Seth Godin: evaluation

Transcript context

…That reminds me of one of your other really powerful pieces of advice about how no matter your job, this is a tangent, but it really stuck with me once I read your advice here is no matter what job you have, you couldn't love it, enjoy it, be amazing at it, even if you're just like a waitress or whatever. Can you just talk through that? Because that's so powerful. Well, I think I got it from the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and the idea is there's no perfect job. A friend of mine, Tim, is a famous jazz saxophonist and he's got to schlep from city to city, and he's got to play to half empty rooms and he is got to deal with this and deal with this. So you're never going to have unlimited artistic freedom. But what we all have is the ability to understand where the boundaries of our work lie and go there. And if you're a barista and you've chosen to be a barista, maybe because it's the best thing you could get, well you're not going to get the next hour over again. So what would it be like to be the best barista in the world for an hour? Would that be worth it for you? Because I've had menial jobs in food service and I got to tell you, when the boss forces you to be mediocre and bored, there's no amount of money they can pay you to do that job. But if you're there and you have a chance to add delight to someone's day, you're doing that for you, not because you're getting paid. And you could totally tell these people in the world when you go to a barista that just you can tell, just loves their job. I know imagine she knows this is not her career long-term, but she just embraces it and just has fun with it. There's so much power to that. On a different note, you mentioned that you were product manager, which I did not know. That's amazing. So most of the people listening to this podcast are product managers. They're either product managers, founders, people that want to be founders, and then people that work with product managers. So first of all, I guess could you just share that part of your life? Because I don't think people know that.…

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