Simple Steps for Getting Unstuck: Do THIS and Change Your Life

Seth Godin (00:00:35):

The only place to begin is where you are. If you're waiting to get to somewhere else before you begin, you're never going to get there. If we're going to do something important, there's going to be resistance. If you don't feel resistance, it might not be important enough. Okay, two words. You ready? Yes. Pick yourself. The dominant system wants you to wait to be invited to go on a reality show, to be invited to apply for a job. They want you to go to the placement office and wait for the company to come interview you. The idea that someone else will pick you and authorize you, they will call you up and they say, "Mel, we know you have a novel in you. Would you please write the novel and we will publish it? " The end. It's really awkward to say, "Yeah, I picked myself. I wrote this. Here. I made this. " No one's forcing you to not wait. You're choosing to wait. What a safe, lovely place to hang out. Congratulations. You've built a perfect place to hide. Go Make A Ruckus is simple. It's work that matters for people who care.

Mel Robbins (00:01:38):

Hey, it's Mel, and I am so excited to learn from Seth Godin to be inspired. You are not going to be the same person after watching this today. But here's the thing. My team just told me that 57% of you that watch the Mel Robbins podcast here on YouTube are not subscribers. So here's how you know you're not a subscriber. The button is lighting up right now. It is free to hit subscribe. I know you're the kind of person that loves supporting people who support you. So I want to thank you in advance. Thank you for hitting subscribe. It's the best way to show our team that you love what we're doing. It also supports us in helping you bring world-class, world-renowned experts like Seth Godin, 20 bestselling consecutive books in a row. He's about to pour into you like you've never felt before. I don't want you to miss his thing.

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That's why hitting subscribe matters. Thanks for doing that. All right. Let's get into the show. Seth Godin, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Seth Godin (00:02:35):

Dream come true. Thank you for having me, Mel.

Mel Robbins (00:02:37):

It's a dream come true because more than anyone else ... I'm going to start crying and we're talking about more than anyone else you have really taught me how to overcome fear and resistance and put art out into the world. You have taught me everything I know about how I think about making an impact with people and communicating and marketing and having courage. And I'm really proud that you're here because our company, 143 Studios in this podcast, is run by people who are students of yours. I can't wait to see the impact that this conversation has on absolutely anyone and everyone that listens to it, that watches it. It is my mission that together we ignite a bonfire inside someone's soul. And they not just listen, but they do something with it.

Seth Godin (00:03:51):

Thank you. One of the measures of my work is not what happens if I teach somebody, it's what they teach other people. And you have taught so many millions of people, and it's just a thrill to be in the same room with you.

Mel Robbins (00:04:07):

All right. I think let's do this.

Seth Godin (00:04:09):

Here we go.

Seth Godin (00:04:28):

If you think about whatever situation you're in, whether it's at work or at home, is there anything you could do to make it worse? Is there anything you could tell yourself a story you could tell yourself or an act you could accomplish that would make it worse? And I think we can all agree the answer is, of course. Well, by that measure, then there are things you can do to make it better, and you can make it better by choosing intentionally a strategy. And maybe we can rewire the story we're telling ourselves and not be a victim or a cog in an existing system, but build something that's generative and makes things better for people who care. And that might sound like a tall order, but if we can make things worse much without hardly any effort, we can probably make things better as well.

Mel Robbins (00:05:17):

I've never really thought about it that way. That it's true. If you just really ponder that question, how could I make my life worse? I could come up with a hundred things that would make it way worse today. And yet we do not really stop and think about the endless ways that you could make your life, your work, your relationships better. Given how many people you have taught, given how many people who have been impacted by your work, just to open up the aperture of possibility for somebody, what are some of the wide ranging things that people have made better by embracing so many of the concepts that we're about to dig into today?

