Seth Godin - Entrepreneur, Speaker, and Best-Selling Author | The Song of Significance

We didn't say anything when the radiologist's job was threatened by a curcutor that could use an x-ray. But now, the systems are coming to the rest of us. Now, selfish, narcissistic, childish, billionaires by companies and then fire people who work there for fun. Some organizations that understand that our job is... They, my guess, is Seth Golden, American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker who has written 21 international bestsellers, books have been translated into 38 languages. She writes one of the world's most popular marketing blogs. The honeybee example, explain what that example is. So let's start by explaining that humans are not beings. A beehive is 15,000 individual creatures that are not actually individual. They are very much like the neurons in a human brain, burned inside out. If one bee sacrifices its life. How do you hire properly? What I'm saying is if it's easy to measure might not be important. The song of significance, what does that actually mean? Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clarey. Success story is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Quick question before we get started. Did you ever play the game telephone as a kid? You start with one message but as people share it, it gets more and more distorted. Sometimes work and feel that way. But the last thing you want for your business is to get a distorted message across your team. HubSpot helps you say goodbye to that chaos by helping you get all your teams on the same page. It's all in one. Your customer facing teams will absolutely love it. You track leads, deals, support tickets, and everything in between all from one spot. You need to know what your sales team is up to. Done. Want to see how your marketing campaigns are performing? You got to cover it. HubSpot gives you and your teams all the vital customer info they need to create the best possible experience. No matter where they are. Save yourself the headache. See how powerful true connection can be. Give HubSpot a try. Your team and your customers will thank you later. Get started for free today at HubSpot.com. Today, my guess is Seth Goden, an American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker who has written 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work. His books have been translated into 38 languages. These books include purple cow, tribes, linchpin, and the dip. He writes one of the world's most popular marketing blogs at sets.blog and hosts a podcast called Kimbo. He has given two of the most popular TED Talks of all time and has been inducted into the American Marketing Association's Marketing Hall of Fame. He is also the founder of several companies, including the Alt MBA, Squidoo, a website where users created pages on any topic, and Yo Yo Dine, one of the first internet-based direct marketing firms that was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He's known for his innovative and unconventional ideas on how to spread ideas, build tribes, and make a difference in the world. His latest book is the Song of Significance, a new manifesto for teams. I think the magic optimist moment is that we have more than one of those. We have countless. We don't live in a Marvel comic book. In a Marvel comic book, a spider is required to bite you for you to become Spider-Man, and after that everything is ordained. When I think about my life, I think about winning the parent lottery, growing up in Buffalo, New York, I think about what happened to me in a canoe in 1977, teaching somebody that set me on the path of being a teacher. I think about meeting Fred Wilson and Jerry Colona and becoming Fred's first investment as an independent VC and building one of the first internet companies. I think about looking at the world wide web and thinking, that's a fraud, that'll never work, and losing billions and billions of dollars as a result. But for this book, for the Song of Significance, I think about Dan and Frankie, I think about being in a little place in Northern California and hearing about Jacqueline Freeman's work and the Song of Significance, a Song of Increase, and learning about how the bees sing the Song of Increase and being completely transformed by their story and by the analogy between bees and humans, and then everything that unfolded in the week that followed, that led me to realize that I had this book in me and I had no choice but to share. It's very interesting when you dive into topics, you do them so thoughtfully, and that sort of tees up why you wrote this book, and that was going to be my next question to be quite honest. It's why are you diving into this topic because from a very high level, it seems that we're doing better at leadership and we're doing better at building organic, it seems like it, it seems like we've moved away from the command control, but I think that when you're in organizations, I think that that's very far from the truth. So what explained to the listeners the Song of Significance, what does that actually mean in 2023? Well, you know, there's a fork in the road, and if you see a fork, you should take it. On one end is more industrialism. We didn't say anything when the steam shovel made it hard to be a ditch digger, and we didn't say anything when the people working on the assembly line were told to race robots. We didn't say anything when the radiologist's job was threatened by a computer that could read an x-ray just as well as a mediocre radiologist could, but now the systems are coming for the rest of us. Now, cranky, solid, selfish, narcissistic, childish, billionaires by companies and then fire them for fun, fire people who work there for fun, and you know, they basically toy with people and torture them because they have power. And the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. And the alternative, the