwards before I let it go. Tension is Taylor Swift. Tickets are going fast and it'll be sold out by tomorrow. Better hurry.

Seth: 13:19

One of the challenges that freelancers have. They don't wanna create tension. They wanna reduce tension. So they try to fit in all the way, but then they're surprised when no one shows up. You can't run across a skating rink wearing wet shoes. You'll slip and fall. You need blades to give you tension against the ice. And that's what we're doing here, is we're creating tension among people who don't have it yet about. This might not work about. I might be left behind about, I might not be good enough to be invited to this. We create tension that causes action.

Sumantha: 13:55

So when you talk about creating that tension. Are we tapping into a want that already exists or are we creating a desire, or is it a bit of both?

Seth: 14:03

If there aren't that many wants, there's, I want status, I want affiliation. I want the freedom from fear. That's pretty much it. So we are just giving new variations to how people can dance with those wants.

Sumantha: 14:18

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so. I mean, in this day and age, we are surrounded by messages that kind of get us on this treadmill of wanting more and doing more. And, you know, I should be publishing content here every single day. And there, and, you know, dancing on TikTok and something I, you know, I found your book The Dip, really impactful, the whole concept of knowing when to call it and knowing when to persevere. How, what's your advice? With the current kind of landscape for business, small business owners who feel quite overwhelmed with all the advice and all the shoulds, and how do you choose and how do you know what's really worth persevering with?

Seth: 14:59

You might be overwhelmed 'cause you wanna be overwhelmed. It feels safe to be overwhelmed, but you're not an unpaid intern for Mark Zuckerberg and you're not an unpaid intern for TikTok and following all the instructions about how you can win this magical lottery of attention. Is a trap. It's a trap people willingly lean into 'cause it makes 'em feel busy and safe at the same time. But if you do the math and you take a hard look, you see that some people have to win the social media lottery 'cause it's a lottery, but it's probably not gonna be you. And you're not gonna make up for not winning the lottery by hustling and hustling and hustling to answer every DM and to fall into this make-believe trap that you can somehow hard work your way into winning a lottery. You can't take a deep breath and do the scary thing, which is walk away from hopefully having a stranger bump in into you. 'cause they're not your friends and they're not your followers. It's just a hack. It's just a system that doesn't want you to succeed. What you could do is instead focus. Breathe and make magical, impactful work for the smallest viable audience. Full stop. Done. Because if you do that, they will tell the others.

Seth: 16:21

So I don't use TikTok or LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. I don't use any of those 'cause I don't wanna be distracted. And a wandering generality. Instead, I show up in one place and I give my readers something that they will benefit by sharing, they don't share it 'cause they like me. They share it because their status and affiliation will go up. So they are busy, thousands and thousands and thousands of times a day more than I ever could using social media to talk about what I just said. I'm not gifted at this. I just persistently and consistently and generously do it in a way that earned trust. But I'm not keeping track of how many people are reading my stuff. That's not what it's for. I'm keeping track of did I make an impact on that smallest viable audience? Was I of service? Would they miss me if I had missed a day? You get the chance to do that, and the only way you're gonna find time to do that is to turn off social media. Use it. If it's good for you, don't use it. If it's not, and you don't have to follow their algorithm, you don't work for them.

Sumantha: 17:32

What was, what was your thinking and why did you make a choice to, 'cause you've written your blog for well over 10 years, every single day. What, what inspired that to be your choice and the thing that you wanted to do to make your impact?

Seth: 17:46

Well, I would blog even if no one read it. 'cause it's better for my head. It's a useful practice. I just hit blog posts, 10,000. It's been 25 years. At some point it becomes a habit, a joy. But I will tell you this, when Twitter first arrived, I was one of the first media people to notice it. If I had gone on Twitter, I would have had a lot of traction and success there. But I said to myself, I remember having this meeting with myself. If you do that. Where are you gonna take the time? Where's the time to do that gonna come from? And what would happen is I would become mediocre at tweeting, blogging, and using Facebook as opposed to picking one thing and putting the time into it and getting good at it. And that's one of the arguments in the dip is that if you want to be a meaningful specific, as Zig Ziglar used to say. You can't also be a wandering generality.

Sumantha: 18:48

And in the dip, something that's very central is, I can't remember the exact wording, but it's about how the most successful people, they quit often. They quit without guilt. They know when to walk away. For someone who isn't an experienced thinker, along those lines, how would you advise them to make that judgment call? How do you know when it's time to to walk away and when it's time to go through the dip and persevere?

