The Gently Mad

What an honor it was to talk to Seth Godin. I almost decided to title this episode The One Where Seth Godin Kicks Me in the Ass, because that’s kind of what happened. 

I kept talking about one thing and Seth kept trying to bring me around to another thing. I’d like to think in the time since we recorded this conversation, I’ve taken put some of Seth’s advice into practice.

Regardless, I had a tremendously fun time talking to one of my heroes. Seth is an amazingly smart and kind man and oozes wisdom.

A self-described starter of projects, Seth is the author of 18 bestselling books and I was was truly delighted to speak with him about life, business, meaning and how all of that intersects.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“A marketer’s job is to tell a story that resonates with us.”

“All the people who talk about market and study up on the short-cuts are never heard from five years later.”

“You do not find anybody who has built a career or a life that they’re proud who says,’Seven years ago I discovered shortcut X and told everyone and spent all my time on shortcut X’. This is not the way it works.”

“I think that it is worthy to have a job. I think that many of us need to have a job and a job is the thing you do to feed your family. And the work is what we call it when we are doing the thing that is personal, when we are doing the thing that makes our heart beat faster, when we are doing the thing that contributes to the community. And sometimes (and I would put myself in this category), we are fortunate enough to have both be the same thing. But if you are requiring both to be the same thing and want to bootstrap your way into that, you’re going to cripple each of them.”

“I think what makes the work worth talking about is tension and fear. There is tension because we are simultaneously doing something that might work and something that might not work. And living with both of those things at the same time is very difficult for most people.”

“It’s one thing to be afraid. But mostly we are afraid of being afraid. Mostly we are insulating ourselves from any situation where we might actually feel afraid. And that is why people look for shortcuts and that is why people hesitate to do work that matters. Not because we can’t deal with the fear, but because the fear of the fear is keeping us from even trying.”

“My thesis is that this tension, this fear, this felling is the *point*. If we go to work and we do not feel it, we’re not actually at work.”

“What professionals do is they go to work to face the fear on a regular basis. What professionals do not do is wait until they’re in the mood. They do not wait for inspiration to strike. They show up on a regularly basis, find the thing they’re afraid of and dance with it.”

“I think that most people have the ability to have a job where someone doesn’t tell them what to do every minute of the day. If you have one of those jobs, you could *chose* to fill it with meaning.”

“The fact is if you’re trusted and known by people who count on you, you’re probably not going to have trouble making a living.”

“It is entirely possible to make a living doing work you believe in. But it’s also true that most of the people who whine about this have not developed sufficient talent. They’re jus

I feel privileged to call Nathan Barry a friend. He’s one of the most generous people I know and the conversation we recorded a few months ago was a really great.  

I’m excited to finally share it with you here. We talked about so many different things, but I think the theme of the show really came down to Nathan’s commitment to consistent daily progress.

That was a huge takeaway for me because I so easily get caught up in big picture stuff and forget that the only way to actually get better at what I do is to show up every day and do it.

Nathan is the author of three books on design and marketing and the founder of ConvertKit, an email marketing company for authors.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“I think the biggest thing you can do is just keep slowly making progress and celebrating those tiny wins. Like if all you can manage for a particular day, celebrate that as a win. You made progress.”

“Maybe I only did an hours worth of work today, but it moved my business forward. It’s forward progress.”

“Probably the biggest lesson for the entire year was realizing that I have enough. Revenue doesn’t have to double every year. I don’t always have to be scrambling to achieve bigger numbers and that’s not necessarily going to bring any more happiness or anything.”

“For a long time I wrote 1,000 words a day and I built an amazing business because of it, but it got to a point where I felt trapped.”

“I want people to think beyond tactics. The real point is that you need to be looking at it from the very beginning as building a system. The work that I’m doing now will benefit me for years to come.”

“This is something I’ve had to work on so much. If you’re just chasing short term revenues. then that work you day that might make you a couple hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars, but it will be one-time revenue. And so if you’re trying to live a balanced life, you’ve got to think in terms of how is this going to help me for years to come and not just this week.”

“The very first book I wrote could have been about how to make money self-publishing books, but it would have been the stupidest thing to do because I didn’t know anything. It would have been hypocritical and wrong.”

“The best people are the ones who have already put in the time to become good at their craft and now they want to teach it. You can start building an audience while your still learning and I highly recommend that, but I wouldn’t start selling training products unless you’re actually good at your craft.”

