“…The difficult part
of seeing is setting aside what you are sure you already know…”
~ Seth Godin, The
Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?.
I finally caught up with Internet
entrepreneur and thought leader Seth Godin’s interview earlier this
year on On Being. In the interview
Godin is typical Godin and covers a lot of ground. Here’s an excerpt:
“…Godin: Well, I've never been shy about talking about the
professional failure, because I wouldn't trade any of it. After I luckily sold
my first little book for not very much money, I then decided I might be able to
do that for a living — and got 900 rejection letters in a row. And then for the
next seven to 10 years, my company was basically on the verge of bankruptcy the
whole time…
But what [we] all had in common, particularly in the early
days, was this sense of, as Brené [Brown] as talked about, being caught out as
a fraud and having the world say, you know, we figured you out, and you don't
deserve any success. And it's all over. And when you hear that — and so many of
us are capable of hearing it just from the slightest negative response, just
from the smallest slight — we then decide it's all over. Then the question is,
what are you going to do with that feedback? And I think this again goes back
to my parents. Because what the habit I developed was that that's not "a
no," that's a "no for now." That's not a "this will never
work." That's a "this didn't work." But I learned something
about what might work for next time. And so there was, you know, the cold fear,
the deep emptiness in the pit of your stomach because there's 50 or 100 people
who are counting on you to pay them. Or the fact that you've worked on a
project for a year or two years or three years, and now it might just be over.
And the question is, is that something
that we flee from, or is that something that we use to tell us that we're
alive?...”
You can find the interview here.
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