Seth Godin on the Difference Between Failure and Your Struggle With Failure

Today’s guest is one of the most well-respected and prolific marketing minds alive today.

After his first job out of college working at a software company, my guest started a book packaging business, which he later sold to his employees. He then co-founded Yoyodyne, a unique marketing service and company — he sold this company to Yahoo! in 1998 for $30 million.

During that time, he launched another web company called Squidoo, which was acquired in 2014 by HubPages.

Most of you will know my guest for his writing. He writes daily to his blog, one of the most popular blogs in the world, and he has also written 18 books that have been bestsellers. You can win a copy of his latest book here.

Now, let’s hack…

Seth Godin.

In this 37-minute episode Seth Godin and I discuss:

• Why and how Seth set up his business to be able to work on something new every day
• Understanding what a brand is (and isn’t)
• The difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur
• Seth’s definition of an entrepreneur (and why it matters to you)
• Why Seth thinks that everyone should blog every day
• Figuring things out — when he does not understand something

[episode]

The Show Notes

• Seth Godin’s blog
• Giveaway: Win Seth’s new book
• Seth’s (free) ebook: Unleashing the IdeaVirus
• All of Seth’s books
• Seth on Twitter
• Jon on Twitter

[episode_ad]

[episode_transcript]

Seth Godin on the Difference Between Failure and Your Struggle with Failure

Jonny Nastor: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at HacktheEntrepreneur.com/Rainmaker.

Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big-name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.

Jonny Nastor: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so glad you decided to join me today. I’m your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.

Today’s guest is one of the most well-respected and prolific marketing minds alive today. After his first job out of college working at a software company, my guest started a book-packaging business, which he later sold to his employees.

He then co-founded Yoyodyne, a unique marketing service company, and he ended up selling this company to Yahoo in 1998 for $30 million. During that time, he launched another Web company called Squidoo, a company that was later acquired in 2014 by HubPages.

Most of you will know my guest for his writing. He writes daily to his blog, which is one of the most popular blogs in the world, and he’s also written 18 books that have been bestsellers. Now, let’s hack Seth Godin.

I want to thank today’s sponsor, FreshBooks, for making my life easier. What is the one thing that I am no good at? I’m horrible at staying on top of my bookkeeping and accounting for my business. Now, rather than losing the receipts and handing my accountant this giant, messy box of papers, FreshBooks has this amazing app for my iPhone and lets me instantly take pictures of receipts and sort them by touching a couple buttons.

FreshBooks is designed for small business owners like you and me. FreshBooks integrates directly with three things that I use every single day in my business: PayPal, Stripe, and MailChimp. To start your 30-day free trial today, go to FreshBooks.com/hack, and don’t forget to enter ‘Hack the Entrepreneur’ in the ‘How did you hear about us?’ section.

Okay. Today I have a guest that I am very excited to have on to the show. Welcome to the show, Seth.

Seth Godin: Well, thank you for having me, Jon. It’s a pleasure.

Jonny Nastor: It’s very much my pleasure. Seth, let’s jump into this. As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?

Seth Godin: It has changed. At the beginning, I survived because I hustled more than most people in a way that indicated that I was not prepared to give up. But that hustle, that focus on making sure I didn’t lose by missing cash flow or not making payroll, was self-defeating in that what actually has worked the best is realizing I’m going to be doing this for a long time and taking my time. It’s a Russian novel. It’s not a short story.

Jonny Nastor: Interesting. I like that. Does it change? You’re building businesses bigger — like Yoyodyne and such earlier on. Is it a brand behind Seth Godin? Is it a business? Are you the business? Do you know what I mean?

Understanding What a Brand Is (and Isn’t)

Seth Godin: Let’s just understand what a brand is. A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a corporation. The Catholic Church has a brand. What makes something a brand is a set of promises and expectations and stories that we associate with something we’re about to interact with. We have those experiences before we actually interact. If I say we’re going out for a double-double, you know what to expect because there’s a brand associated with that kind of coffee.

Of course I have a brand. Anybody who has interacted with the marketplace is going to have a brand. Their brand might be generic. Their brand might be boring. But they have a brand. What I did as an entrepreneur is different than what I do as a freelancer. This distinction is probably the most important thing your listeners will get out of this conversation.

The Difference b\Between a Freelancer and an Entrepreneur

Seth Godin: Freelancers get paid when they work. Freelancers can’t scale because they are doing the work. Entrepreneurs make money when they sleep. Entrepreneurs build a business to sell — like Larry Ellison. Go down the list. If you’ve gone out and raised money, you are an entrepreneur because your investors want you to give them the money back, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you build it bigger than yourself.

