Seth Godin | A New Manifesto for Teams
42:56 Share

Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with author and business thinker, Seth Godin. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash talks at google.

Seth Godin has published over 20 best-selling books that have been translated into nearly 40 languages. He's the founder of the Alt-MBA and the Akimbo Workshops, which have been taken by more than 60,000 people. He hosts a podcast, also called Akimbo, and has five TED Talks. Seth joins Google to talk about his book, The Song of Significance, a new manifesto for teams. The book contemplates all things work,

why it is the way it is, why it's gotten so bad, and what all of us, especially leaders, can do to make it better. Originally published in June 2023, here is Seth Godin, a new manifesto for Teams.

Welcome, Seth. How are you doing? Thank you for having me, Jenny. Talking to you about your work and your project, it's been so thrilling, and I'm glad for all the people who are spending time with us today. So it's fun. Thanks. Yes, it is indeed. Well, let's talk about your work and your project. You surveyed 100,000 people in 90 countries and asked them, what makes the best job ever? What rose to the top?

Okay, so the first thing is if you ask bosses I gave people 14 choices who knows how many people saw the survey but 10,000 of them answered it and I gave Them 14 choices. I picked the ones that bosses think are important. I got paid a lot I got to tell people what to do I didn't get fired because those are the three things bosses offer all the time when they want to keep people around and then I put down things like

I accomplished more than I thought I could. People treated me with respect. I got to work with people I valued. And what I found, not that surprising to me, but to some, is that the three things bosses think are important were at the bottom, the very bottom of the list. And the ones I just mentioned came up over and over and over again. The key is,

is that our job is not to manipulate people into feeling significant. And I gave a talk at Harvard and they wanted me to change the title of my talk to how to make people feel significant as opposed to how to actually create the conditions where people are significant because that's what built Google. Google didn't get here because Marissa wrote a manual and every single person followed all of her steps.

got here because two rogue engineers figured out how to store data on certain parts of the hard drive platter so that the whole thing wouldn't crash. And because somebody else pushed AdSense forward when the founders didn't think it was a good idea and on and on and on and on and on. That when we do significant work, work that we're proud of with people who care, not only is it worth the 90,000 hours of our life, but it actually makes the organization work better.

So how do we do that? How, where do we, you talk a lot about agency, right? You talk a lot about enrollment. Where do we have agency and where do we have it as employees and where should we expect our employer to have it? Okay. So I'm just going to hazard a guess here, but every person listening to this may need to work, but you don't need to work here.

You have choices about where to work and what to work on. You have that ultimate agency, which means that the job you are doing right now at some level, you're a volunteer. And you have been indoctrinated from a very young age to ask, will this be on the test? To get a good grade, to find the right answer, to get picked, to go to the famous college and then to the placement office and get picked. And

So when you show up and they say, you made it, here are the instructions, it's easy to follow them. So we voluntarily end up in this trap of being cogs in the system. So just to give a little history, 110 years ago, Frederick Taylor brought a stopwatch to work, met Henry Ford, and the two of them invented human resources, treating people like a resource, a machine to be timed, to be surveilled, to get the most out of in every given moment.

So the phrase getting jerked around, aim from this because people on the floor would jerk this way and that to do their job. And what's happened is because of the abilities that surveillance gives us and always on internet and databases, we're just turning the screws even tighter.

And, you know, there are people at Google who have been adjacent to that change and who have been victims of that change. But the world is going to shift. And when it shifts, people who are used to following the manual are probably going to get left behind. How is it going to shift? Well, now there's AI. Now there's robots. Now there's outsourcing. The $89 air fryer in my kitchen, we can't make one for $40. There's no more orders of magnitude of cheaper left.

