Speaker 2
And is it hard for you to say no to having a team member come on board that might save you time or might amplify your time? How do you think through that? So
Speaker 1
I've hired thousands, maybe a thousand people in my career. Uh, at one point, uh, Yo-Yo Dine had 90 employees and 52 of them reported directly to me. And it was thrilling. It was thrilling because there was always someone who wanted my advice and they would do what I would say. I mean, it's like, and I was running at double speed. And one can do that for a while, but I realized my life was going to be shallow if that's how I was going to spend it. And as the world changed and it got easier to hire freelancers, what I found is while I love the feeling of camaraderie that comes from having a team, people who've got your back, you've got their back, I was spending a lot of time making sure my team was well cared for because that gave me satisfaction. But that time I was spending was sometimes frustrating and was keeping me from doing the work that only Seth Godin could do. And what I decided, even though it's lonely sometimes, is to say, if I have a task and I can write a spec for it, I'm going to get someone cheaper than me to do it. And so I've got dozens of people who've done projects for me on Upwork and I've got a Rolodex of editors and things like that. But every word that I write, I wrote myself because that's me. That's what I want to do. But if you said to me, oh, Seth, why don't you make a collectible chocolate bar? I would say, yeah, I'm going to make a collectible chocolate bar, but I'm not going to make the chocolate. Sean's going to make the chocolate. Lauren's going to make the chocolate. I'm just going to make the wrapper because that's my contribution. So I guess what I'm getting at is it's easier than ever to have a team, but it's more expensive than ever to have a full-time group that is beholden to you for their paycheck and their rent.
Speaker 2
And was there a specific moment in that when you talk about you had that realization of perhaps that's what you didn't want? Was there a specific moment you can think back to where you kind of looked around and realized this is not what I want? And how did you even start that process of shifting and get, because what you share now is such amazing perspective. I'm thinking about the solopreneur listening and who maybe thinks they have to hire a team and they might be listening thinking, wait a minute, there's another way of doing this. So I'm just curious, was there moments for you in that?
Speaker 1
Three times. It's happened to me three times. I'm a slow learner. The first time was when we sold Yo-Yo Dine to Yahoo. And it was, I've never been divorced, but it felt like getting divorced, like breaking up the family. We had so much love and connection among the 90 of us. And then it was all gone. And it was heartbreaking. And it took me a year to recover. Everyone else recovered faster than me. And then I kept my promise for about four years. And then I built Squidoo and we had nine people. And Squidoo became the 40th biggest website in the US with only nine employees. And then one day, without explanation, Google shut us down. And we had to break up the family again. And the third time was when I built the Alt-MBA and Akimbo. And I built that to six full-time people and 140 coaches around the world. And again, I felt the same feeling, which is, this is thrilling, but I'm carrying too much. This is hurting my soul to have people depend on me like And so when the itch came again, and I did the carbon almanac, I was very clear. I'm a volunteer. You're a volunteer. This project does not last forever. And I'm not going to be able to pay your rent because I just take it very seriously that if you are, people are depending on you for their livelihood. The word livelihood has a word inside and you don't want to be the person who takes it away from them. I love being in sync with other people. I found that being a boss was something I took to personally.