When you’re an entrepreneur, your job is to hire people to do every job you can imagine. You should do nothing other than figure out what to do next. If you’re a freelancer, you should embrace the fact that the work is the point and you can’t scale your way out of that because that’s what people are hiring you for, is to do the work.

I’d been both. When I was an entrepreneur, I was bad at it for a while because I kept hiring the best, cheapest available person, who was me, because I was willing to work for free. What you end up doing, if you’re that kind of entrepreneur, is you keep hiring yourself, which means you have no time to actually do your job as an entrepreneur, which is to grow.

Once I figured that out, I was able to build a company and sell it. But I decided I didn’t love doing that as much as I loved putting my hands in things and making them. I am now a business person who has an enterprise that I am proud of, but I am not an entrepreneur in the sense that I could sell this to General Electric and then they could be Seth Godin instead of me.

Seth’s Definition of an Entrepreneur (and Why It Matters to You)

Jonny Nastor: Excellent. I love your distinction between a freelancer and an entrepreneur because I think you are absolutely right. That’s the biggest thing that the listeners can probably get. I know that a graphic designer, typically they call themselves freelancers, right? Then you get into a business consultant, and they oftentimes confuse themselves and call themselves entrepreneurs. Do you see that difference? Would you consider a business consultant different from a graphic designer?

Seth Godin: We see this problem all the time. The theory that the business consultant has is that they will be able to just keep hiring their way out of this work and extract a profit from the work of the people they hire. That’s what happens at McKinsey and Bain, which are giant consulting firms.

Basically, they’re an amalgam of freelancers who are getting paid a lot, but they’re charging more than that, and the person who organized the firm gets to keep the upside. If you are the person running McKinsey, you better not be doing any business consulting. You better be an entrepreneur who’s running a firm freelance consultant, of which you take a cut.

Most of the small businesses that are doing work where it’s the unique skillset of the person the client is dealing with, those people are freelancers. A really good doctor in private practice in the United States is clearly a freelancer. Now, it is possible to organize some freelancers and make a business out of it, but the person who’s doing the organizing is an entrepreneur. They better not be also doing heart surgery.

Jonny Nastor: Very well said. Let’s move to struggles and failures. This is something obviously you’ve written about and discussed a lot. As entrepreneurs, one of our greatest struggles is the fear of being wrong, making mistakes, and failing. Can you walk our listeners through how to be wrong?

Seth Godin: First, I need to establish my qualifications. My qualifications to answer the previous questions are 17 bestsellers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My qualifications for this one are even better — that for eight years I was within two weeks of bankruptcy. I really danced right on the edge of failure for a very long time. I fired my biggest client, who accounted for about half of my business. The senior vice president of AOL threatened to have me arrested after a particularly bad project failure.
I’ve seen this. Basically, what I am trying to do is tell people what I wish someone had told me. There is a difference between failure and your struggle with failure. You do not have to struggle with failure. That is a choice on your part. If you accept the fact that the person who fails the most wins — and I’ll dissect that sentence in a minute — you can then accept that the act of putting good effort into something that fails is actually a key part of your job.

The reason I say “fails the most wins” — I don’t usually like sports analogies, but here we go — Wayne Gretzky has missed shots on goal more than almost anyone in the history of hockey. More of his shots have been saved than almost anyone. You have to be good enough that you get to keep playing. You have to be good enough that you get to keep taking shots, but if you are good enough to do that, failing along the way is critical.

I have failed more than most people who are listening, which is why I’m doing okay, because I have structured an environment where no failure is fatal. It just gives me enough to keep going.

Jonny Nastor: You’ve structured it. How do you structure it in this way? How do you set up yourself, especially early on? Could you have done this eight years prior?

Seth Godin: From the first day I was on my own. Here was the deal: the way the business worked for a really long time is you could send a 15-page book proposal to 30 different publishers all at the same time. If any of them wanted it, they would send you money and you would build it. The magic of that is you can get 800 rejection letters in a row, which I did, without going out of business because each rejection only cost $1.95.

Whereas if someone says, “I’m going to spend the next three years to build an entity that’s going to eliminate trans fat from the diet of everyone in North America,” we can applaud their audacity. But if they don’t have the track record and the resources to devote to something that audacious, they’re only going to get one time up at bat.