fork in the road, is there are some organizations that understand that shareholder value tomorrow is not the point, that humans are not a resource, humans are people, and they are the point. Our job is not to get the last bit of value every day out of every individual by counting their keystrokes. Our job is to make things better. And the example that you referenced is an extreme example. Do you not feel that on average, we're not doing better work, we're not building healthier organizations. I know that shareholder value still of top of mind for a lot of companies. But even, you know, I look at one of the main examples that you bring up in the book, how tech got it wrong, I would have thought that tech would have been some of the more forward looking organizations that would have been adopting better practices, better leadership policies, treating people more like humans than just pieces of an assembly line. Well, sometimes they do, and then they get stuck because of VCs, because of the stock market, because of scale. And you know, I hear from people every day around the world in so many industries. When you get pitched by a publicist who's just churning a list and doesn't care that they're spamming you. And when you get called at home by a telemarketer who's churning a list and doesn't care that they're lying to you, or you talk to a vice president at a bank who actually has no authority of any kind to do anything, even change the order of the bills they're handing you. They're just doing their job too. And the crank of the industrial engine persists. And yes, there are doctors who will take their time and look you in the eye. And there are clerks who will take their time and ask you a pleasantry. There are people who will choose to be people at work, but too often it's the exception. It's not what they're supposed to do all day. And so the reason that my publisher pushed this book up six months, which they've never done in all my years of working with them, is that they have said this is a moment we need to talk about this. And we're not what we've been doing for a long time. It's saying we can be industrialists. We can have a manual and we can have free snacks and feel like we have agency. But in fact, you don't get the and part because industrialists given their druthers will act a lot like Elon Musk, will act a lot like somebody who's standing there with a stopwatch because the stock market makes them. As opposed to, for example, the way that Google treated its first 500 employees, which is not what it's like to work at Google today. Now, you mentioned the Honeybee example. And I want you to explain what that example is and some of the similarities and how we can sort of take examples from Honeybees, which is a wild example, and you're going to go into it in a second. But then I want to draw some parallels between the adaptive and the thriving nature of the Honeybees and during their song of increase. And in the face of adversity, and then we can encourage similar resilience and forward motion and individuals and organizations promoting a sense of safety, psychological security, like all these different things that are good leadership techniques and tactics and strategy that we sort of will that you have originally seen in a in a in a beehive. So explain that to me. So let's start by explaining that humans are not bees. That in fact, a beehive, and I could share be trivial day long, but a beehive is 15,000 individual creatures that are not actually individual. They are very much like the neurons in a human brain turned inside out. If one bee sacrifices its life or is killed, the beehive persists that they somehow manage to be organized without an organizer to exist in community without a leader. And that's how our brain works too. There isn't one neuron in your brain that's in charge of everything. So what Jacqueline Freeman wrote about when she wrote the song of increase was what happens to the bees at the end of a long winter. So that's in May in the northern hemisphere. If they've survived and many hives don't, they will have depleted much of their honey because the purpose of the honey of the honey and the hive is not to give people some a plastic shape bear to squeeze in their tea. The purpose of the honey is to sustain the hive when times are tough. But if they made it through the winter and they have enough honey, just barely. The council maidens, the women who run the hive will have a meeting and realize they have a chance to leap. And so they'll do two things. The first thing is they'll build a vertical egg chamber and ask the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg because there's only one queen in a hive at a time. And the second thing they'll do is they'll instruct all the other maidens, sometimes called worker bees, to go out and collect as much pollen as they possibly can. And within just a couple weeks, they will replenish all the honey that the hive was running low on. And their baby queen will be about to be born. And then something really cool happens, which is that within a 10 minute period of time, more than 10,000 bees and the queen will swarm and leave the hive all at the same time and go 200 meters away. That's called the song of increase. What a daring leap to leave behind the honey, leave behind the new queen, leave behind all the babies, the pips, and just go somewhere you've never been before. And then they only have three days to find a new place to live. And that leap is what permits bees to thrive and to evolve. And human beings who are not bees have been seduced by industrialism to sing the song of safety, to hunker down, to watch a little bit more TV, to buy a little bit more crap and just go to work tomorrow. And we are capable of more than that. We are capable of leaping into this for you. Let's just take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now HubSpot and the HubSpot podcast network have