The Exchanges

Q Fried had an interesting blog post the other day. He's probably whipping these blog posts out in his sleep and then waking up and create and just churning out profitable web apps. I can't compete with him. Now intellectually, you know, that's nonsense. You're not really competing with him. You're in your own world with your own customer base, but you can't stop that thought. How do you do it?

A Well, I'd start with Steve Pressfield's book, The War of Art, where he talks about the resistance. This resistance is nefarious. It will never give up. It will use every opportunity it can to find an excuse to get you to yak shave, to spend three more hours checking your status on all these social networks. Just one more time to make sure you're right, the right emotional moment to move forward. And then, you know its name, and you know its tactics. And you know how it does its job. And you're smarter than that. So if it's important to you, you beat it. What did Isaac Asimov do? He wrote 400 books in his career. Right? 40 times as many as me. How did he do it? Every morning he woke up at six o'clock, and he wrote till 10 a.m., and then he was done. Right? Robert Parker just died. He wrote the Spencer novels. Every day, day in and day out, he wrote five pages. That's all. Five pages. That's how he beat the resistance. He can spend as much time as he wants at the keyboard, but he cannot get up until five pages are done. There's a million ways to beat the resistance. After all, it's a 100,000 years old. It's very primitive. You just gotta decide that that's your job. Once you decide that that's the job, you'll figure out how to beat the resistance. If I tell you how I beat it, it will not help you. You have to beat it your way.

AI assessment note: “Well, I'd start with Steve Pressfield's book, The War of Art”

Q I pay attention to the people who work for you guys, say, are they really snowing the public, and then when I'm under the hood, I see where the dirt is? No, she's phenomenal. So, If you don't mind, how do you, what's your relationship to her? How is she so phenomenal? What's the deal here? Because I'd like to be able to have people like that on my team.

A Ashita does not work for me. I work for Ashita. She was one of my MBA students. And when the, the semester ended, I asked her to, to come on as head of hoopla for this project. And what I said is, you're in charge. You're the head of hoopla. Tell me what to do. And I worked for her. She says, you're going to talk to Andrew. I show up. And so you start by hiring somebody who loves to be like this. Not someone you have to tell to be like this. And then you completely get out of the way. You get out of the way and say, you are better at this than I am. And that's the secret of Skidoo, by the way. Six people, all of them are better at what they do than I am, so I don't bother them. And I work for her. If I can support what she's doing, that's my job. It is not my job to tell her what to do. Because then she becomes a compliant cog in the factory of Seth Godin. That's not the deal.

AI assessment note: “She was one of my MBA students... you start by hiring somebody who loves to be like this”

Q techniques. I went on a meditation retreat where they forced me not to talk for seven or so days, and they taught me about the monkey brain, they called it. By the way, you name things, right? Like lizard brain. I'm going to be talking about lizard brain with my wife tonight, and we're going to be talking about it in the chat room, and you did it intentionally, right?

A Well, I didn't invent the lizard brain. It's from somebody called Triune Theory. You can check in Wikipedia. But yeah, I name stuff all the time because If there isn't a name for something, we will be unable to take action on it. If permission marketing didn't have a name, you couldn't go to a venture capitalist and say, I'm starting a permission marketing company. If idea viruses didn't have a name, what would we have called them? They're not viral marketing, it's a noun, right? So, by naming things, I'm providing a service, and the service is, I want us to have a conversation, let's just agree to call it this, go, talk among yourselves. I think that's pretty valuable, it's not particularly difficult, and other people should do it too.

AI assessment note: “But yeah, I name stuff all the time because If there isn't a name”

Q heart was pounding before you got on here. My heart is still just trying to settle in. I've done a thousand of these. I'm still nervous. I thought at some point the inner resistance, the lizard brain would quiet down. Can we ever conquer that part of us that creates this insecurity that keeps me from focusing on my questions and has me just focused on my inner, inner demons?

A Well, uh, Steve and I disagree with this about the resistance, but I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem. That trying to make the fear and the lizard brain go away is what distracts us and takes all of our time and energy. And in fact, you can befriend it. You can welcome it back. You can say, oh, I'm getting that tingling in my toes and that little pain in my stomach. It means I must be doing something worthwhile. And so I look forward to that feeling It's a good way to remember that you're alive, but it's also a good way to know that you're on track.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem.”

Q What brings that up for you? Do you have a specific example of something that brought out that inner resistance?

