Seth Godin [00:00:00]:
I have never written a book that got the kind of heartfelt response that this one has gotten. I've also not in a long time written a book that bookstores stocked as little as this one.

Cory Ames [00:00:14]:
Yes. We need to make a living. But how do we make a life? It might not be simply about the money. When the world is in turmoil, when our health is at risk in the future, seems murky. Perhaps paychecks and productivity simply aren't enough. Perhaps we can't manage our way into the future. What if we created the best job someone ever had? What if we built an organization people would genuinely miss if it were gone? What if the work we did made things better? Mozart, not Muzak. This is the song of significance.

Cory Ames [00:01:07]:
This interview with Seth Godin, author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work, is about how we in business can do better, how we need to do better. In 2023, Seth published this very important book, The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto Cory Teams, which was an urgent call to action for us to all rethink Cory, management and leadership, both in how it's all practiced and what it's all even for. Seth has influenced an incredible many in business and marketing, myself included. And I believe he has long already been a champion for embedding meaning into the work we do. To make something people remark on, you must push yourself to make something remarkable. The focus isn't on attracting customers, but rather on building community around what you and your organization stand for. Trust and transactions aren't best bought, but rather built and earned through servicing what people need. This book, however, takes a much broader look at business, explains the rather dangerous pathway we are on, but in simple yet profound maxims in short stories offers us a pathway forward.

Cory Ames [00:02:27]:
In this conversation, Seth and I discuss the perceived problems at hand with business, business culture, and work, and sort through the various nuances of remedying those issues to create a better, more meaningful future. Specifically, we explore how industrialization has bred a race to the bottom culture in business where it's margins, not meaning or service fueling the engines of our marketplace. We explore how we need new entrepreneurial idols and what mainstream business misses about the Henry Fords, Elon Musks, and Zuckerbergs of the world. And most importantly, Seth shares how we can do work worth doing both for ourselves and our communities. We'll start with Seth explaining why significance felt like a song worth singing or book urgently needing writing in the first place.

Seth Godin [00:03:29]:
The book before that, which I organized but did not write, is The Carbon Almanac with 300 volunteers in 40 countries. It was truly, from the heart. None of us got paid. It was 10 hours a day for me for a year and a half and it helped me see just what a mess we've made of so many things and it also reminded me of what's possible. And I really and truly was done writing books the traditional way. You can reach way more people with a video or a LinkedIn course or even a blog post than you can with a book, and a book takes a long time to bring to the world. But when I saw what was happening in the world, quiet quitting, billionaires firing disabled people just for fun online, the side effects and the trauma of so many things we're racing to do in the name of shareholder value. It just occurred to me that I had a position.

Seth Godin [00:04:30]:
I'm super lucky in some of the things that have worked out for me and in the privilege I was born with to be able to say, Wait a second. What is work even for? And beyond that, to take the lessons I learned from the almanac about enrollment and participation and leading instead of managing. And I felt like there was a rant there that I needed to share before I lost the ability to type and, so it was worth it and it has really resonated with people. I'm glad I made it.

Cory Ames [00:05:02]:
Well, and, and with me as well. So, so I'll, I'll thank you, personally, Seth. But what you talk about in this book is, is clearly, a big problem, an existential problem with with, like you said, how we we see work, perhaps what we think work is for. And you mentioned a few specific Cory surface level problems, perhaps symptoms of a greater problem, but many of our listeners here, myself included, are really interested in being part of pushing business culture to be better. Defining better is is pretty important first and foremost, but I'd love if you could articulate a bit. What is the the problem that that you feel like you noticed? Because I think proper issue spotting is really important for the sake of appropriately addressing a problem. If you wouldn't mind just sharing a little bit more about what you saw as as the greater systemic issue that we're facing.

Seth Godin [00:05:56]:
In the 19 tens, a 100 and 15 years ago, 2 important things happened. The first thing is that spindletop in Texas, was a gusher that created an economy that was based on oil. And second, Henry Ford met Frederick Taylor. Frederick Taylor had a stopwatch. Henry Ford had an assembly line. And when they came together, they understood that humans could be a resource, a machine to be tuned and measured and jerked around. And when we combine those 2, we get the engine of our wealth, that we've spent a 110 years industrializing processes, figuring out how to make things more efficient and giving bosses such an easy out, which is did you make profits go up? If you made profits go up, you did a good job. And it worked great for a long time.