incredible podcasts. You have to listen to like entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Dumas. He's been in the podcast game for forever. He gives you insightful interviews. Now imagine this. You're getting first hand experience from successful entrepreneurs like Kevin Lannister, who knows a thing or two about navigating the chaos and rapidly changing industries. He runs the fastest growing IT company in the world or Tyler Wagner, who believes in the power of your story to scale your business online or how about learning from Tom Antian's old but gold insights on transforming hobbies in the streams of passive income. If you are an entrepreneur, you need to listen to entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Dumas brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcast. So what is it going to take? What is it going to take for us to to make that leap? I am asking people through this book to have a conversation, to talk to the others and to simply say let's get real or let's not play, to engage in a series of mutual commitments with bosses and with co-workers with the people who work for you. To say I will not treat you disrespectfully and you shouldn't do the same to me. I will not call on meeting just to make sure you're not out doing your grocery shopping and then lecture at you for half an hour when I could send a memo instead. I will not focus on obedience, I will focus on standards, that it is possible to create change and change is what makes us human. Change is where significance lies, that if all you're doing is managing and repeating and repeating, well that's sort of important but maybe someone else can do that. You mentioned in the book that this is a catch 22 and everyone's hesitating to go first in this conversation and I would so we're trying to solve for this by getting a conversation going but I would also argue that many people don't think they're mistreating their employees. Many people are stuck in a legacy mindset and they may not even be aware that this is not the way that you should be leading. So what does good look like? What does an ideal organization look like so that we can sort of frame it? Why is the sounds silly to say this but why is the assembly line mode of leading an organization not ideal? Okay so there are very few villains here. Most people who are working hard whether they are managers bosses or employees are not seeking to do the wrong thing. I will leave several billionaires out of that discussion but in general they're just doing their job but their job was invented 110 years ago that industrialism is a very specific way of being in the world that was inconceivable before the 1800s and return on machines, return on time figuring out how to use a stopwatch measuring everything. Well it made us all rich it gets you a certain kind of productivity but it's running out of steam. It's running out of steam because now every car is really high quality and now every car is made in pretty much the most efficient possible way. It's being replaced by a creation of value that works a different way. So the project I did before this one I was a volunteer for over a year coordinating the work full-time of more than 300 people in 40 countries to build the Carbon Almanac. Every one of us was a volunteer. We produced a book that's been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Czech and many other languages that want a worldwide award for design. It's 97,000 words, it's footnoted. When it came out there wasn't one significant error in the whole thing. How did 300 people produce in less than five months a book like this with nobody in charge and nobody being told what to do? Well that kind of leap is possible when you get good people who are enrolled in a journey and get out of their way. When you have standards instead of obedience. So yeah we still need managers. I want the people at the pacemaker factory and the people who are you know doing surgery to be extremely structured in their management style. But if our job is to invent the future we have to get beyond being mediocre because GPT is better at being mediocre than we are. Now you know when you mention that example I think of Wikipedia as an example of that too. I think of Wikipedia and all the contributors and them checking themselves and then the output is quite good but there's a vision and associated with Wikipedia. There's a higher calling for the people that contribute and spend their free time very much similar to what you just did. So I want to understand your thoughts. An organization has to have that higher calling and that vision that permeates the people that work there but simultaneously you're running up against the issue of people being very transient in their careers and moving. So the organization wants to have a vision, wants to be able to buy into it but that person is only spending two years at that organization. How do you solve for that? Well what's the vision of the Hillside Elementary School? Right? That one of the most common jobs in the United States is school teacher. Lenny Levine who was the kindergarten teacher at Hillside until he passed away every year started over from scratch and the mission for a lot of teachers is follow the curriculum earn tenure do your job because that's what principals push them to do because that's what boards push principals to do and Lenny said let's get real or let's not play. He said in my kindergarten class the rules are going to be different and I'm going to change these kids forever and 25 years later my kids still remember because you can choose to do that and the receptionist at the doctor's office isn't the person who's going to be sticking a scope up somebody's nose but she has a lot to do with whether someone's going to get better or not and so the question is how does she manage the office that's her title office manager to create the conditions for possibility not just for the