“You should always start very specifically. I find the more narrow the topic, the easier it to sell and grow what you’re doing.”

“I’ve seen major improvements when someone can learn how to design and create their own product and ship better software and all that, but it’s not nearly as life changing as being able to teach someone how to make $10,000 on the side by teaching some valuable skill.”

“I didn’t go into any of this consciously with a master plan. I think those just never work out. What you have to do instead is say, this is the one thing I’m going to do and you do your absolute best at that one thing and then you see what opportunities open up to you.”

“You have to get passed this idea of things have to be perfect before they launch.”

In this episode I talk about some things I've been lately that I think can help you change your life for the better in 2015.  

Most people set multiple goals. I want to lose weight, I want to spend more time with my family, I want to make more money, I want to get out of debt, etc. Don’t do this. If you set 10 goals this year, all you’re doing is creating nine distractions to the No. 1 thing you really want to do.

It’s a process of reverse-engineering. Decide what it is you want to do and then work backward to figure out what you need to do every day to achieve it.

“If you would go every day to a very large tree and take five swings at it with a very sharp ax, eventually, no matter how large the tree, it would have to come down.” ~ Ron Scolastico

If you set a goal of making $20k this year, there’s a chance you’ll make it. But what if you set a goal to make $1 million? The chances are low that you’ll hit that goal, but you’ll probably blow way past $20k. It’s really hard to fail completely if you aim high enough.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” ~ T.S. Eliot

If try to wait until you’re completely prepared and have all the answers, you’ve waited too long. First of all, you’ll never be completely ready. The work will expand to fill all the time you give it.

And there’s also a great amount of fear that comes with the risk of jumping in before you’re ready. But it’s my personal belief that facing those fears and forcing ourselves to do something before we think we’re ready is the best way to accomplish something great and meaningful.

“Some are always in a state of preparation, occupied in previous measures, forming plans, accumulating materials, and providing for the main affair. These are certainly under the secret power of idleness. Nothing is to be expected from the workman whose tools are for ever to be sought. I was once told by a great master, that no man ever excelled in painting, who was eminently curious about pencils and colors.” ~ Samuel Johnson in Idleness

In this episode we're going to hear from a guy who has made the indiepreneur jump several times. In fact just recently before we recorded this episode he left a company he co-founded to start all over working for himself.

The man in question is, of course, Caleb Wojick from DIYvideoguy.com.

Caleb is one of my favorite people and over the last few months since we recorded this conversation has become a friend. He's helped me through a ton of stuff and this episode is a bit of a break from the norm in that it's literally packed from start to finish with great insight into how to make a living doing your own thing.

Caleb teaches creatives how to make better web videos and makes videos for start-ups and solopreneurs.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“Everything I do starts with writing, so the more I write, the more I can produce. If I just sit in front of a microphone and have a topic, that’s really hard.”

“The first thing you need to do is grow an audience and that has to be on a specific topic and it just takes time. And until you have an audience of people who care about what you’re saying, it’s going to be hard to make money.”

“It been over 10 years of me searching for this thing. I was just searching and searching. And I still don’t know what this will look like in 10 years. I think that you eventually learn that you have fall in love with not knowing what’s going to happen.”

“You don’t have to decide you’re entire life today, but you can decide what you’re going to do with your life right now and focus on that.”

“If you commit to something for long enough, you’re going to get good at it.”

“I think a commitment to improvement is key to [success].”

“If you aren’t question what you’re doing with your life, I think that you’ve gone into this lazy, lackadaisical, non-caring mode. And I think you need to question what you’re doing. Not to the extent of depression and anxiety, but to wake up in the morning and think, how am I feeling, how am I doing, how am portraying myself to my audience and is there anything I can improve on.”

“One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past three years of working for myself is that you can work the burnout schedule, but eventually you hit a wall. So for me I had to learn how to recharge.”

“The whole idea of committing yourself to something for a long time has greatly influenced my current path of getting better at stuff.”

“Spend less time planning and more time doing stuff. And doing stuff publicly. Share the kind of things you’re making. It’s important to plan stuff out, but unless you starting doing stuff, you’re not going to get better at it.”

As always, I had a great time talking to Caleb. Enjoy the show!

I'm a hardcore music lover and so is my friend Noah Stokes. We decided to do a fun episode where we thought we would play clips from our top five albums of the year and let the fighting ensue.  

Turns out, our tastes in music are much more similar than we would have thought. This episode was a great break from the routine and if you're a music lover (and who isn't, really?), I think you'll enjoy it.