Seth Godin [00:06:45]:
It enabled billions of people to have a job and to be fed and created enormous amounts of value. But the incremental value that can be created by these methods is now going away or gone, that we can't get more cheap oil and we can't use the stopwatch to get people to go any faster and making the factory any more productive is harder and harder to do. So Ames a result, industrialism is sputtering and instead what's taking its place is community and connection and the change we seek to make. What people are paying for is not a little bit extra for this widget or that widget. What they're paying for is an experience and the way it makes them feel. And I think it's important to differentiate between working in an industrial way, but adding window dressing to it, so it feels sustainable, making sure there's free snacks or carbon offset versus actually choosing to do significant work because they're different.

Cory Ames [00:07:53]:
I I absolutely agree with you, and I've thought about this before. It's like perhaps going green with our cars, but not switching out the internal combustion engine. You know, everything on the outside, the interior, the the the paint job, whatever we, you know, wanna look at on the exterior lens. It's not necessarily changing what we value. It's just changing the way in which things might look or appear or or be perceived. And and you mentioned Henry Ford there for 1. This is something I wanted to bring up, because I I thought you made a couple interesting references to what are perhaps idolized entrepreneurial figures, Henry Ford being one of those. You make a nice little nod in in in saying that, he was given awards by by Hitler and Stalin.

Cory Ames [00:08:45]:
And then you call Elon Musk at one point a raider. I'm interested to know perhaps what do you think we're getting wrong or not seeing or missing about who are perceived these these idols, in the entrepreneurial, field of play?

Seth Godin [00:09:04]:
Ford's contribution to productivity cannot be diminished. Not only did he make the price of a car go down by more than 50%, which is astonishing if you think about it, but he also created a whole middle class of working people because he realized that he had a competitive advantage in his productivity, so he could pay his engineers and his, assembly line people far more than his competitors and that would put his competitors into a big jam because they wouldn't be able to compete with him. He was also a noted antisemite and we could go on and on about Henry Ford's personal foibles. But if I fast forward to our desire to turn Jack Welch or Elon Musk into a hero, I think that that is a holdover from the days when industrial guts and bravery could really change things. And I think that being a troll and showing up simply to create controversy, simply to, you know, punch people in the face because you can, I don't think humanity has room for that, and it doesn't matter that you did important work in promoting the idea of the electric car? That was inevitable but essential. Thank you for doing it, but that doesn't explain why you need to be a troll now. I don't think I don't have room in my day for

Cory Ames [00:10:27]:
trolls. Well, and I I think it's it seems to be worth interrogating what are the values that are underneath the actions. And so you, you, you bring up Henry Ford as an example, and, and of course, more personal foibles in his ideology, aside, he paid workers more for the sake of a competitive advantage. Did he pay workers more because he necessarily thought that that was the right moral and ethical thing to do? I don't know. I mean, you create a middle class in Detroit, and then once workers gain enough strength and power and organization with the growth of unions, the automotive industry, Ford included, moved from Detroit, hollowed out that city, and moved south. And then ultimately further south to Mexico and, and further beyond that. But so I think there's nuance in this, which is pretty important. And this is was a point.

Cory Ames [00:11:20]:
Well, I agree with with so much of the book in in in the book, you know, 99.9%. I thought there's nuance in a few phrases that I was interested to hear Mhmm. What you thought. So right on page 1, and I'll I'll just make sure I I I get it right, you mentioned or you use this phrase, you know, we can do well and do better. And then, later on into the book, you mentioned that supporting human dignity is more than a moral obligation. It's also a competitive advantage. I I I question that a little bit because I'm not sure that it exactly communicates what might be our most important switch or alteration in our values. Yeah.

Cory Ames [00:12:02]:
Decoupling doing well. And I and, you know, you didn't interpret this further, so it's up to the reader to interpret, but I think well with some sort of financial achievement or business success and maybe a conventional thought on that. And then the other one, I'd flip those 2, supporting human dignity. That's the primary reason. Know, it's a competitive advantage, but it's more than that. It's a moral obligation. And so I'm curious what what you think about my interpretation, if I missed it for, you know, for 1, if if That's a great point. Perhaps that's not what you're communicating, but I'm interested what what you might think about that.

Seth Godin [00:12:38]:
So I know a little bit about marketing and marketing informs the way that I try to help people express their ideas. If you show up and say to somebody you're wrong, the next sentence out of your mouth is a really hard sentence to sell. If you show up and say to somebody, you're right, it's a lot easier to help them get to the next step that they want to get to. What we live in is a world where the indoctrination of the last 100 years includes every person who is alive and listening to this today. From the time we were 1 or 2 years old we've been indoctrinated in a system that is based on consumption and convenience and compliance, and when you say to somebody who is a leader, a manager, who has a job, who needs to make a paycheck. If you say to them, well, what we really need to do is change everything, switch to a utopian ideal and do this and this because that's really important, it doesn't land. The people who have already, who have been willing to hear that have already heard it and it's going to bounce off of everybody else. And so what I'm saying to folks is if you wanted to be, for example, to pick a specific, if you want to be in the clothing business and what you're gonna do is go overseas, get the cheapest clothes with the most side effects you can and sell them as cheap as you can, you're not going to make a living doing that because someone's willing to go lower than you.

