The Quitting Expert: Quit NOW Before AI Makes The Choice For You, This Is a Superpower! | Seth Godin

Some guests show up and say, "I did the research. I did the math. Do this because I told you to." The approach is to show up and try to paint a picture for people of what the words mean and what the systems are like and then encourage you to do things because you told. People are afraid. People are lonely. People are disconnected. They're victims of all sorts of media and commercial systems. We've been indoctrinated to not notice it. There are problems all around us. If we can solve problems, we can make things better. The goal is to help people find the words to talk about their problem, realize what's holding them back, go solve the problem. When we solve problems, we make things better for ourselves and for other people. Problems aren't something to be avoided. Problems are opportunity. All problems can be solved. Some things aren't problems. They're situations and you have to live with them. But if it's a problem, it means there's a solution. The goal is to help people find the vision and the words to see where they're stuck, why they're stuck, and whether it's a problem or a situation. If it's a problem and someone's going to benefit from you solving it, the mechanics, the tools, the vocabulary to go move forward toward better can be provided.

The College Application Example04:31

If someone's applying for college, it's super easy if you're 17 years old to get all hung up on "I'm about to be judged. How are they going to know the real me? What if I get rejected? Am I a loser? Have I wasted my whole life?" But once you see the college industrial complex, once you understand the agenda of the admissions office, once you realize what people are looking at and why, you say, "Oh, this is a game. This is a game like Settlers of Catan or Monopoly. And if I win this game, it's not because I'm a good person. It's because I played the game better. If I lose the game, same thing." Once you see that, all the drama and entanglement of applying for college moves to the side. You say, "What's in it for the admissions officer to see the person I want to present to them? Because if I can solve their problem, I'm going to go to the school I want to go to."

The Dynamic of Colliding Problems05:30

We engage with a system or a person or a boss or a co-worker or spouse and we think we're right. We've got all this noise in our head. We think everyone can hear the noise in our head. They can't. We think everyone wants what we want. They don't. And so we show up saying, "It's my turn. I need to get this." And now we have a problem. The reason we have a problem is because that other person thinks they're as right as we think we're right. And they have a different problem. So we're colliding. But if we can see that all of this is a dynamic within family systems, corporate systems, commercial systems, we can understand what are the forces at work. Now that we see them, we can use them to get to where we want to go.