patients but for the people who work there so that it's not a day's work for a day's pay it's a human being showing up not as a resource but as the point because that's what work is for once we figured out how to go on a food and other resources to survive what exactly is the point of going to work I'm just thinking I'm just thinking about another point that you brought up was balancing the needs of the business versus the needs of the individual so let's talk because I think to if we look back at your body of work a lot of the work that you've done on marketing is to shift the focus from focusing on the organization to focusing on the customer and then a point you bring up in this book is as an organization you're focusing on the not the needs of the organization anymore the needs of the employee and you sort of mentioned this a few times so I think this all comes down to how do we how do we champion the needs of the individual or the employee and again look at them like not just a piece of a company but an actual human being so what are the needs of the individual once they have their pay and they have their food and they have their shelter we've satisfied Maslow's hierarchy of needs what is a person need in an organization well I need to highlight one thing which is I am not saying companies need to give some sort of economic value to their employees because it's the right thing to do what I'm saying is creating the conditions for growth and significance actually helps the company achieve what it sought to accomplish in the first book so if we can use Google as an example and then I'll try to get be more specific in your question early on when I was at Yahoo Google was doing some really interesting things was pretty small company and then they were going to have to shut down and the reason they were going to shut down is not because they weren't making any money they had plenty of money in the bank it's because the amount of data they were trying to store was so large that it was crashing their search engine it was taking forever to get results and the laws of physics were involved here you can't just say let's everybody work harder because the fact is the speed of light is the speed of light and two engineers put in emotional labor and effort and figured out that if they just stored certain kinds of data on the outside of the hard drive instead of on the inside ring of the hard drive it spins faster on the outside and they could get the data fast enough to keep Google from going out of business now that sort of change doesn't happen because some manager is offering people a bonus nor does it happen because you're yelling at them it happens because the human being is enrolled in the journey of trying to make a change happen and what human beings want and I surveyed 10,000 people in 90 countries they want to be treated with respect they want to exceed their own expectations for what they thought was possible and they want to work with people that they like in respect they want those three things way more than they want a promotion or title or salary they don't want to travel or get paid a lot compared to being able to shop as a human to do work that matters with people who care and I don't care if you run a sandwich shop that's still going to pay off for you one example that you brought up I thought was interesting to that point and and I think this is the right context correct me if I'm wrong but the Harry Brighthouse example where it's basically based on the movie the paper chase and the professor's cold calling on students but everybody wants to be in this class and it's interesting because cold calling on students it's uncomfortable it's not something that you think people would want to subject themselves to but this is the most wanted class that everybody wants to be in so it shows that people when given the opportunity to excel and and be in a group of peers that are also excelling they're going to take that opportunity well it's important to note that not everybody wants to be in the class in fact almost nobody wants to be in the class but that's enough that if you've been indoctrinated from first grade to ask will this be on the test to do the minimum amount of work and to get by why would you want to be in a class where you get called on the goal is to take an easy class but if you are thinking smart about this college is costing you 50 60 70 80 thousand dollars a year that you're going to be in debt for for decades or more why wouldn't you want to go to a classroom where everybody else wants to be there too and that's the magic of the Brighthouse approach which is some people want to be in a room with people who want to be in the room now is this so this this speaks about I don't know if this speaks about the soft skills that you should be looking for because then this is this is an education for a leader saying how do I find the people that want to be in that room and traditionally I would only hire people that have the hard skills and you you address this as well but then at the end of the book you have an encyclopedia of real skills things that are soft skills but as elite I've hired a lot of people you've hired a lot of people a lot of people listening to this have hired a lot of people you can gauge some of this but ultimately it's stressful when you're hiring somebody to hire based on soft skills so how do you hire properly what what is your advice for the the manager the leader the director the VP that wants to incorporate this so just to catch people up what I'm saying is if it's easy to measure might not be important if they went to a famous college if they have the same skin colors you if they're tall if they're charismatic if they interview well if they can type a lot of words per minute if they commit a lot of lines of code to get up fine but that's not really what's going to transform your organization it's loyalty honesty empathy