Seth Godin [00:14:12]:
Someone's willing to cut more corners than you, but if you want to race to the top, and I think that the folks at Patagonia have tried to do that, it turns out that you can do better, do well, and point to what you did and say the reason that people are paying extra for this is because they get more than an article of clothing, that we've offered them something more than that. So we have to do this dance and the same thing is true on the climate front. As long as the systems are built in one way and what it's gonna take for you to pay the rent, what it's going to take for you to get funding, what it's going to take for you to have a transaction with someone, as long as those are still here, what we can do is ratchet up and say and the system is going to reward you for also acting like the good human being you are, And so, that is why I wrote it in that order. Personally, I happen to think it should go in the other order and I try to live my life that way, but none of us are perfect, because we're all living in a system that's rewarding something else. And as long as that's true, as long as we need to feed billions of people, there's going to be things we have to do that didn't work in the Garden of Eden, because we're doing a different thing now. And what we're doing now is living in an industrial world, but trying to be mindful about it. I don't think we're doing a great job of that, but I'm trying to to amplify the conversation.

Cory Ames [00:15:43]:
After a quick break, Seth further explains the concept of significance. The results of asking 10,000 people across 90 countries to describe the conditions at the best job they ever had and how all these ideas apply Cory don't at scale. We'll be right back. Intrepid Travel is the world's largest travel b corp, and its mission is to create positive change through the joy of travel. With more than 950 small group trips on every continent, Intrepid creates that change by taking travelers on soul defining, life changing adventures that give back to the communities they visit. Traveling with Intrepid, you can explore the greatest icon of ancient South America, Machu Picchu, on a guided tour. Or you can see Vietnam through an exciting mix of transport, including motorbike, Sampan, junk style boat, bus, and train. Intrepid Travel offers small group travel that's good all over.

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Cory Ames [00:18:15]:
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Cory Ames [00:19:00]:
Start thinking differently. Start seeing differently. Start living and working more sustainably. Again, to get that free email series, go to growensembledotcom backslash 7.

Seth Godin [00:19:15]:
If you ask somebody about the best job they ever had, they will not talk about the fact that they got paid a lot, that they got to tell other people what to do, that they worked for a fancy company. What they will tell people, what they will tell you is they accomplished more than they thought they could and they did work that mattered and they got treated with respect. That's universal. 90 countries, I talk to people about this one question. So what do we do when we are doing significant work? We are making a change happen. We are not simply tallying things up on a clipboard that a computer could do. We are not simply pressing the button on the assembly line. We are not simply following the manual.

Seth Godin [00:19:58]:
Those are things that were invented by industrialists to improve productivity. And so my thesis is now that that is hitting a dead end, the alternative is to say, let's get AI to do any job that I AI can do and leave human jobs for humans, which is really hard, not because of the AI part, but because humans have been indoctrinated to want to have deniability, and it's astonishing how far this will go. It is astonishing how far a teacher will push to turn everything, not all teachers, one that's under pressure to turn everything into rote, that people will follow a recipe to the gram before they will innovate and change an ingredient. And for Ames, significance has nothing to do with, are you going to be on the cover of Do Gooder magazine? It has to do with, did you, within the job you have, see another human being and make a change in that other human being's day that they would have missed if you didn't do it. And it turns out when you do that, whether you're a barista or a volunteer at a hospital or digging ditches, when you do those things, your days are better.

Cory Ames [00:21:14]:
Certainly so. And I I I think that is a is a good segue to another line I really enjoyed from the book where you say, it's possible for an organization to sell food, build software, teach pottery making, or so so close. It's not about what we make, it's about how we choose to make it. And and so I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about that how. Like what you know, what's the mindset? What's the approach? What's the strategy? How is how is that necessarily different under this lens of pursuing significance above all?

Seth Godin [00:21:47]:
Okay. So I I don't know, where you live or if you like, Indian food, but there's a food called papad. If you have one, it's called papadam and it's this crunchy lentil rice cracker. It's delicious. It's extremely inexpensive. Almost all the papad we can get in the United States comes from one company in India. It has a picture on the cover of a woman with a rabbit and it's hard to discern what it is, but now that I said it, you'll recognize it. They have 10,000 employees and every single one of them turns out to be female, and they have built this efficient institution on the idea that people who have been overlooked can learn to do something that creates value in the community.

