The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Seth Godin — Coaching Tim on Overcoming Resistance, Lessons from Isaac Asimov, Writing Secrets After 8,500+ Daily Blog Posts, The Dangers of Authenticity, Practices for Consistency, and Much More (#728)

Please enjoy this transcript of my walk-and-talk interview with Seth Godin, author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work. His books have been translated into 38 languages and include Tribes, Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. Seth writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, and two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the altMBA; the social media pioneer Squidoo; and Yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies.

His new book is The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams. 

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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Tim Ferriss: All right. Here we are. So thank you again for taking the time. And the subject, I suppose, relates to time, attention, all these good things, which is how to make Tim Ferriss’ incredibly long-form writing shorter. Or how those two things fundamentally are different in terms of long and short. I texted you asking if there’s any secret sauce, any tips or tricks for writing short blog posts because I consider you the undisputed king of consistently good short blog posts, and that kind of uncorked all of this. So here we are.

And I suppose where I might want to start is with our initial text thread, and one of the points that at least as I read it, it seemed to resonate was treating blog posts more as a question than an answer or a provocation rather than a prescription. Could you expand on that a little bit? Because I think it relates also to the post that you so kindly proofread where I may have misinterpreted how best to think about that.

Seth Godin: I would be delighted to dive in. There’s so many places to start. I’m going to start with this. You are a gifted and generous writer and you have been since I began tracking what you do. And blogging is inherently a generous act because it’s hard in 2024 to justify it as a financial endeavor. You’re doing it to illuminate. And what does it mean to write in this form?

A short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway, probably not, “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.” Six words. It’s perfect. In six words, your heart breaks. That’s not scalable, practical, repeatable. You can’t sign up to write six-word short stories that break people’s hearts every day because that level of condensing, that level of being able to get at the heart, none of the words had more than seven letters. None of the words have more than two syllables. That’s magic, right? We can’t repeatedly do that.

So when we look at the form of a blog, we say, well, “Seth’s blog posts have 100 to 1,000 words in them. All I have to do is take my idea and make it shorter.” And when we try to do that, resistance kicks in, Pressfield’s resistance, and we say, “But I need to clarify this sentence and add a parenthetical to that sentence, or else I will be misunderstood.”

And so this first sentence in this paragraph, which is rich and detailed and recursive and layered goes like this, “Growth agents have a place in medicine, parentheses, some types of hypopituitarism, wasting syndromes/diseases, surgical care, et cetera, and some sports effectively require them at higher levels, but there are always trade-offs when you turn on the dials on complex hormonal cascades and feedback loops.”

Everything in that is true and someone could study that sentence in college for a month because there’s layers below layers below layers. And unfortunately, the blog reader in general is not ready to consume that level of condensation. And so we shouldn’t even try because that’s not what a blog is good at. What a blog is good at is what Scott McCloud taught us about comics. Scott McCloud’s book about comics, which is a must-read highlights the fact — 

Tim Ferriss: I’ve read it. Or Understanding Comics is the one that I read. I think he has — 

Seth Godin: Yes, Understanding Comics. Thank you. Yes. The key lesson is this. Comics work because something happens between the panels. In panel one, Superman sees a problem. In panel two, Superman is with the villain. We don’t see how Superman got from panel one to panel two. That happened in our brain.

And so the reason bad comics and bad graphic novels are bad is because the creator didn’t understand that. They didn’t let our brain do the leaping. They just decided to add a lot of pictures to a story that would be better in words. So what a blog post does is it says, “Here’s a sketch over here, and now I’m over there. You figure out how I got from here to there.” And by you figuring it out, the reader, you will grow, you will explore, you will be a voice in this dialogue. It is not just me talking.

And so when you asked me to review your writing, some people are tempted to proofread, and they don’t really mean proofread, they mean copyedit. And copyediting means fix the errors. What I’m trying to do when I’m editing a friend’s work is say, “Are they even asking the right question?” Because they can fix their own errors. They don’t need my help to do that.

And so here what I’m trying to say is what is this post for? And what it’s for, I think, is to help someone who’s not paying attention to realize that there are seven things they might want to think about. And seven is a lot. So what I pitched back to you is this is actually seven blog posts in a series. And what the first one says is, “There’s some things you’re not thinking about that you might want to think about. Here’s one of them.”