And so turning the screw tighter is not going to create incremental value. If you do pretty good, pretty reliable, mediocre work, I got a computer that can do it for free. So the problem with racing to the bottom is you might win. And I don't think that's a place to hang out. So what do we do? Well, the essence of it is to talk about it.

let's get real or let's not play. And that's why it's worth devoting enough of my life to make a book out of it, not just a blog post, which is what we need to be able to engage with each other is a conversation. The old conversation is I'm the manager, you're the employee, you get prizes, you do what I say. The new conversation is what are we trying to do here? What change do we seek to make? Who is it for? This person we are seeking to serve with whatever we make, who is

are they? And what shift are we trying to make for them? And that is not industrialism. That is a form of capitalism in which we find a market and serve them. But once a company gets big enough, and it doesn't have to have a lot of people to be big enough, it shifts. It shifts from how do I surprise, delight, connect the people I'm serving to how do I turn this dial to make a couple extra bucks?

So that resonates because one of our phrases at Google is surprise and delight. And there are lots of Googlers listening today, but this will also be available on Talks at Google afterwards. So we'll have people in all industries and all sizes of company tuning in to hear your wisdom here. So surprise and delight, seeking to make the change work, being real about what's meaningful for your customer, for your audience. What are some examples of that working well or perhaps not well?

So the problem when we start talking about purpose and about meaning is people think unless you are running a significant nonprofit that is curing river blindness, you have no real purpose. And meaning is elusive. It's for people who work far away doing really important stuff. But this makes no sense. And this isn't actually the way people feel.

that if you are a barista at a place where you have a script, where you have to do everything the way it's been done before, and where you have to ask the boss if someone suggests something to make things better, you will feel like a robot. Press the button on the Nespresso machine, hand the person their coffee. But you could also be a barista

That works at a place where people are willing to go two or three doors farther to get their cup of coffee because you greet people with a smile. You ask them about what happened yesterday. You put a little bit of extra care into the interaction. Well, in the first scenario and the second, coffee is still delivered. We don't have a coffee shortage. What we have is a shortage of this human connection of caring, of showing up in a certain way.

And so when we think about the difference between a FedEx driver who finds meaning at work and one who just can't wait until Friday comes, they're still delivering the same number of packages. But one of them is doing it with and for humans. And the other one is trying to get away with as little as they can.

And I love the example in the book where you talk about this school where there are fresh flowers that the students enjoy every day. And it's an important part of the whole gestalt, the whole vibe of the school. And I'll let you tell the story maybe about how it doesn't take a committee to buy flowers. Do you mind sharing that story? Well, so at the Manchester Crafts Guild, which is a vocational school in Pittsburgh that has helped

More than 20,000 people get on their feet, find good jobs, build a life. Because he became well-known through all the years of running it, there were tour groups came by. And these tour groups were walking around and they said to the founder, how did these flowers come to be in the lobby? And he said, well, I'll tell you. I got up this morning, I went to the florist, I bought flowers and I put them in the lobby. And they're like, well, but why did you do that? What does that have to do with what goes on here?

And he said, it has everything to do with what goes on here. Because lots of people can teach you how to change a transmission or be an x-ray tech. But the people who come here are the kind of people who deserve to have fresh flowers in their life. And by showing up and going beyond the Henry Ford playbook, he created the conditions for other people to do the same thing.

And that was his own agency, his own enrollment, his decision to wake up in the morning, to go buy the flowers and to put them in the school because it was meaningful for him and that community. Whereas you could imagine at maybe some more industrial focused, you know, your word industrial kind of representing potentially sort of one of the new ways where we're working.

There needs to be a committee. There has to be a vote. There has to be seven people to decide on which florist and what color is, and do we buy them on Tuesdays or Thursdays? But by simply taking the ownership because of something that you find meaningful, that can create more significance at work. Am I interpreting the message the right way or where am I? Oh, yeah, you are indeed. And so two things about the Grateful Dead here. The first one is famously for a couple of years at

Google HQ, where I've been a bunch of times, the chef who had previously worked with the Grateful Dead was making food there. Sure. Charlie. And the story of Charlie was what a great place to work at Google because you can even get this amazing buffet or whatever it was.

