Something You Should Know
Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World
Mon, 09 Dec 2024
Why is the most popular pencil the # 2 pencil? What’s wrong with #1? And why are most pencils yellow? If you took an average pencil and drew one continuous line until there was no more pencil left – how long would that line be? This episode begins with some interesting intel on one the world’s most popular writing instruments. https://www.straightdope.com/21343238/how-come-you-see-2-pencils-but-no-1-pencils Seth Godin is one of those rare people who gets you thinking about things differently. Today, he joins me to help explain the importance of having a strategy – and how strategy is not the same thing as a plan or a goal. He has wonderful examples to illustrate how a great strategy can propel your success - including strategies from AirBnB, the inventors of the telephone and more. Seth Godin is author of 21 international bestselling books, he has given 5 TED talks and his latest book is This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (https://amzn.to/4gbhZ14). Beer just may be the most important beverage in the history of the world – perhaps the universe! That’s what my guest Jonny Garrett believes and is going to explain. Beer has been made for thousands of years and by every civilization. It was the first alcoholic drink ever made and by all accounts it revolutionized the world in extraordinary ways. Yet beer is a delicate drink. Light, air and heat can ruin it in a matter of minutes. And many people store their beer all wrong. Jonny will help you correct all that. Jonny Garrett is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker and podcaster as well as the cofounder of the Craft Beer Channel on YouTube https://craftbeerchannel.com/. He is also author of the book The Meaning of Beer: One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint (https://amzn.to/41cVtRg). Around the holidays, it can be very tempting to open new charge accounts because you can often get 10% off your first purchase. But there is a significant potential downside. Listen and I will tell you what it is. Source: Fred Rewey author of Winning The Cash Flow War https://amzn.to/49mH32Y PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. AURA: Save on the perfect gift by visiting https://AuraFrames.com to get $35-off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout! SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: It's your last chance to snag Dell Technologies’ lowest prices of the year before the holidays! If you've been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Shop now at https://Dell.com/deals PROGRESSIVE: The Name Your Price tool from Progressive can help you save on car insurance! You just tell Progressive what you want to pay and get options within your budget. Try it today at https://Progressive.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is the number two pencil so popular?
Today on Something You Should Know, we all like the number two pencil, but how come no one uses a number one pencil? Then Seth Godin reveals why you need a strategy for your life.
Strategy is not tactics. Strategy is not a plan. Those things are based on a mindset that says, if I do this, I'll get that. Strategy is our philosophy of becoming. It's seeing how the world actually is and then showing up to make it better.
Chapter 2: What is the difference between strategy and a plan?
Also, why you should be careful about opening up new credit card accounts around the holidays. And how beer has changed the world. And just how delicate beer is.
Chapter 3: How can beer change the world?
At its absolute best, straight from the brewery. And from the moment it leaves, it's only getting worse. You know, 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer. So we need to treat beer like it's almost a fresh food.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
And don't forget to hit the follow button.
Chapter 4: What is the role of strategy in achieving goals?
Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi.
I'm holding in my hand a pencil, and it has little Christmas trees on it, because it's a holiday pencil, and the background of the pencil is white, which makes it somewhat of a rare pencil, because as it turns out, 75% of all pencils are yellow. Why is that? Well, during the 1800s, the best graphite came from China. Yellow is the color they associate with royalty and respect.
A pencil-painted yellow became known as the best pencil you could buy. And that's why today there are still so many yellow pencils. The most popular pencil is the number two pencil, but there is also number one, three, four, and five. There's a trade-off between the hardness and the darkness in pencils, and the number two is the best compromise for most purposes.
The number one pencil is darker, but people find it smudges too easily and has to be sharpened too often. One average pencil can write 45,000 words or draw a line 35 miles long. The lead, of course, is not lead. It is graphite. The wood is cedar. And pencils have been mass-produced in Europe since 1622. The first U.S. pencils were made in 1812. And that is something you should know.
You probably have goals and plans, but do you have a strategy? Those three words, goals, plans, and strategy, and maybe tactics, those words get used a lot, somewhat interchangeably, but they are all very different, and strategy is probably the most misunderstood. Strategy is not a list of steps to take. Strategy requires strategic thinking and is much more long-term.
Perhaps there is no one better to discuss strategy and strategic thinking than Seth Godin. Seth is author of 21 international bestselling books such as Unleashing the Idea Virus, Permission Marketing, and Purple Cow. He's given five TED Talks. He is the former vice president of direct marketing at Yahoo and the founder of the pioneering online startup Yo-Yo Dine.
His latest book is called This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. Hey, Seth, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thank you, Mike. What a pleasure.
So we're talking about strategy, and it's a word that people throw around a lot, but focus it in the way you're talking about it. What are you talking about when you mean strategy?
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Chapter 5: How did Airbnb succeed with their unique strategy?
Do you know to the penny how much money you have in your checking account? Those are meters. Those are things that are right in front of us. But if they're keeping you from doing the work you want to do, from focusing on what you want to focus on, then you're measuring the wrong thing.
So we know, for example, that the people who do the best in the stock market only pay attention to what's happening every three months or year, not every five minutes. So if you're busy getting updates about how your stock portfolio is doing, if you have one, every few minutes, you're going to panic.
And in fact, there's some very successful investment funds that don't permit their analysts to even keep track on that kind of scale because they know it's going to cause them to make bad decisions.
You say that the hard work of developing a more resilient strategy begins with letting go of assumptions and goals, which seems like, well, why would you want to let go of those?