Seth Godin (00:06:03):

It's tempting to just point to numbers and what did you grow? How big was your organization? But I think it all starts at home. It all starts with the first noise we hear in our head when we wake up and the last thing we say to someone we care about when we go to bed. And all of that is fueled by the story we tell ourselves, the story of being a victim or the story of being an architect, the story of saying, "That person, that one right across the table from me, under the circumstances, they are doing their very best. I can't change them, but I can change the circumstances." And so we begin by realizing that people who have had much worse things happen to them than you or to me or to you have somehow figured out a way to thrive, to thrive given where they are right now because the only place to begin is where you are.

(00:07:01):

If you're waiting to get to somewhere else before you begin, you're never going to get there. We have to start where we are, acknowledge what's happening right around us, and then make a choice. Make a choice about whether we want to change things or whether we want them to stay the same, but you're only a victim if you want to be.

Mel Robbins (00:07:22):

I don't think anyone likes to hear you're only a victim if you want to be.

Seth Godin (00:07:26):

Well, let me be really clear. I won the birthday lottery. I won the parent lottery. I was born with so many advantages compared to people around me or people through the ages. There are people right now who are in relationships that are abusive. They're in debt up to their eyeballs. They're dealing with physical or mental disabilities. All of those things are true. And then what are you going to do? And then what are you going to do? So I'm using the word victim very carefully here. I'm not saying that bad things don't happen. They do. They often happen to people who don't deserve it. What I'm saying is, how should we process what just happened? Should we add a but or an? I'm on vacation, but it's raining means my vacation is ruined. But if it's, I'm on vacation and it's raining, it means I've opened up the door to, now what am I going to do with that?

Mel Robbins (00:08:24):

Can you give me a couple other examples of the power of but versus and?

Seth Godin (00:08:30):

Those words do a lot of heavy lifting in many sentences, in many stories we tell ourselves. I want this person to have exactly the wedding they want, but I also want it to fit into my budget and be the wedding I want. Well, that word but is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And this is one of the key things that's unlocked with the let them theory, which is you can let people do things, but you can't have your butt at the same time. You can't have your and at the same time. There are things that are in front of us that are problems, and there are things that are in front of us that are situations. Problems have solutions. Situations do not. So if it's a situation, we have no choice but to accept it because it has no solution. But if it's a problem, it can be solved.

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You might not like the solution, but it can be solved. And so my takeaway from your brilliant book is if that person's going to do what they're going to do, I can treat it like a situation. I can have a big fight about it or I can realize they're going to do what they're going to do and my solution to the problem is to let them.

Seth Godin (00:09:55):

Correct. So I trained as a mechanical engineer years and years ago in college. You can't rewrite the laws of physics. You can't be in two cities at the same time. You can't persuade a company to buy something from you if they don't want to buy it from you. Those are situations. Problems have solutions, you just might not like them in the short run, but there is a way forward if you're willing to accept an outcome that isn't the one you've been dreaming of. And so what I'm trying to do is let you off the hook if it's a situation. Okay, I can't change this, but it means I have to accept it or put you on the hook if it's a problem and say, "Yeah, if this is a problem, I might not like the solution and probably I have a solution in mind that I don't want to do, but I know what I could do. I just don't like it. " It's still a solution.

Mel Robbins (00:10:45):

Breakups, taking better care of yourself, sticking to a budget, putting yourself out there and risking the judgment of other people. These are all problems, but they have a solution. We just don't want to do it.

Seth Godin (00:11:03):

Yeah. So a simple technical one. If you're willing to have an uncomfortable conversation with your boss for 15 minutes a year, you'll make more money because in those 15 minutes, you can share your honest truth about where you are and where you want to go. But if it's too much trouble and too scary to do that, then you should settle for what you have. So the solution to the salary negotiation is there's probably going to be an awkward conversation. The same thing's true if your spouse loads the dishwasher in a way that you find really annoying, but you want them to just know that. You don't want to go through the 10 minutes of hassle to talk about it. Well, we know what the solution is. Tell the truth. Have a respectful conversation offering the other person empathy, but letting them hear what you need to say.

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You've solved the problem. It just wasn't fun to solve the problem.

Mel Robbins (00:11:56):

Well, most problems aren't all that fun to solve until you solve them.