Speaker 2
freelancing um really exploding right now and people starting to celebrate the fact that they are doing the thing that they love whereas a few years ago all I was seeing was I have x amount of team members as if that was the badge of honor for success so I just so appreciate that perspective of of it three times and deciding you know what this is the way to go and I want to I want to go back to something that you said that was just so powerful about being a wandering generality. I just think that's such an easy place to drop into in the beginning of your business. When you get in and you think, I think this is where I want to go. There's opportunities in multiple different places. Let me try out and test and and just kind of follow that versus coming up with that hypothesis in the big beginning so in terms of strategy what would you say to that person who feels like they maybe have fallen into being a little bit of everything to everyone and they're not sure how to distill that thing or what it is really that they are great at and can serve people best with. So
Speaker 1
here's the big secret of strategy for someone in the shoes you're talking about. I'm lowering my voice because it's a secret. The secret is you don't have to be original. In fact, you should steal one. You should find somebody in a slightly different industry who is living a life like you'd like to live, who is doing work like you'd like to do. And then you should say, how did they do that? Who exactly are they serving? So in my case, I met Guy Kawasaki and Tom Peters, both when I was 24 years old, 23 years old. And I saw that it was possible to make a living going to a conference and giving a speech. And I said to myself, there's a model here. And it took me 10 more years to get to the point where it started to happen. But I was just copying, right? I didn't want to be the next Tom Peters. We already had a Tom Peters. But I saw that there was an industry there that could use someone like me. When I was in the book business before I was an author, I understood that someone could make a living coming up with an idea for a book and selling it to a book publisher. So I met with those people and I said, you know, Hey, uh, John Boswell, how do you do that? Tell me, show me. And people will be incredibly generous about this. And I understood how that was working. So many of my books are filled with stories of people who made a strategy work. Just copy it. So like today in AI, my friend Dan Shipper is building a newsletter business, teaching people what AI can do. He didn't invent the newsletter business. He's just doing a newsletter about a different thing. And so to show up and say, this is completely original. starting a restaurant where the lights are off all the time, and we also sell candles during the day. Like, great, that's fantastic, but it's not going to work because it's never worked before. Just go copy something. It's your life's too short to be completely original. I
Speaker 2
think that's so freeing for people. Life's too short to be completely original. I think it's so freeing. I can even feel people just exhaling, listening to that.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, you don't have to, I'm sorry, you don't have to copy someone exactly because it's too late to be the next one of them, but it needs to rhyme. And the rhyming shows you understand their strategy. I
Speaker 2
love that. And so speaking of taking that big exhale, one thing you mentioned was about not spending time on social media. And I constantly have this guilt about not being on platforms. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not on this. I'm not on that. I just do. I know one platform and I do it well, and I've stuck with it and I don't really want to go out there, but I get guilty and I can kind of talk myself around it and I have to really consistently reel it in. I want to know how you think about that of feeling like you need, do you need to be on every platform? How do you decide which is the platform for you? You know, as new ones pop up, how do you make those decisions and have that discernment? Because before we know it, we can be on 10 different platforms and we don't even do our job during the day.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Don't feel guilty, Natalie. You're changing lives all the time. There's nothing to feel guilty about. It comes back to who I'm seeking to serve and what are people relying on. So if someone says, what I represent is the canary, I show up in every coal mine. As soon as a piece of new media shows up, you can count on me being one of the first users. Well, if that's your reputation, then when a new one shows up, you got to do it, but then you got to leave the old ones because you can't do them all. In my case, I saw that my blog was the center of how I could communicate with people. And so if a social media platform shows up that I can plug my blog into, I do. And I never go back there again. But when TikTok showed up, I'm like, oh, I get this. If I want to engage with 15 year olds and 20 year olds, I got to start being on TikTok. I have no choice but to do that. I have to figure out how to make my content work in 60 second bits. And I got to start making it. And I thought, I can't do everything. And the chances that I'm going to be a star there are zero, unless I build a big team and start over. So I didn't stay away from TikTok because I was afraid. stayed away from TikTok because I had confidence that maybe it would work. And then what would happen? So the problem is we live in a comparison culture that every year when Forbes publishes its list of the 400 richest people in the world, they make 399 people really unhappy because all the billionaires are keeping track of is who are they ahead of, right? If you have $6 billion, why can't you just think you're the richest person in the world? You have all the same resources, but you got suckered in to measuring something that doesn't matter. Well, you know what doesn't matter? It doesn't matter how many Instagram followers you have. It doesn't matter if you get 42 million views on TikTok because 42 million views on TikTok does not change anyone's life. And you also can't make a living with it. So focus on what you want, not what Mark Zuckerberg wants you to want.