And the idea, if I just say to somebody, “Biceps are temporary, baseball helmet sizes are forever,” they visualize that immediately and then they’re like, “Hmm, what?” And then they want to think about what you meant by that. It’s a haiku. It’s a puzzle. It’s a shadow. Where is the light and what is being reflected?

So now you’ve gotten permission to tell me in a paragraph or two what you meant and then you get to say, “Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun,” and I say, “Dun, dun.” And that is the form. That is what blogs are good at, but, and I’m going to end my rant now, the downside is you will be misunderstood. And that is why there are no comments on my blog because people who misunderstood a post would then respond by making me feel bad, so I would overwrite and overwrite so they wouldn’t do that anymore, and then it wasn’t a blog anymore. So I had to stop. And basically, what I’m saying is if you don’t get it, ask a friend. And if they don’t get it either, come back tomorrow and we can discuss a new thing.

And I think the king of this is actually the magic of xkcd, which is a blog in graphic form.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s outstanding. I agree on that. And as you’re talking, a few things come to mind for me. And maybe as a backdrop, the impetus for a lot of this, for me at least, is number one, to get back into writing and to experiment with a new form, a new style, a new approach to writing. And number two is to explore ideas. To explore ideas in various ways to clarify my own thinking, which ended up happening in this short piece, the “No Biological Free Lunch” piece that you proofread.

I suppose my question, not copyedited, which is certainly a very different thing, in this particular case, if you were writing this, would you be inclined to make it a series or would you make each of these a standalone piece? In other words, of those seven bullets, as you’re thinking through not just the word count, this is my mistake, basically said, “Okay, instead of writing a 5,000-word blog post, I’m going to make it less than 1,000, but I’m going to try to still somehow get all of the concepts into this shorter form.” Seems like there’s a conceptual constraint that makes things powerful. But would you take those seven, make them into an interrelated series? Would you make them all kind of independent after you introduce them in this one piece? How would you think about divvying this up conceptually for yourself?

Seth Godin: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: I should also just add one more thing, which is fundamental to all of these observations and questions and goals and dreams of mine is how do I make this sustainable for me? Which is part of the feedback you gave in the comments on the draft of this blog post was, I’m paraphrasing, but “If you try to just make a 5,000-word thing 1,000 words, it’s going to be exhausting for you and most likely also exhausting for your listeners,” which I agree with.

Seth Godin: It’s about genre. My blog is a long-running series. It has been a series of 8,500 daily posts. So if I was starting today, I have to figure out what is the genre of my work. If you think about David Letterman’s TV show, he needed to have a series called “Stupid Pet Tricks.” Because the show wasn’t stupid pet tricks, but there was a regular recurring stupid pet trick. The show was a series of David Letterman shows.

And so if your genre, as you re-enter blogging, is there is a post from Tim on a regular basis and all of them are about the things we put into our body and performance, then you’re fine. If that’s not the case, then the question is when the reader shows up, do you need to do a lot of throat-clearing to get them back on track for what you are writing about today? And so since you’re starting with largely a blank slate, I said, “Well, if the first seven of these are in this series, then you only have to clear your throat once on the eighth day and say, ‘Okay, now we’re talking about this,’ and you could do one of those or six of those or 12 of those.” But people do better if they understand that they’re going to see Dune, not read The Power Broker. Those are different genres and you need to give them a hint as to what they’re going to get.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. I like the idea of recognizing that my tendency is to — how should I be generous with myself? Be comprehensive. Just going to say over-complicated, but let’s be nice. Try to be comprehensive. As we talked about earlier, I’m walking by tennis courts right now and I remember taking a tennis lesson and I kept hitting the ball into the net and the coach said to me, he’s like, “You can do anything now. Next step, you can hit the ball straight up in the air, you can hit a home run. The one thing you cannot do is hit it into the net.” I was like, “Okay, I got it.” And I kind of feel like I need to give myself some marching orders like that for writing to counterbalance some of my tendencies.

So I like the idea of writing self-sustaining, independent pieces to restrict myself from the desire to say, “You know what? I’m not going to overwrite this, but it’s going to be part one in a 12-part series,” which is maybe a workaround for tricking myself.