Seth Godin (00:11:59):

The easy ones are already gone. Yeah.

Mel Robbins (00:12:01):

That's true. So you talked about noise, and one of the things that your work has taught me is just how much resistance I was manufacturing and putting in my own way. And when you first bump into your work, Seth, it can feel very confronting and you start to read Seth's stuff and you're like, "Who the hell does it ... Solutions, problems, noise." He has no idea. And then you start to really consider all of the resistance that you have to that list of things that you can generate that would make a situation better. I would love to just start to pull that apart because that's had the single biggest impact on me is really being truthful with myself about how much I am in my own way and how much I blame my stuff on other people and other things when it's really none of those things at all.

Seth Godin (00:13:06):

The word resistance means anything that we do to get in our own way to keep us from doing something that's going to scare us. And so let's talk about writer's block. Writer's Block was only invented a hundred years ago. We know who named it, the woman who wrote Frankenstein's near-dowell poet husband. And writer's block is based on the idea that you just don't have the muse telling you what to write today. This is nonsense. There's no such thing as writer's block. What happens is if it feels important, if writing a memo feels important, if painting something feels important, if going on a date with someone you've always wanted to go on a date with and it's tomorrow night feels important, we do something internally to insulate ourselves, to protect ourselves, to keep us from being on the hook because we got indoctrinated by school to do that because factory workers don't have to be on the hook.

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They just have to do what they're told. But it's also, I think, part of human nature. And resistance then is something that we cannot make go away. If we're going to do something important, there's going to be resistance. If you don't feel resistance, it might not be important enough. So the question then is, what do you do when it shows up? And the answer is you say thank you. Thanks for letting me know I'm on the verge of doing something important. Thanks for reminding me that this needs to be on the top of my priority list. The things I'm procrastinating, I'm procrastinating because of resistance. And so I now have a compass and the compass points me to the hard work to be done. And hard work I think is worth talking about for a minute. Hard work in the old days was how many pounds of gravel can you carry on your back because we don't have any machines.

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But now hard work is, did I come up with a solution that's not on the list of solutions? Did I tell the truth in a way that the other person could hear? Did I make a good decision? Did I write something that's never been written before, sing something that's never been sung before, paint something that's never been painted before? That's our job. And so when we think about how do we engage with our family? Well, if we're just going to put the stuff in the microwave oven, check all the boxes and then sit down and watch three hours of streaming every night, you're fitting in. You're making all the companies happy, but you're not facing the resistance, which is, what is the work that needs to be done that I'm afraid of?

Mel Robbins (00:15:43):

Why is doing the work that you're afraid of doing the secret to a more fulfilling life? Because you could mistake the word work for something related to your career or something that is on your to- do list. But I know that you're talking about something at a way more fundamental level that is about your experience of being alive and your experience of yourself as you're going through this life. So can we go deeper into what that means, what the work is?

Seth Godin (00:16:27):

I don't know anybody who wants to spend the rest of their life sitting on a beach, having a way to bring the Mai Tais. Every day, you're not allowed to do anything else. I think that would drive almost everyone crazy. When we have a chance to be productive in whatever form that is, whether or not we are getting paid for it, we have a chance to be fully alive. It could be the pottery you make in your spare time or the way you are raising your kids. It could be the fact that you volunteer at the local animal shelter. That's work. You're doing it because the work needs to be done and doing it well is gratifying. There's a magical side effect and the side effect is this gratifying life translates into a whole bunch of side effects, like more respect, like more independence, like more resilience in the bank because the universe can't wait for people to show up who do good work.

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They will line up outside your door and offer you friendship or respect or even money if you are the person who's willing to do the things other people are afraid to do.

Mel Robbins (00:17:40):

One of the things that is interesting is that if you think about something that you know is important to you, whether it's cleaning out the attic now that the kids are gone, nobody else seems to care about, but this just nags at you or it's really writing down all your grandmother's recipes and self-publishing a cookbook or it's starting that store on Etsy or it's volunteering at the community gardens. There is this nagging thing that is inside each and every one of us that we just shove away and shut down. And what you're talking about is that the resistance that you feel, because the things that are important don't go away. There is no amount of busyness that takes that kind of, it's an ache in there away. And so you're talking about and giving us this permission to really look at it differently. It's not a to- do.