And so people came to the conclusion that one way to create meaning at work was to pamper employees. And it got went further and further and further until other people. And this is part of the layoff thing that's going on now. Other people were hired at other places and basically did 14 minutes worth of work a day between all the gyms and the dry cleaning and everything else. It was just fun.

They didn't have any meaning at work. They were just not working that hard and not getting fired, what bosses think is important. If you ask people who have had extraordinary experiences at Interface Carpet, at Rising Tide Car Wash, and at Google, none of them will mention the fact that Charlie made them lunch.

What they will say is this was a really hard problem and I solved it. What they will say is my team worked together to accomplish something no one thought we could and people had each other's backs. That is human meaning. Lunch is great. I'm in favor of lunch, but it's not the point. And the other Grateful Dead aside is number one touring band in the United States for years and years and years and yet almost no one

bought a Grateful Dead record and almost no one actually on a percentage basis went to see the Grateful Dead live. Because it wasn't for everyone. It was for someone. And instead of being a wandering generality saying, what do I have to do to get on top 40 radio this week? They said, this is for these people. And that is at the essence of how we build the next thing. Who's it for? What is the change we are seeking to make? Yeah, that's, that's,

So astute. And since we're talking about music, I have to bring up your concept of the community orchestra, because to me, this is also about enrollment and volunteerism and not just volunteerism, go volunteer to pick up trash in the local park. But I think you're offering us something around volunteerism within your organization.

What can you volunteer to do? What can you say? This is where I find more meaning. So how does the community orchestra versus working for a professional orchestra and your view on that come into play when we walk into work every day? So I went to see the Westchester Community Orchestra perform a few weeks ago, and it was a very good performance. My ears aren't good enough to tell whether somebody was slightly out of tune on the oboe. It was really good.

The people in the orchestra not only volunteered, they raised enough money to hire the conductor who would come and conduct them. And you know that at no point did anyone say, how many hours did you practice last week? Because it wasn't a chance of how can I do as little as possible. It was how can I do as much as possible? There are people who get paid

to play the oboe, and there are people who pay to play the oboe. But it's the people who pay to play the oboe who probably have a better musical experience over time because of agency, because of enrollment, because they're not just doing their job. And so when we think about work, where we need to get paid because we're professional and we have to, you know, with bills and stuff,

Are you going to get fired if you start a book club? Are you going to get fired if you organize a thread to talk about things that will make things better for others? Are you going to get fired if you say, I see something and I'm going to make it better and I'm going to take responsibility for doing it? And if it doesn't work, I'll take the blame? No, no, and no. And if you work at a place where you would get fired for that, you should get another job because you are wasting your days. And that invitation is so meaningful because-

At times right now where there's economic uncertainty and, you know, tech has plenty of headwinds right now, I think for all of us trying to find a little...

dose of additional meaning is a good thing and it complements the work we do every day in our day job. But starting that book club or starting that conversation or finding something broken and fixing it because we feel passionate about it or we feel a sense of responsibility or deep meaning in what we're doing to solve a problem or to serve a customer or to be a better partner to a colleague, that can have a real impact on our enjoyment, how we sleep at night, etc.

Yeah, I mean, let's talk about selfishness for just a minute, because the contract of the industrial capitalist all the way into the tech capitalist has been broken for a long time. The contract used to be, show up, do what I say, you can stay here for decades and you'll make money. But the bosses keep breaking the deal. They lay people off. They change the terms. They have you do things that you couldn't possibly be proud of. And so we have been trained to hold a little bit back.

And what I'm trying to argue in the book is, first of all, it's selfish for bosses to create the conditions for enrollment because everything gets better when they do. And it's selfish in a good way for employees to do this. Not because you're giving the boss a bonus, but because you're not trying to spite them in spite of yourself. You're actually going to have a better day. Your day goes faster because

And creates more magic when you take agency and responsibility. And if the company makes a little bit more money, that's fine. But that's not the point. The point is we don't get tomorrow over again. If you've already committed to going to work tomorrow, what are you going to do to make it better? Because if you're waiting for the boss to make it better, you might be waiting a long time.