Seth Godin [00:22:34]:
Right down the street at the Aravind Eye Hospital, you can get cataract surgery to restore your eyesight for one of 2 prices, $135 or free. It's up to you. You get exactly the same surgery, and it turns out that Aravind has done this eye surgery on more people than live in Detroit, Chicago, and New York put together. The infection rate is lower than it is at a fancy hospital in London. So in both cases, we have productivity, but in both cases, we have institutions that have decided to see other people and create a pathway for them to create generative value. And my friend Sean Askinuzzi has a chocolate company in Missouri. Now the thing is, we could probably live not quite as happily, but we could live without bean to bar chocolate. I, for 1, have so much bean to bar chocolate in my office If you ever come over, you can have a bar, but, Sean, the reason I don't have a chocolate company is because Sean is a better person than me when it comes to running a company.

Seth Godin [00:23:39]:
Sean visits every farmer in the Philippines, Tanzania, and a couple other countries that grow his beans personally every year. He pays them 5 times the going rate. He puts their kids to private school. He has open book management and on and on and on, And yet, Askinozi does well enough that they can do it again tomorrow. And his motto is it's not about the chocolate. It's about the chocolate. And what that means is you have to make a product that is valuable enough for other people to happily buy it, But you also have to look at how you make it, why you make it, who you make it with so you can point to it and say, I don't have to apologize for this. I can be proud of this.

Cory Ames [00:24:25]:
I think that's really important. It's it's almost redefining what we consider a great bar of chocolate. Or as I've recently done a lot of research on coffee, likewise, the same thing. That's kind of what I'm going through is how do we expand or broaden our definition as to to what that means? But, you know, this this you give some examples there, both with the the example in India and and your friend. But all throughout the book, you you describe significance as not being something particularly convenient or easy. And I can't help but feel that that's almost by definition a contradiction to to scale of some kind.

Seth Godin [00:25:08]:
Right. Exactly.

Cory Ames [00:25:09]:
And so those are examples of perhaps that being done at a at a wider range. But how is that done, and should that even be a focus? Because there is a little bit in the space of of business and like impact focused business, environmentally and socially driven business where there's a question that comes up and and how it is that you scale your impact.

Seth Godin [00:25:29]:
Yeah.

Cory Ames [00:25:30]:
And perhaps the validity of what your business idea is is not there. If there's not some idea that you don't you can't feed everyone in the world, you know, you're only just feeding folks in your community, how might we think differently about scale or or perhaps, I don't know, not think about it at all as it relates to this idea of significance?

Seth Godin [00:25:50]:
So scale is tricky. We don't have a music shortage. There is more music available to more people than ever before by a lot. But there is not any song, not one that is even close to selling what Boston's first album sold or what Hootie and the Blowfish's first album sold Cory even what the Beatles album sold. None. Not one has scale like that. So, I think the metaphor that's useful is to say, we need to scale the idea, but we don't need to scale your organization, that when we change systems, it's systems that scale, not organizations that scale. The Internet, the biggest it ever got was Facebook or Google, but that's not the Internet.

Seth Godin [00:26:42]:
Turns out WordPress powers 30 to 40 percent of it because there's so many people doing a little thing. And now that there isn't a dramatic efficiency from industrialism, the efficiency comes from the network effect. What are people like us doing? How do we connect with other people? So yeah, there are really challenging issues of scale, particularly when we think about carbon and food, that the idea, the people who say that regenerative agriculture enables livestock to happen, I don't agree that we need to get rid of cows because cows are at a scale that cannot be sustained, period, and it doesn't matter what you come up with. The math just doesn't work out. So maybe you could run a farm that could grow that could raise 500 head of cattle in a sustainable way, but that's not a scalable idea that can be stolen and spread because the system itself is inherently inefficient and cannot be made to work. On the other hand, if you can figure out how to make test tube meat for $200 a pound and you publish your recipe, other people will figure out how to do it for a 100 a pound and then I'll get it down and down and down. That's a scalable idea, whereas taking old school industrial high carbon things and just doing them a little bit, that's a that's a bigger challenge.

Cory Ames [00:28:13]:
I it that's interesting. I I don't know. I because I wrestle with this quite a bit, likewise, with the topic of regenerative agriculture. Because in in the principles of regenerative agriculture, things are highly dependent on the the local situation.

Seth Godin [00:28:27]:
Right.

Cory Ames [00:28:27]:
How we're going to run a regenerative ranch in San Antonio, Texas, where I am is different than California and and wherever else. And so it's likewise this inherent contradiction that exists or, you know, this this paradox where we say, yeah, let's you know, how do we scale regenerative agriculture? I'm like, I think that's missing the point. I can't I can't help but feel frustrated with that,

Seth Godin [00:28:50]:
in in Well, no. I see let me just since you bring it up, there's a fine point here. And it it the the book, The Wizard and the Prophet is must read for anyone who cares about this. It's a brilliant book. It's a great audiobook. It's easy to read and it will help you see how we got to where we got. The wizard, and I'm sorry, I forgot both guys Ames. The wizard was the person who pushed forward high yield, intensively fertilized farming that fed a 1000000000 people.