Seth: 19:14

Well, so Annie Duke says it's always better to quit too soon than quit too late. She used to be the World Poker Champion, so she knows what she's talking about. If you watch great poker players, they fold their cards early and often. But if you're always folding your cards, you're never gonna win anything. So what the dip says is find a path that someone before you, maybe many someones have made it through. So if you're thinking about being a doctor, every doctor gets to organic chemistry. So if you wanna be a doctor and organic chemistry is hard, the answer is good. Good. 'cause if I get through this, a whole bunch of people won't, and I'm much closer to being a doctor. Don't go try to do something that has never been done before. I hope someone puts in the effort to make a fusion reactor and save the planet, but you probably shouldn't do that. You should probably find a path where you say, if I do A, B, C, D, E, all the way to Zed, it's gonna work. And so when you get to T or you and it gets really hard, you can look outside and say, wait, these people, when they got the Z, it worked. I'm going through it. That's what a dip feels like.

Sumantha: 20:31

Yeah, and because I think that's probably one of the hardest things is knowing and having the confidence and the courage to actually walk away. Particularly when we are surrounded by so many, we are pulled in different directions. This person says, you must do this, and you must do that, or you won't be successful. And it's so difficult to walk away from that when you feel like, but they know better than me. And you know, I think that's such a big my, that's why I think that book's actually so important. It's short, it's sweet and it's important because now probably more than ever, we are surrounded by all of those messages constantly, I suppose, if we allow ourselves to be as well. And so I think, yeah, I think that's really good advice, really sage advice. I wanted to just, if you don't mind, just circle back, you know, the hotel room thing where we were talking about people looking for the cheapest thing. I wanted to just circle back to that because I made a note and I thought of something. Let's say that you, your audience are shopping around for the cheapest thing because there is this kind of mass consumer mindset. Even if you are not marketing to the masses, how do you start to cut through that noise and almost sort of have that wake up moment where your consumer is thinking, well, hang on, I'm I, I shouldn't be looking for the cheapest. I should be looking for the best solution for me.

Seth: 21:55

When someone tells you they're looking for something cheaper, the answer is Thank you. Thanks for telling me that this isn't for you. It is way better to apologize for a higher price once than to have to make excuses for bad quality a thousand times. And you have to be able to justify because people who wanna spend more aren't stupid. There are other people who are happy to sell 'em something that costs more. You have to justify why your more is worth it. But to somebody who isn't looking for that kind of more. Thank you. Thanks for letting me know, right, that if you go to Russe Re or wherever in Paris, and you go to a boutique, they have that little buzzer you have to press to get in the door. That little buzzer is really important because that's not what they do at Sephora. At Sephora, they don't even have a door at Sephora. It's if you're looking for a huge range of pretty cheap cosmetics. Come on in. At the fancy boutique, it's don't even buzz the buzzer unless you're hoping to go to a place that everything costs a lot. You'll pay a lot, but you get more than you pay for. If you can't articulate why they're gonna get more than they paid for, then you're just hustling people. But every single course at MIT is online for free and paying to go to MIT costs a quarter of a million US dollars. if someone goes to the MIT admissions office and said, why should I pay you a quarter of a million dollars? I can take all the courses for free. They will say, please take all the courses for free because the quarter million dollar option is not for you.

Sumantha: 23:36

Yeah, so it's really understanding that it's not about changing people's minds, it's about speaking to the right person and giving the right person and connecting with the right person, I suppose, essentially. And it makes a lot of sense. 'cause when I think of, you know, small business owners around me and things that I've seen, let's say they offer something that's quite expensive, it's maybe their one-to-one time. Often there's an application form rather than a button to just buy, which I suppose is kind of the equivalent of pressing the buzzer for the shop rather than just being able to walk in.

Seth: 24:07

Right. That's right. And it's very hard to sell one-to-one time at a premium because people don't know if it's gonna work until after they've paid you. And so again, we get back to this idea of remarkable. What would make it worth it for me to go pay a doctor a thousand dollars for a 30 minute consult is if a trusted friend said I did this and it changed my life. So if you're not changing people's lives. It's really hard to sell something as invisible as that, but if you are changing people's lives very soon there will be a line out the door.

Sumantha: 24:43

Yeah, and I suppose also a piece of that is not underestimating how important it is to really understand the people that you serve, truly understanding them because it's not necessarily a competition to be the best in the world. It's a, it's, you want to be the best person for that person with that specific problem. So you really have to take the time, rather than being on a conveyor belt, you have to take the time and connect with that person. Right.