connection possibility the willingness to sit in the liminal state between here and there lots of things that don't show up on resumes and what I have found because I don't know a better shortcut is the only way to know that is to work with somebody and the good news is you can now work with somebody before you hire them and so my ironclad policies I only work with people I've worked with before so if I'm going to work with somebody I haven't worked with before I give them a project and I pay them for it and in the act of them working with you you can see what it's like to work with them what do they do when something is difficult do they always need instructions do they give people the benefit of the doubt if they're not acting like the kind of person you want to work with don't work with them so when I started my own business years ago I felt like I was being thrown into the deep end and there's a podcast and I'm going to talk about in just a second that I wish I had when I was building anything from scratch the podcast some of the startups I worked in it's called the millionaire university podcast it's not just another business podcast with jargon and theory the two hosts Justin Tara Williams they've been there done that built their own multi million dollar business from scratch this podcast is like having a personal mentor a successful millionaire giving you a masterclass each episode they walk through highly tangible tactical business strategies that they have used in their own business that will definitely make your life easier they also bring on some of their own mentors that have helped them in their journey as well as bring on new entrepreneurs that are figuring things out and it's kind of like a Q&A classroom session so if you are ready to take the next step in your business you want to scale it to at least seven figures and beyond you need to listen to the millionaire university podcast they drop episodes every Monday and Thursday and they've also built a community around this podcast so if you are an entrepreneur go down this rabbit hole you can find their podcast the millionaire university podcast on apple spotify wherever you podcast I wish I had something like this when I started my own business don't miss out on this opportunity trust me you won't regret it I love that it's so simple it's actually not that complicated when you break it down why did you feel it was important to highlight the difference between tension and stress when I talk about tension it makes people really uncomfortable which is ironic of course tension if I want to shoot a rubber band across the room is only going to happen if I pull it backwards otherwise it doesn't go no joke is funny without tension that's why it's called a punchline comes at the end right when I say knock knock and you say who's there there's tension as we wait for the next part tension is the essence of growth and learning and all the sorts of things we try to create as marketers and leaders stress on the other hand is wanting to be doing two things at the same time here and there away from here toward here that I need to be at work but I need to be at home that I have no choice but to be in the spot because I'm bolted down and I want to leave two different things at the same time it causes our brain to to output chemicals that don't make us happy so I'm in favor of reducing stress by the stories we tell ourselves by the choices we get to make by creating a fair culture but I'm also in favor of creating tension to produce outputs that we seek another another lesson that I picked up from this that I think is a great lesson for any leader it's about feedback loops and you mentioned two in particular you mentioned Paul or Faliah and you mentioned Harry Acker and the two feedback loops they built I guess into the into the DNA of the organization I didn't know these stories so I mean Paul he was kinkos Harry was sleepy's maybe you could tell those stories and then a little bit of a playbook for how to build feedback loops into organizations why they're so important because I think a lot of people they're desk managers and they aren't as active in the field as they should be yeah this is this is great and I got to witness in both first hand I'll begin by saying that culture defeats strategy every time culture is the way things are around here culture is how people make decisions when it's not in the handbook or the manual who is building the culture in your organization in your shop in the whole place the culture is a choice if you don't make the choice you still made the choice the culture is a choice so Paul and he called the place kinkos because he had a big kinky haircut um Paul proudly told everyone he had dyslexia he was virtually illiterate and he built a company that he sold to FedEx for billions of dollars and Paul told me that the way he built it was super simple all day every day all he would do was visit stores and he would walk into the store and say to the person behind the desk what's working and they had to tell him something that the store had innovated little or bake that was working and then he would tell all the other stores and if they didn't have an innovation they got in trouble so everybody there knew that the culture was try something what would happen if we had six business books in the front of the store maybe they would sell so one store tried that and the next thing you know it's a very big line of business and then one day I was in a mattress store in the phone rang I never met Mr. Sleepy he was old at that time but the phone rang and this clerk got really nervous because I guess the phone doesn't ring very often in a mattress store and he answers the phone and I could hear it from like across the desk and the guy who's talking doesn't say hello or anything just says what's wrong and if you didn't have anything wrong with your store you were in trouble but if you could tell Mr. Sleepy