Seth Godin [00:29:21]:
He won a Nobel Prize for it. More people were fed by the Green Revolution than any other innovation. It is the opposite of regenerative agriculture. He basically sucked all the carbon out of the topsoil in order to do this. The prophet was the father of the environmental movement and his whole mindset was, there are way too many people on Earth and we need to be in sync with the Earth, and that leads us to an idea of regenerative agriculture. Is there a middle ground? Yeah, I think we're seeing it all the time, that it turns out, for example, if you build a kale, indoor kale farm on the outskirts of San Antonio using solar panels and recycling the water, You can grow kale indoors 5, 6 harvests a year and because you got rid of all the trucks that are needed to drive it across the country and everything else, it has this huge positive output. You can't possibly build enough kale facilities on your own to feed people worldwide, but once we establish that it can be done, the ideas will be stolen, taken, borrowed, amplified. So one of the companies I wrote about in the book is a greenhouse company, and they sell a really, really, really cheap greenhouse, like a greenhouse that costs less than Taylor Swift concert tickets, and this greenhouse can be set up in places where right now you can't grow anything, or if you can grow something, you can't grow it very well and increase the yield for that small land whole farmer by a factor of a 100.

Seth Godin [00:31:00]:
Well, that sort of systems change is where regeneration can take us.

Cory Ames [00:31:08]:
And I'm with you. I think that there's this little bit of nuance between the, like, the the heroism. That's a little bit of I can change the world, and therefore, so does the execution of my idea as opposed to being like Yeah. It's okay that I feed this corner of San Antonio, Texas.

Seth Godin [00:31:28]:
Right.

Cory Ames [00:31:28]:
But I'm happy to essentially open source Right. What it is that I do with the rest of the world. Because, exactly Ames we brought up the examples earlier, Henry Ford, you know, Elon Musk, whatever, if we wanna continue with Zuckerberg, whatever, there is some idea that they're more than human, almost. And, yeah, I I think what both in the paradox of the significance topic that you discussed too is is exactly this thing is that by kind of by changing the world, it almost feels as if we must accept that no individual person is going to do that alone. But there are ways in which we can, you know, advance this network effect and and work together and collaborate that, yes, we all together can affect changing the world.

Seth Godin [00:32:13]:
Yes, exactly right. So so one one little aside that helps put a if the old system, the system of convenience, industrialism, price, 1 person, again, names escape me right now, one person invented leaded gas and Freon gas. He did more damage to the surface of the earth than any single individual. He didn't do it on purpose, but leaded gas, when you show up at an industrial setting, say, here's an idea. He didn't get a royalty on every gallon of leaded gas, But once it became clear that adding lead to gas made, cars run, quote, better, it spread like crazy because the system could embrace that Freon gas. Once it Ames clear that you can make an efficient air conditioner that allows people to become more productive in lots of places in the world. Once people know that the idea, again, spreads. What we're trying to do now is do the opposite, bring ideas like that that do the opposite to a system that knows what to do with them.

Cory Ames [00:33:17]:
And so, at the the individual level, as we've talked about so many of the difficulties living in the prevailing system in which we do, there is so much of a current headed away from significance.

Seth Godin [00:33:32]:
Right.

Cory Ames [00:33:33]:
And I I kind of liken it to, you know, we already brought up the the example of the classroom. It's like the the teachers wanting to cultivate a true passion for creativity, curiosity, and and learning experiences versus the demand and need to teach to the test. Mhmm. So there there's so much momentum, driving us towards those achievements. And not only that, in our system as it is, we are still rewarded for those achievements. Perhaps we get into prestigious schools or whatever it is and so on. What might you offer the individual who is is at this constant fork between significance and not? What might you offer them to to help inspire them or empower them to to kind of swim upstream Yeah. So to speak?

Seth Godin [00:34:23]:
You nailed it, Cory. This is where the gears mesh or grind us, one or the other, that we are trying to change a system and the thing is systems almost always change in locally connected communities with individuals who care. They almost never change from the central, call it top down, even though it's not the top, that we don't issue an edict and everyone follows. It's when everyone starts doing things that the edicts come out and, you know, we're going to see a really massive crash in famous and near famous colleges in the next 10 years. They're just gonna start going bankrupt. Harvard and Princeton will never go bankrupt. They have enough money in the bank to send 50 times as many people to those institutions for free forever. That's not, they're not in trouble, but the people of the level below that and the level below that that are putting folks a quarter of a $1,000,000 in debt, People are going to wake up one day and they're going to say, not for me, and so there's going to be this shift.