When we have assumptions, what we're saying is we've already made statements about how the world is and the systems that are around us. But it's entirely possible that we are mistaken about that. So back to the idea of college. If I talk to a typical high school student and say, who gets into Yale or who gets into Princeton, they'll tell me the smartest kids or the kids who kissed up the most.
But if I look... For example, at Harvard University, 50% of the people who get in, get in because of a recommendation of a sports coach. that if I take a hard look at what the system actually rewards, it might not be the thing you think it does. Part of what we have to do to bring change to a system is to see the system, to see where the leverage points are.
The goal that we had when we got there might not match the change we actually seek to make.
That's a hard way to think. I mean, it's not a normal, natural way to think. It's the other way of you make assumptions, you have goals, you make assumptions on how you get there, and then you go.
Well, that's exactly what the system wants you to do. The system is good at sticking around. The system invents culture. So simple example, all the 12, 15, 20 years we spend in school, they never once, never once ask you a question they don't know the answer to.
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Chapter 6: Why is perfectionism an enemy in strategy?
The tactic they picked, the plan, was an example of that, but they could have picked 40 different ones that would have worked just as well.
Can you explain the idea of it barely works, I think is the phrase you use, where you talk about things don't have to be perfect to launch?
Well, think about the telephone. At the beginning... There was no one to call. It took more than a decade for a million people to have a telephone. It was really expensive. You had to crank this thing up. The connections weren't very good. It barely worked.
In fact, when the telephone came out, Thomas Edison took Alexander Graham Bell aside and he said, this idea that you should say ahoy when you answer the phone is stupid. And they invented the word hello as a way to answer the telephone because people didn't even know how to answer the phone. So you had this stumbling technology that barely worked. Move to the modern day.
When Facebook started, it was on one college campus for lonely guys who couldn't get a date. And all it was about was looking at other people on this campus and figuring out who would go out with you. It barely worked. Big problems demand small solutions. It doesn't matter if you're trying to lose weight or get a job. Whatever you do isn't going to be perfect for a long time.
And yet people's sense, or my sense is, if you're gonna launch something, if you're gonna do something, you do it right, or you don't do it at all.
This is a great point. And it comes to the confusion about the word quality and the idea of perfectionism. People also don't understand what quality means. Quality doesn't mean luxury. Quality doesn't mean expensive. Quality just means it meets spec. You decided what the spec is, And once you meet the spec, you ship it. If it needed to be better, you should make a better spec.
So perfectionism is an enemy because it's a way of hiding. Perfect is unobtainable. So with that said, what we have to do is say, well, what is the spec that we need to launch this with that we can be proud of?
When Toyota started making quality cars in the late 60s, early 70s, it took a while, but by 1980, a Toyota Corolla was a better quality car than a Rolls-Royce, not because it was fancier, but because it met its specification better. It reliably did what it said it was going to do.
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Chapter 7: What are feedback loops and why do they matter?
Because if you try to change it too fast... The boss is going to come down on you and make it back to what it was, not because the boss likes it the old way, but because the boss's job is to protect the old way. So if we want to change a negative feedback loop, we have to do it incrementally, often apart from the crowd.
And we have to change the way that the feedback is applied so that it doesn't extinguish our good ideas too early.
Well, I always enjoy talking to you. You're one of the people who we talk about sometimes about... I feel smarter having talked to you because you make me think in a way that I don't normally think. And I think that's true for a lot of people, which is why your books sell so well and you're so popular. I've been speaking with Seth Godin, author of 21 bestselling books.
He has five TED Talks you can go watch. And the name of his latest book is called This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Always great to have you on. Thanks, Seth. All right. We'll see you.
Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks.
And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong?
Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows.
In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice.
Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events.
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Chapter 8: How can we effectively change negative feedback loops?
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Go to any party, bar, sporting event, backyard barbecue, you will usually find people drinking beer. It's a popular drink. So popular, it has its own aisle at the grocery store. There are many types of beers, many brands of beers. And of course, it's not only popular in the U.S., but beer is popular all over the world. People like their beer. So what's the big deal here? Why is beer so popular?
What are all these different kinds and colors of beer? Well, meet my guest, Johnny Garrett. He is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster who is best known as the co-founder of the Craft Beer Channel, a YouTube channel with over 140,000 subscribers and 10 million views. He is author of the book, The Meaning of Beer, One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint.
Hey, Johnny, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you very much for having me. So do we know who first said, hey, taste this. This is great. This is beer. I'm really liking this. Do we know when that was?
It's a great question. And to be honest, no, we don't. What we know is the oldest record we have of that happening, which is about 13,000 years ago in a cave called Rakafet Cave near Nazareth in Israel, where we found evidence of the Natufian people who were a sort of semi-sedentary nation.
semi-nomadic kind of tribe who we know they were brewing with barley and wheat in divots that they created purpose-built in the cave. And we know this through sort of digging right down and looking at these divots very carefully under microscopes and working out the processes and the ingredients.
But we're fairly certain, given how, I guess, complicated the process was, how technologically advanced it was, that it must have been happening earlier. We're too far down the chain to think that this was the first example of brewing. They must have learned it earlier.
earlier and it was when again well about 11 000 bce so and so is beer beer like is is the beer that they made 11 000 years ago if i took a sip of it i'd go yeah that's beer or would i say well no that's not what i think of as beer
I think in the Western world, you'd absolutely not recognize it. Beer has come an incredible distance since that first brew that we know of. But there are still lots of, I guess the word would probably be like indigenous style still made in certain parts of Africa, certain parts of South America, where the technology hasn't been introduced. And so the methods are still very, very traditional.
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