Seth Godin: Okay. So I’m going to interrupt you for a little bit.

Tim Ferriss: Please do.

Seth Godin: You are extraordinarily skilled at not over-complicating your writing or your narratives. That’s how you got this far. There’s very little that you have published where you were the primary researcher and the breakthrough creator of the original science. What you’ve done is helped people simplify, understand. What’s happening here is resistance. You are adding parentheticals to protect yourself.

Tim Ferriss: Hundred percent.

Seth Godin: So what I’m pushing you to do is to come up with boundaries so that you can say, “I did a good job,” and ship the work. Now, that could involve having very, like the rules of haiku, very significant rules where you must have a tagline, a come-on line that’s less than 18 words, and you are allowed to have two footnote links, but the rest of it has to be a narrative that you would say to somebody on the telephone. And instead of typing them, you are just recording each one and letting someone on your team type them.

If that would be the model, you would have to let go of it because you only have a five-minute phone call, you’re going to say it as clearly as you can, you can add two links when you’re done, and it’s done, you got to ship it, right?

Tim Ferriss: Yep.

Seth Godin: But that’s not letting the reader down because you’ve announced to them that that’s what this is. The genre matters.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. I asked you one question related to how you know when you’re done, and I’d love for you to answer that again because I suspect I’ll have some follow-up questions, and either before or after that, I would love to know for yourself what type of rules you have imposed or constraints/boundaries when you have had your better streaks of writing, let’s just say.

Seth Godin: All right. Well, I’ll do the first part first because it’s easier. You asked, “How do you decide or know when a post is done?” And I texted back, “I don’t. That’s the point.” And then I wrote, “Imagine how hard it would be to have a conversation or even a text thread if we had to think through whether our turn to talk was over before we stopped talking.” Right?

So my ritual is I write blog posts in advance and then the night before I review them, I rewrite them, I delete them, and so if I get the stomach flu, there’s still going to be a blog post tomorrow. And when I rewrite a blog post, the rule is you get points if you make it shorter. You don’t get points if you make it longer. And if I can’t boil it down more than it already is, and it’s not deliberately deceptive, it’s done. Because the purpose is to tell people something they already sort of know in a way that they would be grateful for the chance to forward to other people.

Tim Ferriss: Could you say it one more time, Seth? That seems important.

Seth Godin: Right. If I can show up with something in your bones you know to be true or interesting or worth thinking about, but I can say it in a way that would benefit you if you could share it with your friends and colleagues, that’s a great blog post.

Tim Ferriss: Benefit you in what possible senses, if you don’t mind — 

Seth Godin: Sure.

Tim Ferriss: — just indulging me.

Seth Godin: I’ll give you a trivial one first, which is more than once I have blogged about how stupid it is that there’s a pull-down menu when you’re checking out of a shop and there’s all 50 states listed. That isn’t helping anybody. We have AI that can speak English. It knows how to turn NY into New York. And we do this because 40 years ago or whenever the web was young, 25 years ago, it was a hack that made life slightly easier for certain programmers and it’s just been sticking around ever since.

There are people like me it really vexes, and if I say this and you are one of those vexing people, now you can forward it to your webmaster and say, “See. See, I said we shouldn’t do this.” And so I just gave you a useful thing to share. That’s trivial, but that’s sort of the idea is that if you have a brother or a son or a colleague or a daughter or a sister who would benefit from the insight that you think I’m onto, you’re going to forward it to them and you’re going to have a connection with them because I opened the door and made it possible for you to do that.

Every once in a while I do post something about Claude AI that you didn’t know about, and you go, “Oh, great. I use Claude. Thank you very much.” But that’s not really the service my blog offers. The service my blog offers is not I’m breaking news. It’s I am trying to illuminate things that already resonate with people.

Tim Ferriss: Not to add too many parentheticals to this conversation, but what is Claude AI?