As always, I had a great time talking to Noah. Enjoy the show!

Noah on Rdio
Adam on Rdio
@motherfuton
@avclark

I remember when I first picked up Donald Miller's book, Blue Like Jazz, in a Barnes and Noble more than 10 years ago. It changed my life and he's since become one of my favorite authors of all time. 

I was thrilled to be able to sit down with him at his office in Nashville and talk about writing, business, life and how to figure out what really matters in all of it.

To say I was excited would be an understatement. I can't even pick my favorite parts of this conversation because the whole thing was so good. But I'll do my best.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“If there’s one thing I do it’s that I just try to communicate everything in a clear and compelling way.”

“Being a writer is very very difficult and I was just naive enough to *not* know I couldn’t do it.”

“Writing is a craft, as romantic as it is, it’s also the same kind of work that a plumber does. Just have to show up every day and do it well.”

“I was convinced the first book was gonna be a huge best-seller and it sold, like, 27 copies.”

“I emulated what I loved. Anne Lamott gave me courage and J.D. Salinger gave me a voice.

“You just have to do the work to write a really great book.”

“The year after the NYT best seller’s list was not an easy year. It was a hard year and somewhat depressing. Because I really thought that it would be Mecca, that it would be amazing. But when that happened it wasn’t as meaningful of an experience as I had hoped it would be. So I began to think about what am I looking for if it’s not success? What will feed me? what will validate me?”

“It took me another 10 years to get back to enjoying writing. I wrote books during that time, but they were labors. How are you going to produce your best work with the burden on your shoulders of your best work?”

“I know now, it’s very dangerous to have a goal that you’re trying to reach. I like having a goal that I’m trying to pass through on the way to another goal. And that to me is much more helpful because you can celebrate passing through this goal and yet you still have something to do. We were designed in my opinion to stay in motion, to keep moving.”

“One of the most healing things you can do is have [work to do].

“I can’t remember the last time I was depressed because I wake up and have something to do and people who depend on me to do it. Who has to time to sit and reflect on the sadness of life? I’ve got stuff to do.”

“I’m not a big fan of ‘what now?’”

“If you don’t know what you’re doing with your life, then just try a bunch of stuff and see what lights you up.”

As always, I had a great time talking to Donald. Enjoy the show!

@donaldmiller
CreatingY

Derek Webb has been one of my favorite musicians for as long as I can remember. He’s always managed to release albums that spoke to exactly whatever stage of life I was in at the time.

After a 20-year career, and dozens of albums (as a solo artist and with Caedmon’s Call), Derek has decided to move more into the business side of the music industry as the President of NoiseTrade, a company he founded in 2006.

We recorded this interview in person in Nashville a few months ago and I was amazed by how so many of his thoughts and experiences as a signer and songwriter applied to my life as an entrepreneur and online content maker.

I have to admit, I was a bit star-struck during this interview and just sat back and let Derek do the talking. Which, as it turns out, was a good thing because he has so many great things to say about business, the struggle, and what it takes to make it.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“You’re not owed a career. It is incumbent upon artists, even great, talented artists, to also be smart and to also be tenacious and adaptive, and if you’re not you’re … you’re probably not going to make it”

“It used to be that the enemy was scarcity. Now the problem is obscurity.”

“20 years ago in the music business there was the professional class and the amateurs and there was no in-between. There was only one marketing plan and that was swim up stream into the head of the sales curve. But then suddenly, everybody could make records, everybody could distribute records … So, there’s finally a middle class. There’s finally a blue color living to be made as an artist. You’re not making a million dollars, you’re not a household name, but you can make a great living playing music. You just have to take it seriously and work hard.”

“If what you want is fame and fortune, that was never really real in the first place.”

“Achtung Baby is the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree” ~ Bono

“I love the idea, honestly, of 20 years on the music business being a footnote to a new season of entrepreneurial work for me.”

“I’m not trying to say anything to anybody. I don’t have any kind of agenda that way, because it constrains the art. Like for me to say, ‘I’m going try to so this to that group’, well now I’ve already put these narrow guardrails around and how can I now trust my creative instincts?”

“There’s nothing worse than being famous for something you don’t like. I’d rather fail at trusting my instincts completely than succeed at compromising them.”

“The job of any artist is to look at the world and tell us what you see.”

“If the only choice is to start making compromises on the actual art, in order to sell more records and draw more people to me, that’s just a line a couldn’t cross.”

