their will sooner or later it becomes
voluntary you need enrollment not
enrollment from the legal sense of
you’re not truant
but enrollment in the sense that you are
leaning into it and want to learn it so
if we want to teach someone to be a
baseball fan here’s what we don’t do we
don’t say here’s the baseball textbook
there’ll be a test tomorrow
and if you do well you can take another
test and if you do ten tests in a row
really well we’ll take you to a game
that’s not what happens but yet kids
memorize all these statistics and they
know all this stuff because they wanted
to know it so we must begin by gaining
enrollment and there are a couple ways
to do it one way is to promise a quick
win all right
just read these six paragraphs and you
will lose thirty pounds and it’s easy to
get the masses to pay a dollar for that
but doesn’t work to debt and the other
way to do it is to say to people being a
Navy SEAL or being physically fit or
being smart at business these aren’t
endeavors they take effort if you’re
ready to pay the price to get the
benefit there are people who will teach
you so it’s the opposite of the question
will this be on the test if you’re
asking will this be on the test from an
online course or from a school what
you’re basically saying to the teacher
is without a certificate I don’t even to
be here I’m only here to prove that I
was here and in this post educational
institution world that were entering
certificates are worth less and less
what’s actually where something is did
you sign up to learn something where you
opened yourself up to possible failure
opened yourself up to the stress of
becoming someone else in a way that made
you better and not everyone wants to do
that but my mission is to work with the
people who do so that I can help them
open those doors a lot of people hide
behind the expression if I could just
find something I love then I could do
great work and I think it’s way more
powerful to be able to say I choose to
love the thing I do and that idea that
we can become passionate about our work
as opposed to expecting our work to give
us passion makes us way more flexible
gives us way more leverage allows us to
move forward and it gets back to the
narrative the self-talk we have about
this work we get to do as opposed to
having to treat it as something we have
to do people who talk to me about
writer’s block who talk to me about
being stuck I say show me your bad
writing and they never have any show me
the six novels you’ve written that are
terrible they don’t have them show me
the 18 screenplays they don’t have them
because what they’re really saying is I
want to have really good writing then
I’ll have some and in my experience it
begins with really bad writing if you
have enough bad writing someone can help
you make it better if you have bad taste
you can learn to get better taste so I
don’t believe that there’s any genetics
associated whatsoever
with what most people call Talent I
think there’s an enormous amount of
culture associated with it and I think
there’s learning associated with it that
you get better at this craft because
you’re in a culture that rewards you for
getting better at it like here we are in
LA surrounded by some of the greatest
sounding camera people in the industry
most of the sounding camera people in LA
are better than the sound and camera
people in Guadalajara why because
there’s a cultural loop here that says
if you get a little bit better you’re
gonna get more work which will get you a
little bit better which will get you
more working around and around it goes
right it’s no one’s born being good at
manual focus that’s something that you
develop an eye for and the same things
true with writing some people get lucky
out of the gate but they can pound that
luck because they keep going and they
edit they develop good taste you know
I’m good at direct mail copywriting
partly because I’ve written 3,000 direct
mail letters and until you’ve written
2,000 it’s not fair to say you’re not
good at about six times in my life I
have met somebody who in the moment
prodded me provoked me and encouraged me
and something came out at the other side
so my friend Lisa ganske helped invent
the word
wide web when she and I met I was busy
building my email company she was busy
running the first web crawler search
engine kind of thing and just being in
the room with her caused me to invent a
whole bunch of things click through ads
stuff that is still around because she
understood what I needed to keep going
and kept in but that’s not gonna work
and then I would need to top that these
are priceless things when they happened
to me they don’t happen very often what
happened with the Alton ba is I saw the
Skillshare courses working I saw the
udemy courses working but I also knew
that the typical online course has a 96%
dropout rate and I knew that a bunch of
money could be made taking money from
people by making promises and then
having them drop out I had no interest
in that whatsoever so I said to myself
what would of course it had a 2% dropout
rate you like and then I went to the
desert and I just sat there with my
problem until I figured it out and
that’s hard work it’s much harder work
than when you find a magical person to
dance with but I came back and I said
here are the 13 projects and we’re gonna
use slack and zoom and WordPress and
this and this and this and we’re gonna
it’s all gonna look longer pot until it
works and let’s go build that I am in
the minority here I think mentors are
way overrated they don’t scale
it’s an unequal relationship and it’s an
easy way to let yourself off the hook I
wish I had a mentor heroes aren’t
enormous ly large supply you can say
what would Bill Gates do what would Elon
Musk do what would Jacqueline Novogratz
do and you can study their work enough
that even from afar without them knowing
you exist because they’re your hero you
can start the model people empower the
industrialists want us to fly lower
because it’s easier to ignore us it’s
easier to keep us in line it’s easier to
get a factory job that way people who
have the you Burress to dream of
something bigger change the status quo