So if we don't get tomorrow over again, that makes me think about hustle. And I started this talk by saying one of the things you're going to help us with is to understand why hustling doesn't work anymore. You talked about this a little bit with the race to the bottom and the challenges of that. Why else doesn't hustling work anymore, Seth? So the first time I met Sergey, no one knew what Google was really. He was making a small presentation about it.

in a marketing circle. There was only like 20 of us there. And he said, I want to tell you Google's, it was, this is, there's a lot of confidence in this sentence. I want to tell you Google's marketing strategy. Our marketing strategy is this. We know that one day, eventually everyone is going to use Google. We also know that every day Google gets better. So the longer it takes for someone to use Google for the first time, that's good because our first impression will improve.

It was the opposite of hustle. Gmail saying, we're not going to let everybody in. We're only going to let in the people we invited.

Compare that to the way that people just completely wreck everything that they hold dear to make themselves famous in social media, to find friends who aren't friends, to get likes that aren't likes, to feed an algorithm that isn't in their favor simply because they think that they can fill that infinite hole. That when we hustle people, when we send them come on notes and pretend to be something that we're not, it always works in the short run.

But I'm thinking about all the people I've seen hustling for the last 20 years. And about a year after they start, you don't see them anymore because it just doesn't last. Yeah. We've talked about this before. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And people see through that. They see through the facade. And that's interesting. I thought you were going to talk about hustle in a different way, but you're talking about the hustle in terms of fakeness or...

uh being well you have a different perspective on authenticity and inauthenticity but it's an interesting take on hustle that i didn't expect you to to cover so which kind of hustle do you want to talk about because i'll talk about anything you want well i mean there's the i thought you were going to go to the don't work harder don't burn yourself out don't just put the pedal to the metal because okay let's talk about that sure so what are your thoughts on that okay so

Stress is not the same as tension. Yes. Stress is the trauma of needing to be in two places at the same time. It's about needing to escape but being unable to escape. It's something that we really need to avoid. Tension.

is the only way that change ever occurs. The tension of, and this is one of my favorite parts, Gabe taught me this. Okay. So Jenny, I got a $5 bill in this hand and I have something in this hand. I'm not going to tell you which. It's a gift for you. Which do you want, the $5 bill or whatever this is? I want whatever that is because I'm a risk taker and I thrive on adrenaline. So if I open my hand right away, all the tension disappears.

But holding onto it for a couple extra beats and a couple extra beats actually makes the surprise better when you find out what's there. We can't make change happen without creating tension. So there is a difference between burning out at work, which is a form of stress because you know you should be doing something else. It's a form of trying to control an outside world that cannot be controlled. It's a form of attachment to an outcome that is out of your control versus the

the joy of actually running a whole marathon, not quitting when you get tired. Because the thing about marathons is by definition, tired is a symptom that you ran a good race. You cannot run a marathon without getting tired. And you cannot do your art, whatever it is, the leadership you seek, without feeling deep down some sort of imposter feeling, some sort of fear.

nervousness, because you're exploring tension. So yeah, it is possible to carve out a job, a sinecure for a while, where you don't have to work very many hours, but more than that, you don't have to take any responsibility. And that's not a happy life. What we're looking for is a chance to raise your hand and say to the conductor, yes, I'd like to play a solo on this Beethoven piece. Because knowing that you're going to play a solo will create tension, but it will also create delight. How do you create delight? What's made you so successful?

What are some secret ingredients to Seth Godin's success? Successful is such a weird word. There are so many people who have acquired significantly more assets than me by a factor of a thousand. Fine with me. There are people who do what I do, who have sold a hundred times as many books as me. Not fine with Adrian, fine with me.