“I want to keep making records that I want to make and if I can’t make living from it, then I have to figure out something else to do, I have to figure out how to subsidize my own work.”

“I subsidize my ability to continue making the kind of records I want to make and not have to put the burden of making a living on it.”

As always, I had a great time talking to Derek. Enjoy the show!

“Everything good that’s happened to me over the last five years is the result of starting a blog. Of putting my thoughts and words down on the page.” One of my favorite conversations so far, Corbett Barr (if that’s his real name) is the real deal.

Corbett and I spoke at length on this topic and it's one of my favorite conversations so far. I've wanted to get Corbett Barr (if that's his real name) on the show for a long time and when we finally made it happen, I didn't want to waste a minute of it. We really covered the gamut in this one, folks.

We talked about taking risks and pursuing our dreams, audience building (how to do it and how NOT to do it), product building, entrepreneurship as a lifestyle, what “success” really is and so much more.

Corbett is co-founder of Fizzle, a community and video training libraries for people working to become self-employed. He's also one of those guys who just exudes wisdom. It kind of pours our of him like sweat. So get read to get a little Corbett wisdom sweat on you.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“There are a million ways to win, you just have to be at the right place at the right time”

“You can only do so much to create a really great product and you never what thing is going to take off and what thing isn’t and a lot of times the solution is to buy more lottery tickets because each project is essentially a lottery ticket and you can’t get better at winning the lottery.”

“It may be that your thing just isn’t good enough.”

“You owe it to yourself to examine every tactic your aware off and pick it apart and follow you’re own internal compass.”

“It is possible to create a really great product that goes nowhere if you’re not willing to promote it at all”

“When you say [these tactics] work, the problem is who do they work better on?”

For some who is using [these tactics], they might win the short term game of getting more subscribers or whatever, but what they lose is is the influence game, over time.”

“You do this sort of stuff long enough and you lose influence with the people that matter.”

“Most people don’t think for themselves. They just look to the clues, the influencers, the reviews, the social proof. So maybe what matters is not reaching each individual person who comes to your site be reaching the people whose opinion matters because that’s how you’re going to grow an audience anyway.”

“Some of the people that are close to me and that I’ve worked hard to cultivate are worth 100,000 email subscribers.”

“Everything good that’s happened to me over the last five years is the result of starting a blog. Of putting my thoughts and words down on the page.”

“I find that over time if put constraints on myself in terms of what the topic is, who I’m writing for and what goal it has to achieve, then I end up not enjoying the process so much and that’s where friction happens and that’s where a great project can sort of get stuck in the muck.”

“People can sense desperation in your career.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of if you commit to living your life in the meantime.”

“[Eventually] you learn that any sort of adversity is just another challenge and there’s always a way around it.”

“There’s no reason the an

Justin is a product-maker, interview and host of his own podcast, Product People (url) and one of the best thinkers about what makes products work and how to get inside the minds of your audience.

We talked about one of my favorite topics, Seinfeld, and how comedy relates to our work as content producers. We also dove into, music, film, Steve Jobs and whether genius is innate or if it can be learned.

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

“I don’t think people really like my writing, but they just like the idea of what I right about.”

“I think that’s what I’m actually good at, is kind of identifying something deep inside people’s guts that they’ve felt, but never been able to verbalize.”

“Time and attention is a form of currency and if you can figure out how to get people to spend their time and attention on something that you’ve created, there is a transaction that goes on there.”

“One of the problems I see people having is that they jump straight from doing nothing to trying to make something they could sell.”

“Making something for money is a lot harder than selling something for people’s time and attention.”

“If you haven’t learned the skills in terms of what it takes to give their time and attention, how are you actually going to convince them to take out their wallets.”

“It’s hard to convince people to do anything. It’s all about psychology. So if you haven’t practiced, you’re going to fail.”

“None of this is new. The problem is we’re not practiced … in knowing what people really care about”

“You expose that thing that no one ever expresses and other people feel relieved.”

“I think people know what they want when they see it, but they can’t articulate it.”

“Others-centeredness doesn’t always have to be altruistic. Sometimes it can just be, ‘I’m doing this for myself”, but acknowledging that it’s for other people. I’m doing this because it matches up with what other people desire.”

As always, I had a great time talking to Justin. Enjoy the show!

Many friends have told me I'm not promoting this show or my contest enough. I don't know what else to do, so I'm doing this. Hope you have a great weekend. Enjoy!