something that wasn't ideal it would get fixed and that was the culture of Sleepy's and so in both cases we have somebody they don't have to have their name on the door who creates a culture of what things are like around here and these acts of creating culture change what people think of as normal and what they decide to do next. You know I was listening to Alex Hermosi who has become very popular very quickly and he's built a large business and I know that he has proactively gone out against this organization and he's basically said to any member of his team try and replace yourself with AI try and replace any task you do with AI as it doesn't matter what it is and it's almost encouraging it's giving psychological safety it's encouraging people to feel safe saying hey listen this piece of the job it's redundant my time is better spent somewhere else and I don't think a lot of leaders are asking that and giving the psychological safe space for their employees to do that I don't think a lot of employees are putting up their hands saying hey 50% of what I do is a waste of time and that's a huge inefficiency yeah no it's a it's a great point and it gets to standards versus obedience so one of the things that happened during the pandemic is an urban legend started to spread of some people who were doing two jobs both full-time and they say right if they could just juggle the zoom meetings no one would know they had two full-time jobs and the manager who cares about obedience freaks out at that the same way today you could probably become way more productive if with your own money you hired a virtual assistant and outsourced some of your work on upwork because you could then hand in really well done spreadsheets or lines of code even though you didn't spend any time doing it at all you're just arbitrarging it to the outside world so the question is is that okay well if someone's measuring obedience it's not okay because what I paid for was your butt in a seat and your fingers on the keyboard and I'm measuring how you work but if it's standards then what I'm measuring is this is what we do around here and how we do it is this better than good enough and if it is continue you figure out how to solve the problem and so if you can create an organization built on standards employees who are enrolled in your journey will continue to make the organization better because they will exceed standards but if you build an organization that is based on obedience then you have to watch everybody all the time because that obedience model that's the low trust model and I've seen this I've seen this play out I've seen companies install the work from home monitors where they take a screenshot every few minutes actually I know somebody that interviewed for a VP level job I think it was about a $300,000 salary plus bonus and it was still eight hours tracked on a computer screenshots every couple minutes and then I've seen companies take it to the end degree where I think it was a call center and this is just all anecdotal I don't want to point it back it up but I've you know hear the rumors of camera has to be on all day you have the managers watch it like it's just horror stories yep it's absolutely horror stories how do you how do you get we touch on this a little bit but I want to go a little bit deeper because we're speaking about getting employees to care and getting employees to buy into the vision and we spoke with some good examples we spoke about you know the receptionist at a doctor's office or the individual you mentioned that at the school but for somebody who's hiring in a very boring I put boring and air quotes boring industry and they feel like they're hiring you know sales reps and there's sales jobs all over the place and and people are coming and going and they have high churn and they're asking how do I get this particular employee in an unsexy industry in an unsexy job and there's no altruism associated inherently with selling software right into an industry that don't care about how do I get that employee to care let's get real again or let's not play if I owned a car dealership I would say if you were looking for a job easy in easy out churning your way through a file and earning a certain kind of commission here's the phone number of four of my competitors please go work there I eager to send you there but if you want to put yourself on the hook and you want to explore what it is to do a different kind of interaction with customers and a different kind of transparency with your boss here's how we do things around here and this is what I need from you and this is what you're going to get from me and I'm going to keep my end of the bargain and if you don't keep your end of the bargain you will know it before I do and if you want to get real this is the kind of place we're going to build together now does that mean everyone will want to be one of my customers of course not the reason we have car salesmen the way they do is that many car buyers want there to be car salesmen like that they want high pressure and deception because it works that's if it didn't work I guarantee you it wouldn't be there but we're going to appeal to a different kind of customer and in fact Ike Sewell years ago had a Cadillac dealership in Texas there was a number one Cadillac dealership in America because he did exactly the same thing one of the things he did and Zigg used to tell the story Zigg or Tom Peters Zigg one of the things he used to do is every three months the sales manager and the service manager had to switch jobs why would you do that you would do it because then the service manager would hear all the promises the salespeople had been making about what service would do and then the sales manager would hear about all the times people had been disappointed by the service people and by creating this empathy by moving people around and professionalizing the work it created a