Seth Godin [00:35:29]:
There are teachers. I know them who have taught kids to lead and to engage instead of saying how do I make sure that they're just teaching to the test, even though parents are pushing them to teach to the test. So there's friction and there's pushback every time we do this, but it's always happening every time when one person connects 5 people and 10 people and say people like us do things like this, then who says I'm going over here, who wants to come? That is what leadership is. It's not management, it's leadership. And so what I'm arguing Cory, what I'm ranting about is don't wait for the system to change. Start changing the system, particularly when it's uncomfortable. It will take longer than you think. Publish your work, take responsibility, point out what isn't working, so people don't make the same mistake.

Seth Godin [00:36:18]:
We don't admit our mistakes nearly enough and repeat it. And if we do it and do it and do it, it starts to change the system. And I'll give you one last example and then I'll give you the microphone back. Why aren't leaf blowers banned? Right? We're not gonna get a presidential order to ban gas leaf blowers, but the evidence about leaf blowers from the people who have to use them mostly, not mostly, some of whom are undocumented and being taken advantage of all the way up to the, what happens to the people who aren't using them, but who live on earth. It's obvious we have a replacement that's easy, cheap, quiet, ready to go. And yet your little town, wherever you live hasn't banned them yet. Do you know how many people it takes to ban leaf blowers in a little town? 30. If you can organize 30 people, you can ban leaf blowers in your town.

Seth Godin [00:37:13]:
If you ban leaf blowers in your town, the system will begin to change and that system's change is what's needed. If you want to become privately a vegetarian, I think that's great, but I'm way more interested if you can get your high school to stop serving hamburgers at lunch.

Cory Ames [00:37:30]:
And so, I mean, with, with that face of the, you know, the Goliaths, especially in the industrial notion of the the Amazon's, Google's, whomever, it is it does seem like we're up against some sort of insurmountable opponent. But but what what you allude to there is that both at the individual level and thinking about systemic change, it seems it's in our organization. And like you said, kind of raising our hand and say, hey, I'm into this kind of stuff. You know, who else is perhaps? And as well as you described throughout the book, it's not that that won't take some courage without a doubt. And so, Seth, this is all layered throughout this conversation already, and likewise, throughout the book and just even in the concept of significance. But I want to more directly ask you a bigger question because these are the types of questions that our listeners here are interested in the show. What do you see as the purpose of business? Like, why does it exist in the 1st place? And second on that, I'm curious, has that understanding for you changed over the course of your own career?

Seth Godin [00:38:47]:
I grew up in, Buffalo, New York, right down the street from Love Canal. Love Canal was the 1st Superfund site in the United States and the people at Hooker Chemical who ended up causing untold amounts of physical damage to babies and to their parents, said, well, I was just doing my job. Milton Friedman said my job was to make the stock price go up, that my job is to increase shareholder value. And sure, maybe we cut some corners and dumped toxic waste in a giant field and didn't tell anybody, but hey, that's, you know, we got to feed our kids. That's what we do. And, I was lucky enough to grow up in a home where that wasn't the kind of thing that we were raised to do. And it feels to me like corporations are fictional. People are real and we create these fictional organizations to enable people to get to where they seek to go.

Seth Godin [00:39:47]:
Where do we seek to go? Well, we start by saying we need a roof, we need healthcare, and we need food. But everyone who's listening to this has all three of those things. So, what are you going to do now? And it only became socially acceptable to be a titan of industry who could happily fire disabled people online for kicks fairly recently. And before that the culture said, you know, things are like around here, what things are like around here is we take care of each other. What things are like around here is we don't dump toxic waste in the Love Canal. And what things are like around here is if you see someone who needs your help, you give it to them and we don't have to be seduced by the Ayn Randian nonsense that isn't based on fact. It's just an easy shortcut for some people who don't wanna think through the repercussions of what they do. So what is business for? Business is to help human And anything above that, like making people who are in an investment bank rich, I don't think that's what business is for.

Seth Godin [00:40:56]:
It might be a side effect of doing the other thing, but that's not the purpose.