Seth Godin: Claude AI — I can’t believe I know something you don’t know. Claude AI is significantly better than ChatGPT at certain functions. And I think part of it is because it doesn’t read the web or it says it doesn’t read the web, so it’s not easily distracted. But I’m launching a software project in six weeks and the business plan took more than a year and a whole bunch of contributors. It’s 40 pages long. And I uploaded the business plan to Claude and I said, “Please review this. Highlight contradictions, paradoxes, and obvious errors.” And in less than 10 seconds it wrote me a page-and-a-half MBA-quality memo that nailed it. It just nailed it, nailed it, nailed it. And I was like, “Okay, you got me. That’s great. That’s great.”

So I use Claude AI every day to read other people’s writing, my writing, critique it, give me insight. You could send your post to Claude and it might not have the insight I had, but it would definitely have something to say.

Tim Ferriss: Incredible. All right. In parentheses. What are some other elements or practices or constraints or fill-in-the-blank that have helped you with consistency in terms of blog writing? Because I have attempted and failed a number of times to build up momentum writing shorter posts. And I think a lot of what we’ve already discussed will help. Is there anything else that you would add to the it-helped-my-consistency-streak category?

Seth Godin: Well, I would say two things. First, I think you’re talking about consistency in terms of showing up at the ballpark every day.

Tim Ferriss: Cadence. Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Seth Godin: So I’ll do that one second. The first one, I have never met Larry David, but I’m guessing that there are some days that Larry David is actually a nice, thoughtful person. And there is a character named Larry David as well. So the person who writes my blog is a character named Seth Godin. And I am the only person who has ever written my blog. I’m the only person who ever will write my blog, but when I am doing it, I am playing the character named Seth Godin. And so if it doesn’t sound like me, if it’s just me authentically being tired or annoyed, I don’t publish those because that’s not what my character would do. This is not me exposing some mystical, mythical Seth Godin to the world. It’s me portraying the character Seth Godin because it’s a service.

And then the second thing is streaks are usually used against us by software. And if they make you feel bad, it’s not a helpful thing. But I write blog posts every single day whether I use them or not. And I learned that from Isaac Asimov when I worked with him all those years ago. If you know that tomorrow morning you have to start typing, tonight when you go to sleep or today when you’re walking around, you will be noticing things so that you have something to type. And I have enough in reserve that I don’t have to do it every day, but I do it every day because I eat lunch every day and because I take a shower every day.

Tim Ferriss: Few follow-ups. So the first is related to the playing the character of Seth Godin. It sounds like, if I heard you correctly, you’re saying your writing should reflect how you feel in the world at the time that you’re writing. Am I hearing that correctly? I know you’ve talked about — 

Seth Godin: No.

Tim Ferriss: No.

Seth Godin: It’s the opposite of that.

Tim Ferriss: It’s the opposite.

Seth Godin: There’s no should here, first of all. If someone wants to write a blog that’s just the unvarnished version of them in the moment, go for it. I don’t care. I’m not the blog police.

What I’m saying is I can read a blog post I wrote 14 years ago, and I might not write the same one today, but it rhymes with the one I would write today because there is a voice that this character has that I’m very comfortable with. And I did the first thing that all writers do when I got ChatGPT, which is I asked it to write like me, and I was pleased to discover it was a parody of me. And being able to be parodied is a really good sign, and that’s what it is to have this voice is to say — I could exaggerate it in six different directions and people could tell I would be parodying it. But like the Peanuts comic strip, Charles Schulz did it every single day, and it’s very hard to tell which decade a Peanuts strip is from.

Tim Ferriss: Totally.

Seth Godin: And that’s what I’m after.

Tim Ferriss: So just to unpack that a little bit more, I know we’ve talked before, or I should say I’ve asked and listened to you discuss how authenticity is — the authenticity fetishizing, it goes on, is often, not always, but often very misplaced and just kind of over-values this over-sharing. What are the things that make Seth the character, Seth the character? Is it 80 percent voice that you’ve developed such that ChatGPT can imitate you and parody you? What are the other ingredients that make Seth the character who writes on Seth’s Blog?

Seth Godin: I’ve not ever pushed myself to name them because seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees, but I guess I’d highlight a couple things. The first one is I try to begin from a place of the benefit of the doubt of there probably aren’t bad people, there’s just situations that cause people to do things that are troubling, and a level of optimism to go with it.

I try to reduce ideas to their essence without becoming hyperbolic because the voices of social media amped up the hyperbolic part. That’s not a simplification. That’s an exaggeration.