and the people who are in charge aren’t
in favor of that
and I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all
but I do know where I wear public
smoking from and public school was
invented by faculty owners who didn’t
have enough compliant factory workers
and it worked great for a hundred years
we had this wonderful system do what
you’re told go to the placement office
you’ll get a job for 50 years you will
like the job but you’ll be able to go
home and watch TV buy enough stuff you
only des storage unit and then you’ll
die and the deal was straightforward and
kept on both sides and during our
lifetime in the last 20 years deal’s off
and the mistake the problem is that
people are still seduced into thinking
that what they’re supposed to do is fit
in more and social media has made it
worse because there’s this whole pack
mentality of how do I fit in more with
small bursts of here’s one quick tip for
a flat stomach in three different ways
to get rich and you can learn to flip
houses today and be a millionaire
tomorrow
none of which work right but the
combination of those two mean that
people are starting to feel broken and
bitter because the promise isn’t being
capped so let’s think about a job where
you have to train 12 years to be good at
it
radiology you and I could never read an
x-ray and figure out if someone’s got a
broken leg or not well a few years ago
they figured out that x-rays are digital
so you don’t need the person to read
them here scan them send them someplace
overseas where someone’s cheaper they
don’t have to do that anymore because
now our computer can do it and a
computer can do it better than an
average radiologist so what jobs are
left for radiologists the job of being
so expert at something and doing
something so beyond competence that a
computer isn’t going to be able to learn
how to do it then all we’ve got left are
jobs where you’re doing something
someone can’t tell you what to do
because if someone can tell you how to
do your job we can find someone cheaper
than you to do it so you have a choice
and the choice is one of three things
either you’re the replaceable cog in the
pyramid who’s going to get paid as
little as possible or you’re the founder
of the owner the person who runs a thing
but for most of us the best choice is to
be the linchpin the woman
can’t live without the person who
figures out what to do next and I’m
betting that of the 1,400 people who
worked for you you had 50 linchpins and
those people made the place work the
other thousand you could have replaced
down a weeks notice but those 50 people
what they knew how they cared how they
worked through the world there would
have been no company without them do you
think at all how how do we get people
inspired to become a lynchpin okay so
now we’re getting I think to the core of
what you’re trying to build here and
what’s open to so many of us mandatory
education makes no sense so the system
wants you to feel mostly powerless
because they have power you don’t and it
also wants you to feel inadequate until
you buy more stuff because that’s what
marketers sell us is the idea that until
you buy this you’re incomplete it turns
out those two things don’t make people
happy what makes us happy is agency
knowing that we have some sort of
control over what’s going to happen in
our life and unfortunately the economic
structure that we live in isn’t going to
be easy for most people to fix not in
the short run but we can fix right now
is how we respond or react to what’s
happening in front of us now my friend
Kat Hoch says you can’t be curious and
angry at the same time so you got a
choice you got a choice in the traffic
jam you get a choice when you’re dealing
with an angry clerk you get a choice
with a bureaucrat am I going to be
curious about how this person got to
this moment am I going to be angry at
this situation and what we find is that
as a parent as a clerk at 7-eleven as a
third grade teacher we could dig deep
into emotional labor not the physical
labor of digging latrine but the
emotional labor of sitting when we feel
like running of whispering when we feel
like yelling we could dig deep and say
in this moment I’m going to choose to be
the best version of myself and seek
possibility and it turns out that that’s
a life that you can build an entire life
merely doing that
and then what happens more often than
not is the world responds by inviting
you to play on a bigger stage so this is
not about hustling I’m not a fan of
Sling I’m a fan of a generous hustle and
the generous hustle says how can I do
things in the world to leave a better
trail and to help other people not how
do I do things so I get my fair share
because the world doesn’t respond well
to hustlers they don’t like being
hustled but the world responds really
well the people who take responsibility
and give away credit and that boundary
there is totally different and if you
work in an organization that can’t
respect that there’s another one that
wants you in 91 I helped invent
commercial email so if you’ve ever
gotten an email from any company that
you wanted to get not special because I
was loud and proud against spam from an
early age I got kicked out of the Direct
Marketing Association for my behavior
but permission marking that that was my
invention years before I wrote the book
and we built a company that was getting
more email every day than any company in
the world it was only you know 75
employees so that was a fascinating ride
and it was energizing and I sold it to
Yahoo right at the peak of the bubble
and then I got a call from Bill Gross
who’s a great entrepreneur and he said
Idealab needs a vice president and
marketing we’re gonna go public in six
months would you like a billion dollars
in stock options to take the job and I
looked at my little kids and I looked at
my life and I said I know how to do that
but what would change for the better if
I did and so I turned it down and once
you turn down a billion dollars in stock
options it becomes really easy to
prioritize the rest of your life because
you say yourself well don’t do it for
money because you didn’t do that for
money and so the model has been I see myself as a teacher