(00:18:45):

It is some of the most important things that you could force yourself to spend time on.

Seth Godin (00:19:06):

Okay, two words. You ready?

Mel Robbins (00:19:07):

Yes.

Seth Godin (00:19:08):

Pick yourself. The dominant system does not want you to pick yourself. The dominant system wants you to wait to be invited to go on a reality show, to be invited to apply for a job. They want you to go to the placement office and wait for the company to come interview you. The idea that someone else will pick you and authorize you, they will call you up and they say, "Mel, we know you have a novel in you. Would you please write the novel and we will publish it? " And I'm speaking from experience here, I've talked to thousands of people in this very situation who have a book inside of them and my advice to them is it's simple. Make it into a PDF, email it to 20 people, ask them to share it with others for free. If it spreads, your phone will ring and now you can get hired to write another one.

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If it doesn't spread, write something better at the end and almost no one does this because it's really awkward to say, "Yeah, I picked myself. I wrote this here. I made this. " And those four words, here I made this are so challenging that it's easier to buy a cookbook and follow the recipe than to invent something you're going to serve to people you care about. And so if we can find a life where we can identify the things that are important to us, truly important to us, and then pick ourselves not to do the work to win a prize or get a medal, but because we have agency, because we could, the word for that is freedom. It is the responsibility of showing up to make a thing and offering it to the world. It might just be your family that notices the attic is clean, but you, you realize that you hired yourself to clean the attic.

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Don't wait till you're going to sell the house and the realtor hires you to clean the attic. You hired yourself to clean the attic and that sort of freedom and responsibility, that's where dignity lies. And everyone I've ever met wants more dignity in their life.

Mel Robbins (00:21:11):

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Seth Godin (00:22:36):

Life is high school, isn't it?

Mel Robbins (00:22:38):

It is.

Seth Godin (00:22:38):

And high school taught us a whole bunch at a very important moment of our life. And the people who got by who seemed the safest weren't the ones who were picking themselves. They were the ones who were sort of hiding out, hiding out in a uniform, hiding out in an attitude, hiding out in a clique, hiding out in a group, hiding out in a mob. And so the system wants us to hide out. It's much easier to sell you lunchables and to sell you the next thing on television if you are part of the crowd. And so we have to do some work to unteach this to ourselves. And that's one of the magical things about sharing this podcast because when you say to a friend, "I'm going to start acting this way. Listen to this, hold me accountable." You picked yourself, but you now picked someone to hold you accountable as well, and the cycle can continue.

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That one of the things we notice is that when you are a part of a scene, whether that scene is jazz musicians in Chicago in 1964 or Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs 10 years ago, you want to fit in with the group, the scene you are a part of. So if the scene you're a part of isn't getting you where you want to go, build a different one, build a different circle of people who ask each other hard questions about their relationships, about the books they're reading, about the books they're writing, about whatever it is you want to make, because we become who we hang out with and what they expect of us.

Mel Robbins (00:24:11):

I believe it's a fact that there's something about the hardwiring of a human being that is a fundamental need tied to growth, tied to learning, tied to connection and expressing yourself. And no matter how busy you get, no matter how much you drink, no matter how much money you make, no matter how broke you may get, you will still never outrun the things that are uniquely meant for you to do during this lifetime. They just have this kind of magical way of haunting you. And so that presents you with this choice. Do I sit knowing deep down there's some change I want to make? There's some way I want myself or my world or my family to be better. There's something I want to do. There's people I want to find, but instead of doing it, I am going to sit with the resistance that slowly is killing me as I think about it and actively deny or talk myself out of it.

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One of the things that I see a lot, Seth, when people write in is somebody will write in and say, "I've changed my life. I've lost some weight. I'm exercising. I feel incredible. I've started journaling every day. I'm also now selling this new skincare line or I got my realtor's license." My partner hates what I'm doing.