completely different kind of dealership but if you went in to Sewell Cadillac with a piece of paper and said I think I can save twelve dollars over at your competitor there say you want to lift go save twelve dollars we're not gonna we're not racing to the bottom so everyone just want to take a second thank the sponsor of today's episode brevo now 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consolidated toolbox to scale their business it's trusted by over 500,000 businesses across 180 countries it includes leaders like sedexo Louis Vuitton car four eBay Michelin they all rely on brevo's robust technology and extensive integrations to deliver unparalleled customer experiences reduce costs drive sales this is what you got to do get started with brevo for free by clicking our link below or going to brevo.com slash success and use the promo code success to save 50% on your first three months of the starter and business plan that's brevo.com slash success promo code success and sign up for free and one you know one of the things that we're speaking about is is also is also meaningful work I love that by the way I just want to I want to wrap up with this I want to actually there's two things I want to wrap up with excuse me so I want to talk first which is very relevant now in a post-COVID environment where everything's virtual and everyone's working from home and you you touch on meetings a lot in the book and why there's basically an over emphasis on meetings and I think it's gotten even worse now and I think you can test it as you you couldn't have two seconds of content to deliver to a person or a peer or a coworker and you spend an hour on a on a zoom call right it's ridiculous so knowing knowing the current environment and how unhealthy meetings have become and how ridiculous meeting culture has become how do we fix this particular thing in a business because I think that this is very tiring I was just speaking to somebody earlier today that actually gave scientific facts as to why when we're talking on a meeting it's it's more on a zoom calls more tiring because we don't have the the type of signals and connections between ourselves and our brains that we would have for sitting in the same room and it takes a lot of cognitive power to understand what the person is saying and the cues the nonverbal cues aren't there so it's just exhausting it's very bad for organization how do we fix this how do we solve for meetings so meetings aren't the problem meetings are the symptom of the problem and the problem is we're not able to ask our boss and our co-workers what is this for and if you're not able to ask what is this for whatever it is then you haven't made an agreement to be significant if the question what is this for if the answer is because we always do it this way then it answers itself so my friend Toby has a company with more than 5,000 employees 10,000 and he also knows how to program he went in and deleted every regularly scheduled group meeting in the entire company on a Sunday just from everyone's Google calendar just disappeared and then on Monday everyone got an email and it said if you really need this meeting back you can have it but why don't you try it without for a while he said it's the company millions and millions of dollars in untold frustration so if we can't say to our boss I see you have a meeting scheduled for an hour what's it for would it be easier if you recorded a five minute video and just email that to everybody if you can't have that conversation then meetings aren't really the problem the problem is you can't even ask about it and the last thing I wanted to ask you you make a wonderful reference about the focus on creating meaningful work like Mozart as opposed to background noise like music so how do you how do you quantify how do you how do you measure meaningful work what is the new metric as a business that we should be striving to attain so music in terms of number of years touched it's pretty popular any elevators playing music not Mozart but for me the question is did you make a change happen did you take a risk to do a generous act for anyone that the goal of being significant is the smallest unit of change in a good way for the smallest viable number of people because then you get to do it again stop worrying about mass stop worrying about average stop worrying about scale and worry about better instead because if you can create a better day for everyone who interacts the business part will take care of itself I love that now if people want to go get the book when is it coming out I mean you can drop all the socials that you want to drop but where should they go get the book what can they learn from the book outside of what we spoke about today who's this book for I'm just give a little bit of a primer so that somebody's really clocked into what they're going to get it from it and then give some dates because I think I have the days but I'm in front of me so right so we're talking this coming out at the end of May May 30th the book comes out if you go to sets.blog slash song s o n g there's some videos there for me there's a link the podcast there and there's lots of ways to buy the book you will not find me in most of social media because I don't want to be the product I would rather do my work and perhaps you could try that too I like that okay last question I ask everyone and you know what if you write a 20 second and a 23rd and a 24 I have no doubt you're going to keep writing books well we'll see how this answer changes as you release next book and next book and next book but I ask everybody the same question so after your career after all your accomplishments the businesses you built the books you've written what is success mean to you sometimes if I'm good at what I do the people I teach teach somebody else and I don't need credit I don't even want credit I just want to know that I made things a little bit better