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Seth Godin: I try to eliminate parentheticals unless I really have no choice. So I will avoid saying something like, “All tall people are very brave,” because that’s ridiculous. But I will not write, “Tall people are brave, parentheses, except for this person, this person, this person, and this person,” because now it’s not worth reading. So there’s an assertion at the beginning that creates a tension, and then a release of that tension that lands an idea.

So the shortest blog post I ever wrote, which I’m really proud of, is first line is, “You don’t need more time.” So that’s an assertion. It’s controversial. People who feel overwhelmed want to challenge it, and then the delivery is, “You just need to decide.” So that flips it upside down, takes the blame off the system and the people who are making you busy, and puts it right back on you, giving you agency and authority and responsibility to simply decide, and then get back to what needs to get done.

And so in just a few words, that’s an example of a short Seth Godin blog post. And a longer one is one where I will try to teach somebody details about something they didn’t know, but frame it in a way that they’re comfortable with because that’s how they might’ve framed it as well.

Tim Ferriss: Let me ask a quick question, and maybe that I’ve cut back on my caffeine too significantly, but “You don’t need more time, you just need to decide.” What are people deciding?

Seth Godin: Well, folks who say, “I’m going to figure out which college I want to apply to soon. I just need to do more research. I just need to think about it.” Right?

Tim Ferriss: I got it. Right.

Seth Godin: Right? So — 

Tim Ferriss: Close the open lips, get it done, make a decision.

Seth Godin: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That makes a lot of sense.

All right, the other bookmarks, follow-up I had, and I’m sure I’ve asked you this, so I apologize, but I can’t remember the answer if we have discussed it, what are some other things you picked up from Isaac Asimov? This guy’s a demigod. At least a lot of people would consider him one. What are other things you absorbed or observed with Isaac?

Seth Godin: Isaac was in his 70s. I was 24 and a half, maybe 25. It was one of my first projects. It was one of his last ones. And we would hang out at his apartment near Lincoln Center and I got to spend time with his wife.

The thing about Isaac Asimov is the character of Isaac Asimov was a know-it-all egomaniac for the time. Today he would be seen as humble, but he published 400 books. He invented the modern conception of a robot. He wrote seminal work on an enormous number of topics, a definitive book about the Bible, I mean, all over the place. But in person, he was humble and funny. And as a project partner, he was completely hands-off. He spent time with me to make sure I understood the boundaries of what an Isaac Asimov project was. And then he said, “Go for it.” And he didn’t micromanage a thing because he trusted me and my understanding of where the robots universe could go, and it spoiled me because I thought that was going to happen again and again and again.

I got Stanley Kaplan into the test prep book business, and it took seven years, and by the time we published the book, Stanley was long gone from the project because he had sold the company, but talk about micromanaging with a well-known name. So on one end of the spectrum was Isaac Asimov and the other one was Stanley Kaplan. Go figure.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Your story about Asimov makes me think a little bit of Rick Rubin, where right out of the gate, L.L. Cool J, Beastie Boys, he’s like, “Oh, this is easy. This is how it works. Fantastic.”

What was the project that you were working with Isaac on?

Seth Godin: Okay. So before DVDs, lots of people had VCRs and — 

Tim Ferriss: Yes, I remember.

Seth Godin: — a company called Parker Brothers took their board game Clue and they made it into a VCR game, and it was dumb, and it sold more than a million copies at $40 each.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Good for them.

Seth Godin: And so Peter Olotka, the greatest game designer of his generation, and I, invented a murder mystery game you could play on your VCR. And so there was a movie shot with real union actors in a set New York City. It lasted 38 minutes, and took place on another planet, about robots and murder and detectives. And six times during the short film, a screen came up and said, “Hit the pause button and play a card.” So you would hit pause and you had a stack of six cards, and each card had two sides. And you would throw a card down and it would be a clue, like, “There are no fingerprints on the gun,” which might mean it was a robot because robots don’t have fingerprints. And on the other side of the card it said, “There were fingerprints on the gun,” so now you know it’s not a robot.