Why Seth Thinks That Everyone Should Blog Every Day

Seth Godin: The way you structure this is a blog. I’ve posted 5,600 blog posts. How many of them are the best blog posts I’ve ever done? I don’t know, 10? A blog lets you keep doing another one every day, so the cost of me being wrong is pretty low.

If you want to build a company that makes apps, my suggestion is not to try to build the next Two Dots. Don’t try to build the next Angry Birds, because your chances of building something that shiny and that successful are really low.

Instead, say, “Could I figure out how to work with 20 merchants in Waterloo to build an app that all 20 of them would share? Each one puts up $2,000.” At every step along the way, my chances of complete failure are very low. Now I’ve learned how to be in the app business, so my next one can be five times bigger than that.

Jonny Nastor: Whoa. I like that. The blog, with 5,600 posts, maybe 10 of them your best ever — those odds are low, right? It’s an interesting thing that I’m finding. You write every day and you publish it. James Altucher, he publishes almost every day, at least across many platforms. He definitely does every day. There’s only a few people that are doing it every single day. We look up to them. We admire them. We say, “How does Seth Godin become Seth Godin? How does James Altucher become James Altucher?” They blog every day. How do they get to do that?

We all have ideas. We all have passions. We all have fears. Could you start writing every day? What do you think the chances would be of failing after, say, five years of blogging every day? Even if you didn’t know how to write, you could still probably learn within five years quite well, right? Does that seem like a logical thing, that somebody could, if they really just stepped up to the plate and were willing to fail for the first 500 posts or 600 posts, but maybe they’ll score one on 601?

Seth Godin: There are couple of easy ways for me to answer that one. The first is that my high school English teacher wrote in my yearbook, “You will never amount to anything.” It’s not like I’m Nathaniel Hawthorne here in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

The second thing is that old blog posts are still there. Go look how bad they are. They’re trivial, and they’re erratic. The point is not that everyone should blog every day, though I think they should for their own selfish benefit. The point is that we gave everyone in the world a microphone. That’s what the Internet is.

When I was starting out, there was Forbes, Business Week, and Fortune. There were three business magazines. If you wanted to be someone who wrote for the business community, there was no door open for you. You couldn’t do it. They were publishing before Harriet Rubin started Doubleday.

They were publishing a business book in America that mattered every week. Now they publish a business book in America that matters every 40 minutes, and there’s way more than me and James writing a blog post every day. The chances of you breaking through are really, really low. The chances of you getting better at it if you just do it because it’s free go up.

Then, if you can say, “How can I be generous? Not generous to the world, but generous to the smallest group of people who I can overwhelm with my generosity.” Then keep being more generous. Keep being more generous. When you’re generous enough, some people will say, “Wow, I can’t live without this guy.” At that point, you have a brand.

Jonny Nastor: Excellent. I agree that not everybody should start a blog, at least as a business model, say, or to get to Seth Godin’s level. It seems like there are these things, these microphones, we’re all given with the Internet now. If we really do just step up and do the work long enough, it’s not going to harm us. We’re not going to be further back. That’s for sure.

If we talk ideas, you’re big into changing from a serial idea-starting person, and the goal is to be an idea-shipping person. Can you tell us how to make this transformation from, “I have all these ideas” and thrashing about to actually shipping ideas?

Seth Godin: The only reason that people have a lot of ideas is to protect them from ever having to ship any of them. If someone says, “I have too many ideas. I’m working on everything. That’s why you haven’t seen me ship anything,” they’re lying to you. They are lying to themselves.

Then it’s really clear that the resistance, as my friend Steve Pressfield calls it, doesn’t want you to bring your finished idea to the world where the world can say, “We hate that.” That is the scary part. “Oh, I have so many ideas.” How can anyone argue with you? How can anyone complain?

The discipline is to say that it can be your hobby. Your hobby is that you can have all the ideas in the world, but your profession, your work, is shipping. I had an entrepreneur friend come by, and they were talking about their business. Every single constructive piece of feedback or hard question I had was answered with a glib, bulletproof answer.

That meant that the meeting had no point, because if you’re not willing to engage, if you’re not willing to say, “No, I do this. I don’t do that,” and then have someone say, “Well, I don’t want this. No,” if you’re not willing to have that conversation, then you’re not actually making anything. You’re just pontificating.