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They're not supportive at all. So can you talk a bit about the noise and the resistance that comes from the people around you and what to do with it if one of the reasons why you're not making the change you want to make is because of that outside pressure.

Seth Godin (00:25:57):

So when in doubt, look for the fear. There are three things that motivate people. Fear, affiliation, and status. So let's do them in reverse order. Status is who eats lunch first. Who's up and who's down? What kind of car are you driving? Is your desk closer to the bosses? Are you mom's favorite kid? Status. Affiliation is, who's to my left? Who's to my right? Am I wearing the right outfit? Is my hair the right style? Am I wearing the right glasses? Do I fit in? And between those two, underlying both is fear. It starts, of course, with the fear of death because we're all going to die, but it extends to a million things. We've figured out how to hook almost everything up to fear. So the people who are around you, who care about you are afraid, so are you. And that fear might involve not knowing the person you're about to become.

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That fear might involve catastrophizing what might happen if the world changed. But here's the thing, Mel. The world is really crazy right now, and this is as normal as it is ever going to be again. If you're waiting for things to get back to normal, you're going to be waiting a very long time. And so given that change is happening whether you like it or not, the question is, should we take agency and control and influence of that, or should we sit back and just wait? And so the people who you are listening to, who you are modeling your behavior around, they mean really well. Under the circumstances, they love you and they care about you, but the circumstances determine everything and the circumstances involve everything we've been taught, everything we've been led to expect and the systems we're all part of. And if it's working for you, don't change anything.

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But if it's not working for you, then we get back to the and but thing. If it's not working for you, you have to decide if it's not working bad enough that you're willing to deal with the short-term resistance and challenges to change it. And you're not guaranteed it's going to work out the way you hope, but you are guaranteed that you can influence it.

Mel Robbins (00:28:12):

So in the instance of somebody who has changed their lifestyle, they're now healthier, maybe they've cut back on the drinking, they're getting up earlier, their spouse is sleeping in. It feels like they're growing a little bit apart. If we use the but and you could say, "I'm getting healthier and I'm feeling great and I'm making positive changes, but my spouse doesn't like it. " Versus, "I'm getting healthier, I'm making positive changes, I'm feeling much better, and my spouse doesn't like it."

Seth Godin (00:28:48):

And if it's the second one, now you owe your relationship something because your spouse can't fix this problem by themselves because if they could, they already would've. So you can just announce a situation and live with it. Or you could say, "What would it mean for me to really see my spouse, to really see their fear, to really understand how they might feel rejected or denigrated by the fact that I'm doing this thing that they secretly would like to do to, but can't. How can I put effort into helping them feel the firm foundation that our relationship has when it's at its best?" And there are lots of ways to do that, but none of them are guaranteed. But if you don't work at it, it's probably not going to work very well.

Mel Robbins (00:29:35):

Well, I love just the simplicity of but and, because when you say but, now all of a sudden it means the spouse is the reason you got to stop doing it or they're the biggest reason why it's hard for you. When you say and you basically separate yourself and them and you hold space for both things to be true and therefore they don't become the excuse, they just become one of the problems Problems or the facts of what you're dealing with, and now you can decide how you're going to make this better.

Seth Godin (00:30:06):

Correct. That's exactly right.

Mel Robbins (00:30:08):

It's super easy.

Seth Godin (00:30:09):

So if you think about the marathon, we're in Boston.

Mel Robbins (00:30:12):

Okay.

Seth Godin (00:30:14):

Some people run the Boston Marathon and make it 24 miles and then they stop. And some people finish it. And the only difference between the people who finish the marathon and the people who almost finish the marathon is the people who finish the marathon figure out where to put the tired. They're both tired. But if you quit at 24, you can't handle all the tired. You got to stop. But the difference is the people who make it to 26, they're tired too. They just figure out where to put it. So if you go to a running coach and say, "I want to run the marathon," you don't get to say, "And I want to finish without getting tired." Not allowed. You have to say, "I'm going to run the marathon and I'm going to get tired and I need to be able to do both." So this idea that forward motion, changing your appearance or your life, it comes with a form of tired that goes with it.