And that's because I don't define- To clarify, Adrian, your publisher. Yes, Adrian, our publisher. I don't define success by what Forbes magazine thinks is successful. And I had a really fun ride when if you type blog into Google, I was the first match. Now I'm not. It's out of my control. Didn't make me sad.

Because why would I want to get sad about something that's not in my control? So for me, success is, are there people willing to give you the benefit of the doubt? Are you able to teach people something that you're proud to teach them? And do sometimes they go and teach somebody else so that it moves forward? Do you have enough resources to take care of yourself and your family and your

do whatever you can to make the world around you a little better. If you have those things, then by my measure, you have a level of success. And I,

Find the craft of doing this such a privilege such a thrill that I'm happy to do it again but if I was keeping track of what my compatriots at Yahoo used to keep track of if I was keeping track of what my compatriots at TED used to keep track of I'd be very unhappy because I wouldn't be as successful as the person standing right next to me, but I think that's a false proxy a bad measure and

So I want to talk about false proxies, but I also am picking up on what you said about craft. So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're speaking about the craft being an important part of this, which to me sounds like the journey is an important part of this. So say a little bit about how the privilege to be able to do this craft or the privilege of the journey is as important as the output. My guess is you'd have something to say on this because I know you love to teach people and it is a craft. I love this question.

The journey is the only point. That's all there is. The outcome is just some total of side effects of a journey. So there are people in Silicon Valley who have more money than God, who are not going to go out of business, who are busy adding, quote, features to their software that they can't possibly be proud of.

that they're manipulating kids, they're surveilling people behind their back, they're putting in billing things that bill people when they don't expect it. And if you ask them about it, they'll say, well, it's the market at work. If we don't do it, somebody else will. And so is that how you're going to spend the rest of your days when you could do anything? Because you're a volunteer. You won't be able to tell the difference between one more zero and not one more zero. You're a volunteer.

And, you know, when I was at Yahoo, there were probably a thousand people who had enough stock options that if the stock went up $3, they could tell. It would make a difference to their long-term life, which means that when you went to work, you were surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people who needed you to make a decision that would make the stock price go up, which means that your life was being determined by a hedge fund person in New York City.

And we see all these companies end up in this cycle of creative destruction because they do what the short-term people need them to do. And then they're surprised when it doesn't work in the long run. And the fact is, we don't get many days at this thing. And my friend Kevin Kelly has written so beautifully about this, about saying, what is the sum total of the work we're seeking to create? And so when Bryan Stevenson shows up

making one thousandth of what many people on this call make, he's making an impact. But he's also having a thrilling day doing it. And so we can use tech and we can use these systems to make things better. And I don't think we get to blame Milton Friedman in the market when we start to make things worse just because we can make a dollar. So one thing you think makes things worse is false proxies. Talk to us about false proxies. What are they? Yeah, go ahead. You know, you go.

No, I finished. Go ahead. I couldn't read it. Well, because you said before that false proxies, what is it? That they steal our soul. They get in the way of our output. They're expensive. I love this concept. You use the ketchup bottle example. What are they and how are they bad?

Okay, so we have to put labels on things because you're not allowed to taste the ketchup before you buy it whenever you go to the supermarket. We trust Heinz that it's going to taste similar to last time. The label is an excellent proxy for the ketchup. It is a reliable metric of whether it's going to be good ketchup. But what we learned from Michael Lewis in Moneyball is if a college prospect looks like a good baseball player, you know, with the blonde hair or whatever it is,

That doesn't mean they're going to be a good baseball player. In fact, the proxy that was overlooked by all the scouts was, I don't know, understand baseball on base percentage or something. So he instructed his scouts to go get all these undervalued folks who actually had an accurate proxy that could take the Oakland A's all the way to the pennant.

So when we think about an organization that's hiring and hiring and hiring, oh, you went to a famous college. Oh, you know how to move Mount Fuji. Oh, you know how many gas stations. Like all these clever interview questions, they're terrible proxies. I used to ask them. I know this because it makes the interviewer and sometimes the interviewee seem smart. But the people we're hiring aren't going to get asked how to move Mount Fuji. They're just not. Once they get there, that's not their job.

