Seth Godin's Blog, page 107

Spectator sports

Every year, we spend more than a trillion dollars worth of time and attention on organized spectator sports.

The half-life of a sporting event is incredibly short. Far more people are still talking about the Godfather movie or the Nixon administration than care about the 1973 World Series.

Billions of people buying tickets and investing countless hours on something of absolutely no significance.

It turns out that this insignificance and the ephemeral nature of sporting events is the heart of their appeal.

Instead of having passionate arguments about things that matter, issues with consequences, topics where one can be wrong or right, organized sports are a tribal opportunity to vent without remorse.

We've taken that pleasure in insignificance and transferred it to celebrity culture as well. And then on to just about everything else, including science and governance.

Hence the challenge--because when we start to treat things of significance as if they're a spectator sport, we all lose.

Soccer hooligans are a real problem. But hooligans in science (yelling about their opinions, denigrating their opponents) or in world affairs do none of us any good.

            

Anxiety loves company

Somehow, at least in our culture, we find relief when others are anxious too.

So we spread our anxiety, stoking it in other people, looking for solace in the fear in their eyes.

And thanks to the media, to the microphone we each have, to our hyper-connected culture, it's easier than ever to spread our anxiety if we choose. And when someone who seeks power offers to hear our anxiety in exchange for attention or a vote, it gets even worse.

It's worth noting that there's no correlation between the real world and anxiety. In fact, it's probably the opposite--when times are good, people with a lot to lose start to get that itch.

Absorb the anxiety if you wish, spread it if you must, but understand that it's an invention, and it's optional.

            

Looking for the trick

When you find a trick, a shortcut, a hack that gets you from here to there without a lot of sweat or risk, it's really quite rewarding. So much so that many successful people are hooked on the trick, always looking for the next one.

SEO, for example, had plenty of tricks as it evolved, ways in which a few worked to get rankings and links without deserving them.

Or consider the act of publishing a book. One approach is to spend a lot of time and money tricking the system into believing your book is already successful, which, the trick says, will lead to it becoming actually successful. 

Or the simple trick to avoid belly fat, lose weight, get a promotion, find dates or make money overnight.

I could list a thousand of them, because the web is trick central, a place where, for a short while, the people apparently at the top of whatever heap you aspire to got there by finding and exploiting a trick.

There's a meta-trick that's far more reliable. One that works over time and doesn't depend on avoiding being out-tricked: Make great stuff. Satisfy needs. Do the hard work that leads to growth which leads to investment on its own merit.

It turns out that the trick-free approach is the best trick of all.

 

            

Skills vs. talents

If you can learn it, it's a skill.

If it's important, but innate, it's a talent.

The thing is, almost everything that matters is a skill. If even one person is able to learn it, if even one person is able to use effort and training to get good at something, it's a skill.

It's entirely possible that some skills are easier for talented people to learn. It's entirely possible you don't want to expend the energy and dedicate the effort to learn that next skill.

But realizing that it's a skill is incredibly empowering and opens the door of possibility.

What are you going to learn next?

            

For the weekend...

New podcast with Brian Koppelman

Classic podcast with Krista Tippett

Unmistakable Creative from 2015

And a video of Creative Mornings and their podcast

The Your Turn book continues to spread. Have you seen it yet?

Early-bird pricing on the huge Titan collection ends in 9 days.

            

Widespread confusion about what it takes to be strong

Sometimes we confuse strength with:

Loudness
Brusqueness
An inability to listen
A resistance to seeing the world as it is
An unwillingness to compromise small things to accomplish big ones
Fast talking
Bullying
External unflappability
Callousness
Lying
Policies instead of judgment
...and being a jerk.

Well, once you put it that way, it's pretty clear that none of these things are actually signs of strength.

In fact, they are symptoms of brittleness, of insecurity and of a willful disconnect from the things that matter.

Individuals, organizations, brands and leaders all have a chance to be strong. And can just easily choose to be jerks.

Because it is a choice, isn't it?

I think it's up to us not to get them confused, and to accidentally trust the wrong behaviors or the wrong people.