A You know, it changes over time. Uh, when I was starting out and I'd give a speech to five or 10 people, I would be pretty on edge. Now I can give a speech to a thousand before it starts feeling like something's up. But if I have to, or if I choose to do a talk where it's all brand new material, I still feel that. Uh, I think it's very common to feel it when we're afraid we're about to be judged. Uh, you, neither you nor I Often has a situation where we are about to be physically threatened, where there's someone with a javelin or a spear, uh, that's going to, um, you know, uh, cut our entrails out, but it's the same feeling. We just simulate it in a different way. So, yeah, I feel it, and on a day when I don't feel it, I go looking for it.

AI assessment note: “if I choose to do a talk where it's all brand new material, I still feel that”

Q it was a formula. I'd like a formula for creativity that would make me as clever and stand, and help me stand out as much as Seth Godin would. It's not just me. It's not me being, um, all Andrew-centric. I'd like that for my audience too. Am I being too rigid in asking you to give us some kind of formula or some path where we can do this?

A Here's, it's, this is a very simple question to answer because you're, A business guy, you understand. What creates value? Scarcity. If there is no scarcity, there is no value, right? That the reason water costs more in the desert than it costs in New Jersey is because there isn't any water in the desert. Scarcity creates value. If this is a great lifestyle, and it works, and anyone can do it, and I could give you a map, an instruction manual, then everyone would do it. The thing that makes it scarce is, there is no map. You go to art school, the real kind of art school, They don't teach you how to be Shepard Fairey, or Andy Warhol, or Pablo Picasso. They can teach you to draw. They can teach you to do a still life that looks like a photo. That's easy. They just can't teach you how to do the next thing, because if they knew the next thing, they'd do it themselves. There is no map. And the people who are going to hate this book, there's two kinds of people. One, the kind of person whose lizard brain is yelling at them really loud, and they're looking for someone to blame. They can blame me. Okay. And number two, the people whose lizard brain says, I need a map. The people whose resistance says, where's the how-to thing? Where's the list of bullet points? Here's what I know. I know that if I want a blog post that's going to outperform all my other blog posts, what I need to do is…

AI assessment note: “The thing that makes it scarce is, there is no map.”

Q Well, let me, let me suggest this. I've talked to several entrepreneurs who drove miles just to see him and share his eyes, share their ideas with him, with the hope, some of them that, that he invests, but others just so he'll bless their ideas because, or just to spend some time listening to him. He's able to transfer that into a business model, right?

A Yeah, that's my point. Paul Graham calls you on the phone and says, Andrew, I want to invest in your company. Right? Do you do due diligence on him? Do you check over three times? You just take the money. You take the money. Is he able to get a better investment rate because he's Paul Graham? Of course he can. That's money. Right? Where the money came from? It came as a souvenir of his art. Right? It came because his reputation made him more valuable to be part of what you do. Came because that guy who's got lines in the Linux code, you trust him more as a good programmer because he's proven himself. So, we either fool ourselves into thinking the only way to make money is to sell out and do what we're told, or we make money by being exceptional, by being indispensable, by being someone they can't live without. And my argument, and I think I got lots of evidence to back it up, is that the first is on a downhill slide. That first category gets paid less. In my presentation last week, I showed a chart. Hourly wage adjusted for inflation from 1960 to present. For untrained workers, you know, burger flippers. 1960, they made 15 dollars an hour. Now, they make 15 dollars an hour. Zero change in 49 years. That's a lousy bet. I don't want to take that bet.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that's my point. Paul Graham calls you on the phone”

Q Every one of us, for the most part?

A Well, see, Albert Einstein ruined the whole genius thing. Cause we think that to be a genius, we have to come up with a five letter equation that changes the world. That's not what a genius is. My definition is somebody who solves a problem in a way that no one expected or haven't been able to solve. So when you were four, you solved an interesting finger painting problem. And when you were seven, you said something to your dad that no one expected that really changed the conversation. And when you were 12, you made a joke that was so funny, people wet their pants, right? But then along the way, it got drilled out of you. Along the way, acts of genius were laughed at, and acts of compliance were rewarded. So, we marvel at entrepreneurs who break this many rules. Well, the reason we marvel at them is we've been trained that no rules should be broken. And my point is, surely you have touched someone in a way they have not been touched. Open a conversation in a way that has never been opened before. Solve the business problem in a way that has never been solved before. Those are acts of genius. How often do you do them? You could do them more. That's what we're willing to pay you for.

AI assessment note: “So when you were four, you solved an interesting finger painting problem.”

Q the kind of attention that you have for your book, but they don't do it, and it's not because they're not working hard enough. I see them sweat so hard to even go back and forth with me a million times to schedule an interview as hard work, and I'm just one, one piece of their, of their publicity machine, but they're not being creative enough. What can they do?