So when we hire, instead of reinforcing caste and status roles and misogyny and all the other ills of our society by picking people who look like us, who were born with privilege or whatever thing we are defaulting to, why don't we figure out what is a good proxy? What is a worthwhile measure?

So at some companies, they count how many lines of code you commit a week. That's a terrible proxy for whether you're a good programmer. Terrible. Because it leads to bad code, inferior code, cruft, and lack of commenting. What we actually need is someone who delivers code that solves the problem. And if you have a history of doing that, that's the best proxy I can think of for the fact that you might be able to be good at it tomorrow.

This totally influenced me because outside of work, as I'm working on my own book project, I'm hiring a virtual assistant. And based on your guidance, I didn't ask for resumes. I will be doing very minimal interviews. I've done a few. But you've guided me that interviewing just shows how good someone is at interviewing. And so if you're hiring for someone to be a professional interviewee, then sure, that's a good proxy.

resumes, you could just have someone clean it up and you could outsource it. So what I've done is I've asked for people to do some project work and

I've found that this is including more people that would have otherwise perhaps not risen to the top on a resume. There's a stay-at-home mom who's been out of the workforce for eight years, and she shared with me how grateful she was that I didn't ask for a resume because how often she's just immediately taken out of consideration based on that. And so it's really, really meaningful and valuable guidance that I very much appreciate.

Well, we want to take some questions from the audience, but before we do, let's just get to know you a little bit better with some this or that. How does that sound? Okay. Am I playing Dan Pink or am I playing me? I mean, I'm going to answer as Dan and then I'll let you know if I'm going to answer as me. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Let's, but let's remind people that they can, how do people ask questions? So people can type questions into the chat and then we have someone from our amazing talks, the Google team curating these, and they'll pop a couple up for us in just a few minutes here.

All right. So answering as either Seth Godin or Dan Pink, e-book or regular book? Audiobook. Audiobook. Okay. In-person or virtual meetings? Meetings are not where people think they are. I think conversations matter and I will do them anywhere. If I can do them in person, I prefer that. But meetings, I don't go to meetings. Not a fan. Air guitar or air drums? I'm much better at air drums. Can you show us?

No. Okay. It's a union thing. It's a union thing. I mean, I'm willing to be on air guitar if you're on air drums, but maybe that's for it. What song are we going to do that one with the Jay Giles band where in the music video, but instead of a bubble, and then there's the big drum is filled with milk. So

All right, we got it. We had our slightly asynchronous air guitar and air drums jam session right here with Jenny and Seth. And we'll put Dan on like air vocals or something. All right, art museum or history museum? I grew up in an art museum. Any specific one? The Albright Knox reopening this month in Buffalo, New York, one of the finest contemporary art museums in the world. Wonderful. Attend a party or host a party? Come up with a really good reason not to go.

And what's your go-to reason not to go? Are you just purely honest? Sorry, I'm unable to make it. Or do you have an excuse that just seems much more original? Well, the alien one works often, except you can only use it once per person. That sounds fair. Being abducted. Well, here's something I'm working on is just being honest and saying, unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to make it because people think I'm an extrovert, but I come up as an introvert on Myers-Briggs. So I oftentimes don't want to attend the party.

And I've gotten some good guidance from friends who simply own it and they say, sorry, I won't be able to make it. No excuse, no reason, no alien abduction. But I think it's part of my own maturity and growing into my own comfort with who I am. Just saying I can't make it. Next step is to realize that one of the most overused false proxies in corporate America is the Meyer Briggs. There's no data that shows that the Meyer Briggs has any utility whatsoever.

Interesting. And our friend, I think Adam Grant is the one who said that most people would actually come up as ambiverts, which is probably where I'd fall to. So I think he said it's like two thirds of people or something like that. I think that most people we know are introverts, except on demand, we put in the effort to look like an extrovert.