Seth: 25:09

Exactly. You nailed it.

Sumantha: 25:12

There's something I wanted to, I made a note of this because I think it's a really practical takeaway. From your book, this is Marketing, you give three sentence starters to help people actually really start understanding their their market. And I wondered whether you wouldn't mind expanding on it a little bit. Your three sentence starters was, my product is for people who believe, fill in the blank. I will focus on people who want, and I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get. And then you fill in that blank. Would you mind for my listeners, just expanding on that just a little bit to give them something they can really move forwards with that's going to lead them down the right path?

Seth: 25:50

So what does it mean to believe something? Right? I'm here to help people who believe blank. Well, some people believe that hard work is its own reward. Some people believe that hard work should be avoided. Some people believe that hard work gets you various rewards, and some people believe hard work makes you a better person. Those are fundamentally different beliefs. So if you're busy trying to sell an online course. You better start with which one of those beliefs is someone coming after. So when you think about the CrossFit gym that proudly showed the blisters and bleeding hands of the people who went to the gym, that was very different than the gyms that were popular in New York where you could go in your work clothes and then just go straight to the office 'cause it wasn't much of a workout at all. Which one do you believe when you even show up? Then the want is, what is the change we are here to make? What change are we promising people? Because if you're not making a change happen, why do I need you? I've already got a stable world. So the change you seek to make, what is it? So for example, if I start by saying I believe that my job as a member of my family is to protect my family and to do adult things so that in the future I'll be glad I did. Okay. The change I seek to make is to relieve the fear I have that my house is going to burn down and will be left with nothing. So if I find people who have those beliefs and wants, I can then show up and say We sell certified government underwritten insurance with a no fine print policy that if your house burns down, we'll make it right. So it's a very simple thing. If someone is a renter or lives in a tent, they don't want what I have, right? If somebody is living for today and doesn't think that insurance for tomorrow matters, they don't want what I have, that's fine. I've gotta find the people who seek a change, who believe something that fits the change and promise I wanna make, and then I have to deliver it.

Sumantha: 27:51

And with the belief thing, something I wrote down is how people's perception is their reality. And it's so important to to remember that because, you know, I work in an education niche. We are educators. You, I mean, you're an educator and I think something that is very tempting is to say, I know better. I know best. And so you almost override what someone knows they want. And I think there's, it's a subtle but really important distinction between me saying, I know you need this and you knowing that you need this and actually what you think is more important than what I think.

Seth: 28:25

Okay, so we have to differentiate this a little bit. The teacher does know better, but not about what you want, but about how you could get what you want. So what do I want? I want the self-esteem that comes from being at the top of my class. I can't talk you outta that or into that, but what I can say is, I know better about how you can do well on this calculus test. That's why you're here. So we don't argue about enrollment. Enrollment is the emotional connection to a shared goal. If they're not enrolled, kick 'em out. If they're wasting your time, if they are enrolled, then all you have to do is leave breadcrumbs. 'cause they wanna go where you wanna take them. And that is when learning actually happens.

Sumantha: 29:12

Yeah. So Seth, I mean, I'm, I'm aware of time and I don't want to use up more of your time, and I want to just say a really big thank you because something I find whenever I listen to you. Even if you've spoken for half an hour, it takes me about a week to get through it. I keep, I keep, I have to, I have to take time to digest and this is one of those episodes where I'm, my brain is still working and I know that I'm gonna say bye and then think, oh, I should have asked that. But actually, I think everything you've shared is, is really valuable because something I'm sometimes tempted to do, and I know the people I work with is tempted to do is to, is to fast forward and gloss over some of the fundamentals, but those fundamentals, if we, and this is why I listen to you and I listen to Rory Sutherland every week. Because you keep my mind right. You stop me from fast forwarding and bypassing the stuff that's actually really important. And I think today everything that you've mentioned is such a valuable reminder in this day and age. Like it's so relevant right now. When we are being pulled in different directions, information is such a huge asset. You open YouTube, TikTok podcast, whatever it might be. But you've talked about the fundamentals, which I think are often not spoken about enough. We fast forward a little bit. So Seth, thank you so much for all your generosity today and for being here and for your time.

Seth: 30:43

Well, thank you for leading and for making a difference. It's sometimes easy to forget how much people count on our voices, lighting things up for them, and anybody who's doing that is okay in my book, so thank you.