Cory Ames [00:41:02]:
Certainly. And I think what what's really important about what you're suggesting here is that it's interesting how people can act in ways that seem contrary to their stated ideology in familiar company Cory perhaps in their own neighborhood, in their community face to face Mhmm. As opposed to an online persona, you know, for 1, or just, you know, what they think they believe. People are extremely generous, you know, and and and willing to help out a neighbor almost irrationally from an outside perspective. But, you know, put it in the the political dialogue or whatever that, if we can even call it that, a discourse of of a Twitter or whatever it is, those just don't match up. And so it's it's interesting because you think that this online world feels real, especially it has all the sensations and stimulations, you know, of our primal beings to to make us feel that way. But if you get out into the world and really connect with people and find a way to speak and connect in such a way to where, you know, it's it's resonant no matter what it is the the person's stated political party or ideology. I think that will surprise ourselves.

Seth Godin [00:42:12]:
I know it's brilliant. You know, I need to be clear. I'm a hypocrite, and I've never met anyone who's not a hypocrite. That's not what's being discussed. What's being discussed is in our moments of leverage, are we doing something that might lead to systems change? Because it's systems change that is what we have to do. If we need everyone to be on their best behavior at all times for the world to work, it's never gonna work. But if there are systems in place that help people achieve the better angels of their nature, then it's way more likely to happen. So we need to take a hard look at the systems that push us in one direction or another.

Seth Godin [00:42:57]:
And, you know, just to pick one more controversial topic to talk about, the challenge in the short run of things like cryptocurrency is it creates a system in the short run that is less lawful because the people who are gonna embrace it first are the people who are gonna use it to break the rules. And so we need to think about how are we gonna build new systems that have built into them, things that will replace the old systems for the better, not help us race to the bottom.

Cory Ames [00:43:30]:
Certainly. I I I think that many of those things inform our narratives of if, you know, whether we believe people are inherently good or inherently bad, cynical Cory selfish or generous Cory or altruistic, it's worth interrogating the level deeper as to to what are the circumstances and and situations at play that make us act in such ways. Because I thoroughly believe people are good, want to be good, and and hope to to do good, but that enough of the resistance or whatever it might be that exists in the world, making rent Cory, you know, just social pressures, all those things together affect the way in which we we really see our neighbors, you know, our. Yeah.

Seth Godin [00:44:11]:
I mean, you know, the American The dilemma that the dilemma that Mark Zuckerberg had was, a year into Facebook, you could change the algorithm so that you would get popular by being nice Cory you can get popular by being a jerk and you can say, well, I had no choice because if I didn't do what people really want, then someone would have taken my place Or you could say, you know what? I have this leverage moment where I can change a system, where people are gonna do what they get rewarded for. And, you know, all you have to do is look up a recipe on the Internet. Every recipe on the Internet is formatted the same way. Why are they formatted in that ridiculous way? Because Google rewarded it a long time ago and kept rewarding it. So, yes, you can change the way everyone talks about food just by changing the algorithm. Well, most of us aren't running Facebook or Google, but we have our own systems. Who are we hiring? Who we giving, the benefit of the doubt to? Which resume gets somebody an interview? And we have unseen systems that we could change if we could just see him first.

Cory Ames [00:45:21]:
And so, Seth, you mentioned throughout the book that, things that can be easily measured and quantified might not necessarily be as valuable. And so in the context of business, if it's not necessarily our profit and loss statement that we're looking at to measure whether our business is successful or not? You know, what what what do we seek to to look out for? What what are the measures of success for for business given this current context?

Seth Godin [00:45:52]:
Well, I think false proxies are a real danger. If it's easy to measure, we tend to measure it Cory, and many companies talk about profit and loss, but most of their decisions aren't based on profit and loss because they're not in the highest margin business, etcetera, etcetera. They're based on what will please my boss, what will please the board, what will get me a good story, whatever it is. And these false proxies, when they get to the worker level of, you know, how many calls did you take per hour? Well, that's easy to measure. What's harder to measure is how many people did you talk to in customer service today who went on to tell 3 friends and thus transformed our position in the marketplace. That's hard to measure, but way more important than how many calls did you take. And we have false proxies around cast and we have false proxies around personality, etcetera, and figuring out where the false proxies are. You know, the people who like you online don't really like you.

Seth Godin [00:46:45]:
The people who are your friends online aren't really your friends, but it's super easy to measure that little number. What would happen if that little number didn't appear when you look at a YouTube video or someone online? Would you think of them differently? Because isn't that interesting that you decide a video is more worth watching if a 1000000000 people have already seen it before? I'm not sure we want that to be the proxy that we use.

Cory Ames [00:47:12]:
And and perhaps one final question for you, Seth. I'm wondering because you have certainly been influential to so many through your your books and your work over the course of your career. Some of those folks have themselves pretty notable or significant, you know, personal platforms and audiences through which they they speak to tons and tons of entrepreneurs of of different scales and sizes. And so I'm curious, with this book, The Song of Significance, how did you feel it was received, and did you feel like, you know, if any of those folks read it, did you feel like they got it, what you were trying to communicate and say? I Maybe it wasn't for them, but I'm I'm I'm interested. What do you feel like the reception has been from The Song of Significance?