Sure. And this gets a little bit to your be inauthentic strategy. All right. Putting in the effort. Okay, let's put in some effort to answer these questions that people have been so generous and thoughtful to ask and bold to ask. So what do we have first? From Ellie. Okay.

Okay. So some people put in the extra mile, but they get criticized by those who prefer just to kind of phone it in or average output. What's your advice to deal with the tension or the vibes that come from those people?

So I was in Australia and people came to me and they said, you know, we have this thing here called the tall poppy syndrome, which is it's the tall poppy that gets cut down first. And then I was in Italy and people said word for word the same thing. And then I was in it. Turns out everyone thinks it's a local story. It's not. And tall poppy syndrome is fairly universal. The first thing is we need to shun the nonbelievers.

that there are always going to be people around us who have been sufficiently indoctrinated to do what they think is safe and feel insecure when change happens, whatever kind of change we're talking about. But the second thing I would say is there are lots of ways to go an extra mile that don't have a lot to do with taking credit. When we give credit,

people ask us to do it again. When we take credit, people feel the scarcity in it. And so one of the things that happens is if you want to feel that feeling of generous contribution, if you couple it with taking responsibility but giving away credit, I think you might be amazed at the fact that you get to do it again. Thank you, Seth. Next question. From Jeff, what is the biggest shift you made in your life or career that brought you to where you are today?

Okay, so biggest is a hard word, but I would say that in 1984 or 5, when, no, it must have been 86, when my business was doing really, really poorly and I was getting rejected and rejected, when I had an enormous amount of self-talk and excuse making and stuckness.

I started listening to my late friend Zig Ziglar, his See You at the Top series of audios. I listened to them so many times, I used up all the cassettes. They melted and I had to buy another set. And then fortunately the CD player was invented so I could get a more permanent version. And I shifted the way I talk to myself.

And there are lots of ways to do it. You might do it with, you know, sort of casual Pema Chodron, American Buddhism kind of thinking. You might do it with becoming a coach for other people so that you could talk to yourself when you're talking to them. You might do it with volunteering. But when we change the story, we tell ourselves about what is going on in our lives. It tends to couple with our lives start going better.

Yeah, I coach a lot on facts versus stories. What are the facts of the situation and what's the story you're telling yourself? How could you shift that to be slightly more optimistic? I know you're an optimist. You share that a lot. And so I agree with you that changing the story you're telling yourself can have a real impact. Next question. Lydia is asking, what's the single most powerful act a manager can commit today to increase a sense of significance in their team? Such a good question, Lydia.

Thank you for teeing up my manager leader rant. So we need managers, particularly airlines and fast food places and hospitals need managers because you want it to be just like it was yesterday to meet spec. Managers are on the org chart. They use power and authority to get what they got yesterday faster and cheaper to measure things to Six Sigma.

But leaders are different. Most managers aren't leaders. Many leaders aren't managers. Leadership is a choice. You aren't awarded it because you have a spot on the org chart. There are people who are CEOs of major corporations who are just managers. And when the world changes, they're going to fail. Leadership, because it's voluntary, what you're saying is, I'm going over there to explore that liminal space between here and there. It might not work. Who wants to come with me?

And if you're not prepared to say it might not work, then you're probably not the leader that you want to be. And so if we're going to create a sense of significance for people, it helps to make their work significant. And we will do that when we are making a change happen, because that is what everyone will tell you when pressed. What made me feel significant was that I was on the hook to make a change, maybe a small one, maybe a big one.

This person I'm handing the coffee to, this person who's on the other end of the phone, this person I'm emailing with, this VC who's investing, what change am I promising? If I succeed at that, I will have found significance. So if you want to lead, if you are lucky enough to be in an institution that gives you the agency to come to a talk like this one,

You have enough freedom to voluntarily begin to lead. But what you will not find when you do that is a manual that gives you all the excuses and lets you off the hook. Fish don't like to be on the hook. I think people do.