A They can decide, right? I don't do anything secret or anything hard. I don't spend any money. The permission marketing website costs 450 dollars, and that was at the high side of what I've spent to market a book. This isn't rocket science, right? What it is, is making the decision. I was talking to a guy who, who makes a, a dessert item, and he was a friend, he's doing stuff for charity, so I was giving him some free advice, and I proposed to him a totally radical package. And he and his partner came back, and they had taken all the rough edges and smoothed them out, making it worthless. Rough edges are what we pay for.

AI assessment note: “They can decide, right? I don't do anything secret or anything hard.”

Q Ok, we've talked several times about the lizard brain. Maybe we should define it and then talk about where that comes from because it ties into what you just said. So, what is the lizard brain?

A Ok, so it's right here. I shaved my head so you could see it. Uh, it's near the top of your, uh, spinal cord and near the amygdala. And what it is, is prehistoric. It's been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We evolved to have it. It protects you from saber tooth tigers. It protects you from, um, being thrown out of the village and being eaten by animals. It is responsible for revenge and anger and fitting in and reproduction. We have many brains. It's one of them. There's another brain that worries about breathing, and another brain that worries about lust, right? And that brain, the lizard brain, is quiet most of the time, but it's aroused when the boss comes in and says, Andrew, I need you to give the speech tomorrow. And all of a sudden it's . And Elizabeth Gilbert likes to say, and I'm, I changed a little bit, but she says, you notice that people get writer's block, but no one gets plumber's block. You know, the plumber doesn't show up and say, you know, I just don't feel like plunging your toilet. Do you have any whiskey or scotch? Maybe I could drink my way out of it. But we expect writers to act like that. My argument is that physical labor is not so good anymore. You can't make a living, really, with physical labor. So we get paid for emotional labor. Get paid for digging deep and doing work that maybe we don't feel like. That's your job. So do the work. And t…

AI assessment note: “It's near the top of your, uh, spinal cord and near the amygdala.”

Q artist, go, artist, those are the people I laughed at on my way up the ladder, right? Those are the hippies who are going to make things, who are going to be creative, who are never really going to go anywhere. So now if I want to be creative, and I don't have the mindset of, of a, of a, of a, of an artist, How do I do it?

A Well, let me again be really clear about my words. Pablo Picasso was an artist, but so was Bill Shakespeare. Um, but so was that guy at Goldman Sachs who figured out that spreadsheet that when you used it a certain way created a billion dollars in value by combining certain kinds of securities in a certain way. It had never been done before. It changed things. What artists do is not paint. What artists do is put together things, see the world as it is, and make change happen. And yet, Almost all of us were raised to fit in, follow the instructions, and be compliant. And it's very hard to overcome it. Now, I've been living that life for 30 years and failing almost every day at it. Lucky for me, the world changed, reorganized, and made it so that being non-compliant is actually beneficial. So what I know, for example, is when I want to launch a book, The more agita I cause my publisher, the better the book's going to do. Right? Both the way the book is written, the way the book is packaged, and the way the book is marketed, the more they hate it, the better the book's going to do. Because if I just fit in and follow, there's a 175,000 books that are going to be marketed this year. Why pick mine? You won't. So, I think you're selling yourself a little short, Andrew. You may be pretty good with numbers. I don't think you ever laughed at creative people, though, and I am certain tha…

AI assessment note: “What artists do is not paint. What artists do is put together things”

Q know what? It's, I'm glad that you brought that up. People laughing at you. There's so many times when I think, who is watching my interview right now with Seth Godin and saying, this dopey dope, Andrew. With his little webcam operation. What's going on here? And one of the messages in, in this new book, in Lynchpin, is to find a way to get rid of those voices, right?

A Oh, you know, the voice is the problem. Let's talk about the opportunity first, because if we lead with the problem, people will turn us off. Here's the opportunity. The opportunity is that the industrial age just ended. It lasted for 200 years. The cotton gin, the assembly line, interchangeable parts, Henry Ford, the TV industrial complex interrupting lots of people with spam and average products for average people and compliant cogs working in the factory doing what they were told. I could go on for a while. We all grew up with it. It was our lives. You sit in school in a straight row, number two pencil, filling out the little circles, no stray marks. What's that about? It's about training you to work in the factory. And then all of a sudden, the race to the bottom ended. It ended when you could buy a barrel of pickles at Walmart for two dollars. It ended when you could go online and buy anything in the world cheaper from someone else. It ended when Ford Motor Company laid off 10,000 innocent people who didn't do anything wrong, but they lost their jobs because they followed all the instructions. And so, with all of that pain, where's the opportunity? The opportunity Is, we're now rewarding individuals who make a difference. We're now celebrating leaders. We're now seeking out people online and off who make things by hand, or keep their promises, or challenge the status quo. …

AI assessment note: “Let's talk about the opportunity first, because if we lead with the problem”