What I push people to do is say, “Show me what you have shipped. Show me what has failed. Show me what you have learned through those interactions, and show me that you’re getting better.” Because if those things aren’t happening, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Jonny Nastor: Yes. Very well said. As we’re shipping these ideas, though, an idea I want to get to is The Dip, your book and the idea and concept of ‘the dip’ as we’re bringing ideas and shipping them. There’s always a dip. No matter if we’re trying to go to the gym or if we’re trying to launch the next Google.

This is the most-discussed topic by any guest on my show so far. Everybody seems to bring up the dip. I know that your publisher didn’t want to even put the book out, but that concept has lived on. It’s such a big thing because we all hit it. Can you just quickly explain the dip and how to foresee it and how to work through it?

Seth Godin: I’ll try to give the short, math-based answer. The word ‘economy’ comes from the Latin word for ‘scarcity.’ Things have value because you can’t get them from everyone. If you could get it from everyone, then you wouldn’t be able to charge very much for it. Where does scarcity come from? Scarcity comes, in the case of gold, because there are only a few gold mines in the world. But most of the time, it comes from the fact that not everyone makes something.

The reason that not everyone is a doctor and not everyone has six-pack abs and not everyone is really good at understanding microeconomics in a way that can help you is they give up. They give up somewhere in between the time they start with great intent and the time when they would actually be great at it. That moment, where almost everyone gives up, is the dip.

In the world of fitness, the dip is February 7th every year. What happens is people gain a lot of weight over the holidays. They all join the gym when they make their New Year’s resolutions, and the first three weeks at the gym are great because you’re getting a little endorphins, and your neighbors and your friends are all rooting for you.

In February, you wake up and it’s snowing, and it’s dark, and it’s tiring, and you say, “No, I’m not going to go.” Everyone stops on February 7th. That’s the dip. For a doctor, it’s organic chemistry. When you’re pre-med, everyone’s applauding you until you hit organic chemistry, and most people stop right then.

The book — it’s only about 100 pages long — says, “If you want to win, you must become the best in the world at something.” The way you become the best in the world — by ‘world’ I mean among the people who could choose you — you have to get through the dip.

You have to find something that is actually quite hard to get through because the harder it is to get through, the more likely it is it will be scarce on the other side. When it shows up say, “Oh good. This was the dip I was looking for,” not curse it out and say, “Oh, I thought this was going to be easy.”

Jonny Nastor: It’s hard, but as in you’re in a business, and you’re stuck in it, you can foresee what you think is going to be a dip. That dip will probably appear, but other dips also appear all the way throughout. It’s life. Things are happening. Things are going on to stop you from seeing it through to the other side.

How do you determine when you have to always keep pushing? I know that you like to say, “Don’t start anything unless you’ve invested what it’s going to take to finish it.” It’s a great concept, but we’re told that you have to give up sometimes. You do have to quit things.

Seth Godin: Quitting is a great idea. That’s why I wrote a book about quitting. Let me be really precise here, because I’m not talking about putting up with the school of hard knocks and not being the kind of person who gives up. I’m talking about something very specific.

Let’s say your startup is designed to sell security systems to high schools in Manitoba. There are 100 high schools in Manitoba. I will tell you exactly where the dip is. The dip is school numbers five through nine. School numbers one through four will sign up because they’re run by principals who are early adopters who want to do something that’s brand new so they can brag about it. Those sign-ups aren’t very hard. The next five schools aren’t run by people who are early adopters. They’re run by people who want a proven, guaranteed, safe thing to do.

When it comes time to build this business, don’t — at the end of installation number two — draw a straight line between dot number one and dot number two and say, “Now I will rule the universe.” Say, “Oh, I haven’t gotten to the dip yet. The dip is going to be when I show up at a conservative principal’s office, and he says to me, ‘Prove that this is working for all your previous clients.'”

If you know that that dip is coming, you will put all your resources and all your energy for months in advance in anticipation of that hard slog that’s going to go from school number five to school number nine. That is the kind of dip I’m talking about.

Jonny Nastor: I see. You were talking about the pre-med. He announces he’s pre-med, and there’s a party. There’s a celebration. Me, as Jon — my business — we’re going to launch a new project. Should I tell the world and announce that? Do you think that gives me a better chance of completing this project?

Seth Godin: There’s two parts to that question, I think, and it’s a great question. One is the personal psychology of, “Do I do better at achieving my goals if I would be humiliated if I gave up?”

Jonny Nastor: Well said.

Seth Godin: There are certain goals where that is absolutely true. If you are trying to give up smoking, you should tell every single person you know because the fear of shame is huge, and that will get you through some tough times. If you’re trying to go up as opposed to give up, as my friend Zig used to say, it’s not always obvious that you should tell everyone you know.

