Seth Godin Hates Being Organized

I went to see Seth Godin to talk about organizing. And I was nervous. 

To get to his office I took the train from Manhattan to Westchester on a sunny February day.

I sat by the window. I watched the white caps on the Hudson as we made our way north. I put my head on the window and closed my eyes.

The night before I had stayed up late to put the finishing touches on the usual prep email I send to guests. I had read every article he’d written about productivity and organization. I had listened to previous podcasts, and reread a few of his books. 

The email was lengthy, and each question cited at least a few of his blog posts — I wanted him to know that I’d done my research, and that I wanted to go deep.

I fired it off at 10 PM the night before, exhausted but feeling a little proud and very ready to get on the train to interview him the next day. 

I woke up early the next morning and read his response to the questions I had crafted:

“I'm happy to try, and I'm looking forward to seeing you. But I think the biggest takeaway for your readers will be how little my life reflects the questions you want to ask me.”

Uh oh.

.  . .

Seth Godin could work in a skyscraper. Instead, he works in a converted apartment in a small town in upstate New York.

Seth Godin could fill his office with flashy paintings, and expensive furniture. Instead, his office is filled with books, and papers, and posters blossoming in every color from every corner of every room. His workspace is his own mind turned inside out and made manifest as interior decoration. 

Seth Godin could have a gigantic staff to order around, but instead he employs a small crew of friendly people who he treats like family. He makes them lunch every day. Often dal.

When I show up he’s on a Zoom call with students from his latest course, Creative Workshop. 

“Mr. Shipper!” he booms as he bounds out of the room. He’s wearing a blue dress shirt, and a loose pink and yellow tie, the pink and yellow twisting together like a soft-serve swirl. 

We go into his office and shut the door. He’s got this underlying energy that is at times bouncy, friendly, and almost goofy. But at others it is taut, focused, and intensely concentrated. 

We sit down to examine one question: is the whole thesis of this newsletter wrong?

.  . . 

My usual tactic for dealing with nerves is to name them. So I do.

“I'm a little bit nervous to do this interview because I don't know if you believe in the thesis of Superorganizers,” I say.

“You shouldn't be nervous,” he says. “But I don't. I believe it's useful to have the conversation, but I don't worship at the altar of organization.”

“I want to explore that,” I say. 

Then I plug in my microphone and hit record.

Usually, I use only one. But for this interview I plug in two — just in case. I don’t want to miss anything. 

Seth introduces himself

I’m Seth Godin. I’m an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. I’ve published 139 books including This Is Marketing, Purple Cow, and Tribes. I’ve written a blog post every day for decades, and I run workshops like altMBA and the Creative’s Workshop.

How Seth thinks about organization

I’ll tell you a story about how I think about organizing. 

I went to the engineering school at Tufts for college. One of the classes I took there was an invention design class. 

Our first assignment was to build a case for all the freshmen to organize their tools in. 

Back then, every freshman was given about 30 tools to help them do their work — things like a protractor, a mechanical pencil, and a fancy ruler. And we had to build a case for them. 

The freshmen would use the case for two weeks, and then we would get a report back about whether it was useful.

Everyone else in the class spent hours and hours building these ornate, beautiful cases that had custom foam inserts that were cut out to organize just the right tool in just the right place. So you’d have a space exactly cut out for your protractor, and a space exactly cut out for your ruler. And everything would be neat and tidy and organized.

But I didn’t do that. What I did was I went to Harvard Square, got a paint box that artists use, and then put a piece of foam on the top of the box and a piece of foam on the bottom of the box. 

The way it worked was you just throw your tools in the box and then you close it. Your tools wouldn’t move because the two pieces of foam held them in place, and when you opened the box again your tools would be just where you put them.

I worked on it for a total of seven minutes, and then I handed it in. The students who used it loved it. They said it worked great.

But my professor gave me an F on the project. So I went to him and said, “Why did you give me an F?”

He said, “Because you only worked on it for seven minutes.”

And I said, “Yeah, but it’s not an arts and crafts project. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.”

So my professor changed my grade to an A. And that’s my philosophy on organizing.

Organizing is like building a case to hold your tools. You don’t get points for making it fancy, you get points for doing the work.

Seth needs the noise to do his work

When I think about organizing I think about two things: who’s it for and what’s it for? To answer the first question: it’s for you.

To answer the second question, usually people say: it’s to lower the noise level in your own head.

And I think that definitely makes sense for some people.

But lowering the noise level is just not something I need. I need the noise. If there isn’t noise, I make some.

Maybe it’s because I grew up with undiagnosed ADD — but I need more froth and motion than a highly evolved organization system would give me. I don’t feel like the time I spend archiving, organizing, and alphabetizing things is really helping me with my work.

There are definitely certain moments when I will feel overwhelmed by the amount of things that are going on, and that will shut down my creativity. It feels like I can’t put another log in the fire because it’s already too hot.

But in those moments I choose not to be overwhelmed by it. I choose to use it as fuel.

Seth on being productive

I like to be productive. 

I've published 139 books. I did a book a month for 10 years as a book packager. I like shipping things, and shipping consistently has helped put me at the forefront of a number of big shifts in technology over the past few decades.

But being productive and being organized are not always the same thing. The trap with organizing is that it can sometimes be an excuse not to ship things. 

I will often run into people who will say they need the right scenario to do their work. If they only had a better camera, or the right word processor, or a better organizational system they would begin doing the work. 

But you don’t need the perfect setup to do the work.

For example, I’ve written five of my books completely on airplanes.

That is not what someone expects when they ask about my system for writing productivity. They imagine that a writer will go to a library — a place where you’re supposed to be quiet and nothing is supposed to be in front of you and the environment is perfectly set up to work. They don’t imagine me sitting in the middle seat on an airplane typing on my laptop.

But I’ve found that you can’t wait for the perfect setup, because that will never arrive. It’s too often an excuse not to ship.

I’m not saying that everyone who organizes uses it as an excuse. But some do. And it’s something to watch out for.

Don’t ask: am I organized enough? Instead, you might ask: Am I shipping work in sufficient quality and quantity to cause the changes I seek to make? If not, what’s stopping me?

How Seth makes sure to ship work that is important enough

Shipping has never been a problem for me. What has always been a problem for me is shipping work that is important enough. 

This comes down to the difference between a professional and an amateur. An amateur doesn’t care about the audience; the amateur is doing it for themselves. To be a professional, you have to engage with somebody — you have to engage with an audience.

But engaging an audience is right next to being a hack. It’s a subtle line.