Seth Godin [00:48:05]:
Well, I can't I don't know which people you're talking about, so I'm just going to pretend that I do. Sure. I have never written a book that got the kind of heartfelt response that this one has gotten. I've also not in a long time written a book that, bookstores stocked as little as this one, because something is happening to the book industry and also this one doesn't naturally line up with any section of the bookstore or my previous work. So, I didn't write the book to chop down trees and sell as many copies as possible. I wrote the book because when I hear from somebody and I see how it changed them, I don't need a lot of those people. I'm not writing for the largest possible audience. I'm writing for the smallest viable audience.

Seth Godin [00:48:56]:
What I have found is that people like my friends, Marie Forleo or Tim Ferris, it got under their skin. And that's all we can hope for, that a book will sit with us and that we will share it with somebody else. And I've been lucky enough to do a 100 of these podcasts with people like you, and to talk to someone like you who thought about it so deeply, some pages more deeply than I did, it's thrilling. And so that makes it worth it. So thank you.

Cory Ames [00:49:26]:
Wonderful. Well, with that, Seth, I think we'll wrap up. Thank you so much for for taking the time. I I really, really appreciate it.

Seth Godin [00:49:33]:
Well, a pleasure. Keep making it a ruckus, Corey.

Cory Ames [00:49:36]:
Seth's book and our conversation brought to my attention this very difficult, pervasive contradiction. In business and work, we are seemingly forced, obviously encouraged, to act a particular way. We should be driven by competition, winning, speed, scale, progress, productivity, aggression even, with little mind to the costs. We should do things people will pay for, not necessarily what people or we value. In our personal lives, we seek to act another way. We might hope to be infinitely generous, present, and attentive with the people we love. No keeping score, less concern for efficiency, or cutting margins because we know in those margins are the moments we live our lives for. Chasing a squealing toddler around the house to get them clothes for preschool when you needed to leave 10 minutes ago, staying up all night talking and laughing, exhausted for work the next day when you first fall in love, wandering when you travel because you know the best stuff isn't always easily seen.

Cory Ames [00:50:51]:
Sure. There's balance in all things. We can't live our whole lives as if we had just 1 year to live. But how much of our humanity, how much of the humanity of those we lead, manage, employ, and service, might we defer or deny for the sake of our economies? Frankly, I fear the newer doctrine now that we can do well by doing good, that sustainable, ethical, and responsible business is good because it's good business, isn't going to get us anywhere new. It's just a cleaner coat of paint still appealing to that same ugly contradiction. We do the right thing because it's the right thing for business, not because it's the right thing. To me, all this feels like a dam that has long been waiting to burst. A multi generational contradiction forced to work one way, talk one way, while craving to live another.

Cory Ames [00:52:00]:
Don't get me wrong, there is a basic human need to be Or for whom? We can take the path to pursue even greater efficiency in our work and continue to encourage a broader business culture to do the Ames. Cheaper, faster, Cory. Or we can take the path to pursue humanity in our work and invite others along with us to mold businesses, culture, and purpose anew. How long will we continue to appeal to that contradiction? That part of us apparently motivated by returns, wealth, status, fear, insecurity, and control. What is in it for me? Versus our calling to be our best individual and collective selves to see creativity, build community, contribute, and find fulfillment. I don't know about you, but I am exhausted with that contradiction. I want change. I don't want or need another Dale Carnegie explaining the only moral thing he could possibly do was to give away his entire fortune before he died for the sake of the public good.

Cory Ames [00:53:26]:
When he built that fortune off the back of his relentless undermining it. I'd rather he had just paid better wages. I don't want the Patagonia CEO saying, if you're serious about the climate crisis and this is your business, you've got to develop a level of comfort with contradiction. Get out of the business or change the business because that individual comfort with destructive contradiction becomes a collective burden to bear. Hope for all of us, we change, we refuse to get any more comfortable with these contradictions so that when the time comes, we can confidently answer this question, where the lives we lived, the things and organizations we created, were they a success Cory were they significant? Alright, y'all. That's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Seth Godin. If you did, then you'll love my newsletter, the weekly ensemble, where each week with thousands of social entrepreneurs and change makers from all across the globe, I explore the art of living and working sustainably.

Cory Ames [00:54:51]:
Go to growensemble.com backslash newsletter to get the next one in your inbox. And lastly, don't forget to sign up for my free 7 day email series, 7 days to living and working more sustainably. You can do so by going to growensemble.com backslash 7. Each day for 1 week, I'll send you a short essay that explores this art of living and working more sustainably to help you get started.