Instead, I think that what we benefit from as entrepreneurs is finding a tiny group of people, again, that we can overwhelm with our generosity. If your goal is to serve the people within three blocks of your home or three miles of your store, you need to figure out how to obsess about one house at a time, not announce it to the world.

This phrase “get the word out” — I hate that phrase because that’s an old-fashioned way of thinking about marketing. There is not word to get out. What there is is a connection that people want to make and that they would miss if it disappeared.

Jonny Nastor: Yes. “There is no word to get out.” I like that. Let’s quickly talk about work. Can you walk us through the first 30 minutes of your work day?

Seth Godin: No.

Jonny Nastor: You write a blog post every day. I believe at 5 am it comes out.

Why and How Seth Set up His Business to Be Able to Work on Something New Every Day

Seth Godin: I can’t walk you through the first 30 minutes because I have intentionally created a life — at great expense — where every single day is different, where if I industrialized what I did, I would be more successful, but I would be less happy.

Jonny Nastor: Good. Can you walk us through, when you’re going to write your blog post for Tuesday morning, tomorrow, when does this blog post get written? How do you sit down to write it, then? That’s what I want to know. The Steven Pressfield, “You have to sit down and do the work if you want the muse to find you. It’s there for all of us if we put in the work” — I want to know where Seth Godin’s is.

Seth Godin: I don’t consider my blog my work. I consider my blog an outlet for the voice that’s in my head, and even if no one read my blog, I would keep writing it. Once my subconscious knows that something is due, it’s more likely to verbalize the things I see around me. Writing my blog is a privilege.

I write several blog posts for every one that you get to read. I keep them on slips of paper. I keep them in Notes on my iPhone. I keep them in ISIS in my Mac. They get improved. They get rewritten. They get deleted. Sometimes it will get deleted shortly before it was going to be seen by everyone. Sometimes they get deleted months before it would be seen by everyone.

Figuring Things out — When He Does Not Understand Something

Seth Godin: If I see something in the world and I don’t understand how it works or why it works, I try to figure out why. Then once I figure out why. If there’s an insight there that I think is worth sharing, I have the privilege of sharing it.

It’s the people who don’t wonder why that mystify me. You sit down at a bureaucratic institution, and they ask you for something that clearly made sense to ask you 50 years ago but hasn’t made sense for 5 years. You say to the person, “Why do you need that?” They look at you like it never occurred to them to ask themselves that question. I can’t imagine not questioning those things.

This blog is built on question and answer. I question things in the world. Why are they working? Why aren’t they working? Then I try to answer them in a way that helps other people see the world in an interesting way.

My work is doing things I’m afraid of, and I’m not afraid of writing my blog. My work is challenging issues that might get me in trouble or make me feel dumb. My work is connecting with situations or people where I can be generous, but it might frustrate me. When I need to exert emotional labor, that is when I am doing work.

Jonny Nastor: You’ve consciously set it up this way, right? You’ve worked hard to make your work be something that strives to get to the essence of what Seth Godin is still.

Seth Godin: Yeah. After Permission Marketing was a bestseller, they said, “Here’s twice as much money. Please write the Permission Marketing handbook.” Those cycles get repeated. People call me up, and they say, “You have a reputation as a marketer. Would you be our chief marketing officer?” I say, “If my goal was to earn an income, of course I would do that, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to make a difference.”

Jonny Nastor: Excellent. On this topic, if for some crazy reason your career was to end today, Seth, would you be happy and content with the legacy that you’ve created and left behind up ’til now?

Seth Godin: My legacy, if I have one, is going to be what the people who learned from me teach other people. So far, it’s thrilling to watch. If I see someone teach somebody else something that I said and they don’t give me credit, that’s fabulous because what I’m trying to do is cause generations to happen as fast as possible to change the way we see things and talk to each other and treat each other.

I don’t count how many Twitter followers I have, and I don’t count how many people read a blog post. What I do instead is pay attention to who is teaching someone else something based on something I said or did.

Jonny Nastor: Wow. There’s a lot of us out there. I think there will continue to be for a long time to come.

Thank you so much, Seth, for joining us here and taking the time. I really, truly appreciate it. Please keep doing what you’re doing because it’s amazing to watch, and it is inspiring teaching and helping a lot of us help other people.