And because I've already introduced you as a ruckus maker, I'll share this other thought you talk about in the book, which is a good manager. And Lydia, I think this maybe addresses a piece of this as well. A good manager would encourage every new employee on their first day to keep their LinkedIn profile updated every day. And you could feel that...

An unconfident manager might think that's a threat to them. Well, if I encourage them to keep LinkedIn updated, then maybe they're going to find a new job. And I advise on this in the Own Your Career program that I run within Google as my passion project within Google, that good talent is rented, not overrun.

owned. And the manager who has that mindset is the one who encourages their employee to keep LinkedIn updated because it is volunteerism. We want people to want to be here because they are on the hook to make a change. So that I love that piece about that. Can I squeeze in my two minute blue card riff? Cause it didn't get in the book.

By all means. So I went to Allen and Company and talked to 25 summer interns. They were as blue suited and privileged as you could imagine. And they'd all been there for six weeks already. And I walk in, I figure I got to shake up this thing somehow. And I say, look, on my way in, Bill Gates called or maybe it was Warren Buffett. I can't remember who. And he's got a million dollars for a project that's going to take four weeks. He wants one of you to be in charge of it. And you get to hire someone.

Any three people in this room to be on your team, they each get $100,000. It's going to be a really cool project. It's going to make your career. Take out a blue card and write down three names. Now, everyone gets very stressed at this. I said, don't worry. I'm not going to make you tell everybody who you wrote down. And after people finally wrote down their three names, I had two questions. One, how many of you think the same names came up over and over again? And everyone said yes. And I said, the second question is, how many of you think your name was one of those three names?

And we're indoctrinated not to raise our hand, tall poppy. I said, what would happen if you had come here six weeks ago for your summer internship and decided that you were going to be one of those three names? Because people didn't get on the list because they knew how to code C++. They got on the list because they had real skills because they were able to do the work that needs to be done.

And so I'm going to leave a teaser for everybody to read the book because you're going to learn from Seth about why we should stop calling them soft skills and start calling them real skills because soft skills undervalues how critically important these skills are. Let's take one more question and then I'll wrap this up. Oh, Sam is asking, who are the three people who have most influenced your thinking about purpose and meaning? I could probably guess a couple. I'm curious to see if I'm right.

You can't guess any of them. Okay, that's even better. That's like the closed hand. I'll have tension now waiting to anticipate your answers. Sam Drexler, because he's the kind of person who asks a question out of the blue, who isn't just sitting there taking notes. A young woman I met when I was 17 who discovered by engaging with a canoe and the water that she didn't have to direct her rage at other people.

And every single person out there who has been unfairly judged, discriminated against, kept from doing what they could contribute. And we are surrounded by goodness and surrounded by people who want to make things better. And we see industrialism sucking it out of us while it pollutes our planet and leaves behind a mess of

And we don't have a lot of time, but we have to hurry because we can make things better. We sure can. And I believe you're one of the only authors who has written that into the acknowledgements of your book.

thanking those people, giving them a voice when they didn't have a voice, acknowledging the injustices against them. So that really stood out to me when I read the acknowledgements of this book, which is so fantastic, The Song of Significance, A New Manifesto for Teams. I took a few things away here, Seth. I took away that there's a difference between tension and stress, that tension can actually be a good thing, but stress leads to burnout. And

I took away that we don't get to do tomorrow over again. So enroll, volunteer, be the change that you want to seek because you're on the hook for that change.

And then finally, that you can change the story you are telling yourself. And that can be a more positive outcome for you, for your team, for your organization, for more significance all around. Seth, thank you so much for being here. I know this is a really meaningful book to you, kind of different than the gist of some of your other books with a very meaningful origin of the story of how this book came to be. So it's a true privilege to be able to hear your wisdom and have you share it here with all of us.

Well, back at you, Jenny. This was an extraordinary interview because you made it happen. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you.