So it turned out that two to the power of six is 156 or whatever, and if you added up the code numbers on the top of each card you played, it told you which page in the answer booklet had the answer to that thread through the game. So you could play the game hundreds of times and it would be a different outcome each time. And we sold the rights to Kodak and Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up and advertised it on the Olympics, like the full thing. It was fascinating.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Where were you in your career that that opportunity presented itself or you found that opportunity? What had led up to that outside of what you just described?

Seth Godin: So before I did that, I had only one real job, and my job was at Spinnaker Software. We invented educational computer games and I built the first brand of illustrated computer adventure games. I worked with Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton. I got rights to games. I worked with Byron Preiss. He had a team of programmers and I had a team of programmers. We did The Wizard of Oz, and I loved it. I could still be doing it to this day. But the world changed and I was out on my own after a couple years as a book packager. But Peter and I knew each other, and the momentum from the interactive game thing led me to Isaac’s editor, and no one had ever asked for the rights. The rights weren’t expensive. And then once I had the rights, I found Kodak and Kodak was able to put up the money so we could build this thing and own part of the back end.

Tim Ferriss: So if I zoom out, I have a macro level question for you, which has been on my mind a lot, if you don’t mind, which is a question of how you choose next chapters in projects because I’m coming up on the 10th anniversary of the podcast next April, so in a few months, and figured that would be a good time as any to pause and reflect on things and think about where I want to go. Love doing the podcast, don’t plan on stopping it. But there are a lot of trends driving it towards effectively turning podcasts into fixed-location television shows. And I don’t have much desire to do that. I don’t want to be contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian. That’s its own trap or set of traps. But I know you’ve been very deliberate, for instance, in choosing not to start a dozen startups and in favor of choosing to spend your time on other things.

How do you choose or think about next chapters or what advice might you give me as I contemplate the what’s next type of question?

Seth Godin: I think it’s very kind of you to say I’m very good at it. I don’t think I’m good at it, but because I’m sort of in public and I do it in a certain way, it’s noted. I did five years of Akimbo. It was in the top one percent of all podcasts, and then I just stopped. And I stopped not because I didn’t love it, I did love it, I stopped because if I kept doing it, there’s something else I wouldn’t do instead. And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum. But if I just keep doing the thing, then there is no vacuum.

And sometimes the technology changes. That’s why Spinnaker went away. That’s why you couldn’t keep making VCR games. It’s why my head start in the CD-ROM business was worthless, because CD-ROMs went away. I liked, in every time I did this, being a pioneer in a new media space because that’s, for me, the funnest spot. And then when the technology changes, I’ve got to move on. But podcast technology is never going to change. I mean, you’re noting there’s a change in the production format, and that is a change.

So in my case, what I’m trying to do is not maximize my income per hours spent, nor am I trying to maximize the size of my audience. What I’m trying to maximize is are the people I’m serving glad that I did, that I showed up to solve an interesting problem? And two, as I build the stack of things on the bookshelf behind me, can I point to them and say, “That was interesting and generous and I’m glad I did it?” And that’s part of a limited attention span theater, so it’s not for everybody, but my whole point of view is that life is projects — it is not a job.

Tim Ferriss: And when you stopped the podcast and created that vacuum, did you already have something kind of warming up in the batting cage that was pending that you need to create that vacuum for? Or did you create the vacuum and then wait for something to get pulled into it?

Seth Godin: Right. So if there’s — 

Tim Ferriss: Not to strain the metaphor, but you get the idea.

Seth Godin: No, you’re not straining it. If there’s something pending, it’s not a vacuum. There have been times when something so good came along, I did it and then had to remove things so I could do it.

When a few of us started Squidoo, which was one of the first social networks, I had to completely reorganize my life because we built the 40th biggest website in the US with only eight employees, and so we were busy. This is not what I’m talking about. I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you’re never going to work again, where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up, and that’s hard to do.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it is hard to do. So just to put a microscope on that I have, as means of backstory, done this for periods of time and have found it deeply, deeply uncomfortable, sometimes fruitful, oftentimes not terribly fruitful. In part, I think because when I create that vacuum, I don’t know if the best way to embrace the vacuum is to basically just stare at the wall and watch paint dry or do something else, and my mind just kind of folds in on itself.

What are you doing? You create the vacuum. And then what do the next few weeks look like in terms of how you spend your time day-to-day or week-to-week?