Strength begins with unwavering resilience, not brittle aggression.

            

Big fish in a little pond

There's no doubt that the big fish gets respect, more attention and more than its fair share of business as a result.

The hard part of being a big fish in a little pond isn't about being the right fish. It's about finding the right pond.

Too often, we're attracted to a marketplace (a pond) that's huge and enticing, but being a big fish there is just too difficult to pull off with the resources at hand.

It makes more sense to get better at finding the right pond, at setting aside our hubris and confidence and instead settling for a pond where we can do great work, make a difference, and yes, be a big fish.

When in doubt, then, don't worry so much about the size of the fish. Focus instead on the size of your pond.

            

Three things to keep in mind about your reputation

Your reputation has as much impact on your life as what you actually do.
Early assumptions about you are sticky and are difficult to change.
The single best way to maintain your reputation is to do things you're proud of. Gaming goes only so far.

In a connection economy, what other people think about you, their expectations of you, the promises they believe you make—this is your brand. It's easy to imagine that good work is its own reward, but good work is only of maximum value when people get your reputation right, and they usually get that from others, not directly from you.

It's logical, then, to care about how your reputation is formed. But it's dangerous, I think, to decide that it's worth spending a lot of time gaming the system, to consistently work hard to make your reputation better than you actually are.

There is one exception: The most important step you can take when entering a new circle, a new field or a new network is to take vivid steps to establish a reputation. This is the new kid who stands up to a bully the first day of school, or a musician who holds off on a first single until she's got something to say. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but what most people do is make no impression at all.

That reputation needs to be one you can live with for the long haul, because you'll need to.

As the social networks make it more and more difficult for people to have a significant gap between reputation and reality (hence gossip), the single best strategy appears to be as you are, or more accurately, to live the life you've taught people to expect from you.

Your reputation isn't merely based on your work, it's often the result of biases and expectations that existed before you even showed up. That's not fair but it's certainly true. Now that we see that the structures exist, each of us has the ability to over-invest in activities and behaviors that maximize how we'll be seen by others before we arrive.

Be your reputation, early and often, and you're more likely to have a reputation you're glad to own.

            

Understanding taxonomy

If you need to add a word to the dictionary, it's pretty clear where it goes. The dictionary is a handy reminder of how taxonomies work. The words aren't sorted by length, or frequency or date of first usage. They're sorted by how they're spelled. This makes it easy to find and organize.

The alphabet is an arbitrary taxonomy, without a lot of wisdom built in (are the letters in that order because of the song?).

It's way more useful to consider taxonomies that are based on content or usage.

Almost everything we understand is sorted into some sort of taxonomy. Foods, for example: we understand intuitively that chard is close to spinach, not chicken, even though the first two letters are the same.

The taxonomy of food helps you figure out what to eat next, because you understand what might be a replacement for what's not available.

Shopify has more in common with Udemy (both tech startups) than it does with the Bank of Canada (both based in Ottawa).

Your job, if you want to explain a field, if you want to understand it, if you want to change it, is to begin with the taxonomy of how it's explained and understood.

Once you understand a taxonomy, you've got a chance to re-organize it in a way that is even more useful.

Too often, we get lazy and put unrelated bullet points next to each other, or organize in order of invention. For example, we teach high school biology before (and separate from) chemistry, even though you can't understand biology without chemistry (and you can certainly understand chemistry without biology). We do this because we started working on biology thousands of years before we got smart about chemistry, and the order stuck.

The reason an entrepreneur needs a taxonomy is that she can find the holes, and figure out how to fill them.

And a teacher needs one, because creating a mental model is the critical first step in understanding how the world works.

If you can't build a taxonomy for your area of expertise, then you're not an expert in it.

            

The opposite of the freeloader problem

Is the freegiver advantage.

Freeloaders, of course, are people who take more than they give, drains on the system.

But the opposite, the opposite is magical. These are the people who feed the community first, who give before taking, who figure out how to always give a little more than they take.

What happens to a community filled with freegivers?

Ironically, every member of that community comes out ahead.