Seth Godin: I thank you for that. I mentioned this to you earlier, but a podcast is way more time-consuming than a blog. It’s satisfying, no doubt, but probably not receiving all the accolades it deserves. I, for one, want to thank you publicly for showing up and doing your work because I think it matters.

Jonny Nastor: Thank you. I agree. I get to talk to brilliant people like you all the time. It’s a great side benefit. Thanks, Seth.

Seth Godin: Bye.

Jonny Nastor: Mr. Seth Godin, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Imagine reading somebody’s books for years and years and having it shift and change and meld your worldview on marketing and business and then getting to sit down with that person for half an hour. That’s what I just got to do, and it was amazing. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did because he didn’t hold back. It was just a great conversation. I’m astounded by the power of podcasting, that I get to do that. I love it, and I really hope you do, too.

His books are transformational for a lot of people. His blog is one of the most popular blogs in the world. He wrote a new book called What To Do When It’s Your Turn. I have something very cool for you.

But first, let’s talk about what Seth said. Seth said a lot of cool things, didn’t he? He did. He always, always does. He said one thing. One. Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.

Seth Godin: There is a different between failure and your struggle with failure. You do not have to struggle with failure. That is a choice on your part. If you accept the fact that the person who fails the most wins — and I’ll dissect that sentence in a minute — you can then accept that the act of putting good effort into something that fails is actually a key part of your job.

Jonny Nastor: That’s the hack. “There is a difference between failure and your struggle with failure.” You know what, Seth? If you would have told me this two years ago, a year ago, it wouldn’t have made sense. It wouldn’t have clicked. It’s something that is inevitable in business. It’s inevitable in life, too, but I don’t know why we deal with it sometimes better in day-to-day to life. I guess because we’ve been doing it since we were learning to walk and falling. It’s just something that we know. We have to make these mistakes, and we just keep going.

Recently, in business, I’ve learned that things that happen to me in day-to-day life, mistakes I’ve made, failures that happen, don’t even affect me anymore. They brush off me so much easier. Things that would have wiped me out and devastated me for a day or two days or a week or a month even, don’t even bother me anymore.

It took conscious thinking about this, and I think it is literally the fact that I’ve learned to not struggle with failure. I know that it’s essential. It’s essential to learning to walk when you’re one year old or two years old — whenever it is you learn to walk. I can’t remember anymore. It’s seriously the fact that you have to fall and fall and fall and fall until, “Oh, I know how to walk.” But you don’t just stop. It’s just not part of it. It’s life.

I think if you can get your head and change your mindset to the fact that that’s how business works, that it’s really just a part of it. It’s not because you’re bad. It’s not because you’re no good. It’s none of that. It’s literally just life. It’s a part of the process. It’s a part of the process of getting good at something, of mastering something, of building a business. It’s making mistakes and dealing with the failure and knowing that that is part of your job.

Seth Godin, masterfully said, as always. Thank you so much for everything you’ve ever done for me and for everyone else out there, and thank you so much for joining me today.

Seth Godin’s new book is What To Do When It’s Your Turn — and it’s always your turn. I have 10 copies in my grubby little paws and I want you to have one of them. Hacktheentrepreneur.com/seth — there’s going to be a page there. You’re going to put your email address in there.

Every Sunday, I write my best work. This is my blog, like Seth Godin — he does it every day, though. I do it once a week, and I write the thing that I think will help you through the next week. It will help you kick the ass you need to kick, to build the business, to build the things, and to do the cool stuff you want to do. I want you on that email list.

For the next five weeks, I’m going to give away two copies of this book to two people on that list. You can’t win if you’re not on that list, sorry. But it’s free to join. Go there. Drop your email. Hacktheentrepreneur.com/seth will get you on the email list. You’ll get my writing every Sunday afternoon, and two of you will win Seth Godin’s new book every week starting next week. Do that. It’s going to be fun.

Check out the new site. It’s on the Rainmaker Platform, and it kicks a lot of butt. It’s awesome. A new update just came yesterday, and it’s got some really, really cool stuff. Now I can post my social media from Rainmaker, and I can schedule my post to go out based on whenever I set them to. It’s really cool. The site is built on it. Check it out. See if you like it. It’s pretty great. HacktheEntrepreneur.com/Rainmaker will also show you what the Rainmaker Platform can do for you.

It’s been a lot of fun. Seth Godin is an amazing person. You are awesome for listening. I know you have a lot of options, and I truly appreciate that you stopped by and spent the time with me today.

Until next time, please keep hacking the entrepreneur.

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