Seth Godin: I think a fundamental difference between you and me, there are so many of them, but one of them as I am here talking to, what, the world tango champion?

Tim Ferriss: Former world record holder long time ago, but yes.

Seth Godin: The only thing I have a world record in is being part of the largest co-author book signing in history, in which me and 400 other people all signed our book at the same time. Because I am not a high performer. I am interesting. And being interesting is really important to me, but I am not holding myself to the standard you hold yourself in so many ways. And so I could imagine that the thing that gives me comfort might not make you happy.

Tim Ferriss: Right. For sure. So I agree with all of that. And how does that difference translate to what you would do in the weeks following creating the vacuum after, say, stopping the podcast? Because I guess you have activities that you’re still carrying forward. It’s not like you’re completely idle, you’re writing still, presumably.

Seth Godin: Oh yes. If someone looked at me from the outside, I think that that they would see that my days aren’t that different. I’m not shipping public work because I don’t ship junk, but I am internally creating lots of mediocre work and basically creating straw people and saying, “What would this be like? And then what would that be like? And here’s this thing. And I sat with my 60 or 80-watt laser cutter and I cut this thing out. What do I think of that?” And that invention cycle is joyful, but I can’t do it forever because I also need the satisfaction of shipping the work and not giving in to resistance.

When I was a book packager, we sold 120 books in 10 years, a book a month, but I had more than 800 books on my hard drive ready to go, not finished, but two-page, five-page proposals. Because the only way to have a finished proposal for me is to have an unfinished one that you didn’t ship.

Tim Ferriss: What is it, and this is probably a fundamental question I should have asked earlier, but what do you get from writing and having written as consistently as you have been doing? What is the payoff? Why do that?

Seth Godin: Okay. So the biggest payoff is simple, not in terms of equity, stock value, but in terms of the noise in my head. The biggest benefit is I will be writing tomorrow because it’s Friday, not because I’ve written the perfect blog post. That every single day, something gets published by me because I decided that 24 years ago, not because I have reconsidered each day whether this one is good enough. And even if no one read my blog, I would still do it. And I’m very fortunate that people give me the benefit of the doubt, knowing that I am not guaranteeing this is the best thing I ever wrote, and they’re still willing to look at it. So that’s lovely.

In terms of my professional practice, again, back to genre, having a sinecure, a platform where — for a long time if you typed blog into Google, I was the first match because I just showed up more than just about anybody. There’s a lot of value to saying, “This is my lane and you can count on me in this lane.” And for someone who is as peripatetic as I in their creative pursuits, having one of those turned out to be a really useful thing.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned a word that I don’t recognize, but I love the sound of, sinecure. What is that?

Seth Godin: Yeah. It’s a safe haven, a niche, a place to hide, a fortress.

Tim Ferriss: What a great word. All right. Mental note to use sinecure. Well, I don’t want to take up a ton of time here, Seth. This is all incredibly, incredibly helpful.

Seth Godin: Best part of my day. And I know that you’re not publishing this as written, but I just want to say for the people who were wondering what’s in this magical thing you wrote, it includes the line, “Like Patagonian toothfish has become Chilean sea bass on fashionable menus worldwide.” Right there. That’s gold, Jerry. That’s just gold. And so you need to liberate these things and explain to people what the — I know what you’re talking about, but the fact is that entire species are becoming extinct because somebody figured out a clever way to market an animal that we eat. There’s a lot to be said about that one little riff, and you have 40 of them in one post.

Tim Ferriss: Thanks, man. Yeah, the “No Biological Free Lunch.” It’s one of those things that I’ve said so many times to friends in conversation and I was finally like, “You know what? If not for any other reason than I am tired of repeating this Gettysburg Address speech to every wayward friend who calls me up about to consume really potent drugs.”

Seth Godin: Yes. I have some of those. If you go to seths.blog and type “advice for authors,” there are two posts with the same title because I wasn’t being clear, that I wrote a year and a half apart, and they have each like a dozen or 15 bullet points. And now I have a sig in Superhuman that I can call up when someone sends me a note, a friend or whatever, I can say, “Oh, I’ve already thought about this question. Here you go.”

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I love it.