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Where are you going to put it? How are you going to put in the effort to get good at dealing with the effects?

Mel Robbins (00:31:13):

You just said a sentence that's very liberating. And even though I've read absolutely all your books, I'm not sure this one has ever hit me the way that it hit me right now. I need to be able to do both. There is this presumption, almost like a psychosis, that when something's important to you, you believe it's going to be kind of easy to do. And if you were to start with the presumption that this thing's important and I'm going to get tired and it's going to be hard and there's going to be a lot of resistance, so I need to be able to do both. Do the thing that's important and also know that this is part of the package.

Seth Godin (00:31:58):

Right.

Seth Godin (00:32:24):

Well, congratulations. You got exactly what you wanted.

Mel Robbins (00:32:27):

What do you mean?

Seth Godin (00:32:27):

No one's forcing you to not wait. You're choosing to wait. What a safe, lovely place to hang out. To be able to say, "I've submitted my novel to 20 great publishers and they all turned me down. Okay, you're off the hook. How safe could that be? " That I have a great talk I want to give, but they won't let me get the main stage of Ted. As soon as they call, I'm ready to go give the talk. Congratulations. You built a perfect place to hide. And we all do this. No matter where we are, no matter what we do for a living, this is what we do. We find a perfect place to hide. And if it's working for you, don't stop. But if it's not working for you, then we get to this and thing. I have a talk I want to give and I recorded it yesterday and it's on YouTube tomorrow.

Mel Robbins (00:33:15):

Oh, that right there is like, "Oh, I don't want to do that though."

Seth Godin (00:33:18):

Right. Do it under another name. I've suggested to people for years, you should start a blog and if you want to do it under an assumed name, I don't care. But after a hundred days, you'll want to put your name on it. So tomorrow-

Mel Robbins (00:33:30):

Why would I want to put my name on it after 100 days? What happens?

Seth Godin (00:33:33):

Because you're going to be so happy with what you are doing. You're going to be so proud that this work is there, that you did it, that you want to take credit for it. It's just the act of saying, "Here, I made this. I put this into the world for people who might benefit from it. " And the generosity feeling, because remember, it doesn't cost us anything to do this idea sharing and it has leverage. It might be multiplied to a whole bunch of people. This is not the same as going on Instagram and hustling everybody you know to give you a like or whatever it is. They are structuring their algorithm so that you will feel bad until you do more of what they want you to do. That's how they make a living. That when we are constantly creating content without charging them and telling all of our friends to absorb that content, we're doing their work.

(00:34:27):

It's a trap because you can say, "Well, I've done all the things. I've got the wide brand hat. I've got the lighting. I'm doing all the things like everybody else is doing. I'm going to be an influencer. I just don't have my 300,000 followers yet." And now you found another safe place to be stuck. And so you end up burning your relationships by selfishly asking people to do things for you online and you're pandering to a crowd you don't know and don't care about. And once again, you're trapped.

Mel Robbins (00:34:55):

What you're saying is if you're sitting in your head waiting for the right time or obsessing over the right way to do it, probably because you're managing, I want people to like it. So instead of picking yourself and saying, "Wait a minute, I want to put this out there, whether it's my real estate business or it's my art or it's just me starting to write something, I want to do it because it's killing me to sit here and watch everybody else do stuff and to know I'm quietly quitting on myself."

Seth Godin (00:35:30):

There's something I call intentional design and it's two simple questions. Who's it for and what's it for? So this thing you're putting on social media, who exactly is it for? Tell me exactly by name, if you could, who is it for? If it's not one of those people, you don't want them to see it, you don't care if they don't like it. What's it for? Why are you putting in this effort? What do you get out of it? What do they get out of it? If you can't answer those two questions, who's it for? What's it for? Then you're floundering, then you're hiding.

Mel Robbins (00:36:05):

For the person who never actually starts,