Mixing It Up With Seth Godin

Intro/Outro (00:04):

It takes a bit of a blend of art and science to get baking just right and having extra eyes, ears, and hands can make a big difference along the way. That’s where Ab Maori, north America comes into play. We are the team behind industrial and artisan bakers that help optimize success. We’ll discuss more on this episode of the Oven Light. So let’s get going. Flip the switch.

Rick (00:32):

So welcome back everybody. Let’s flip the switch. The oven light is back on. We’ve got an incredible guest for you on today’s program. I’m Rick Sack, your host, by the way, but I’m very excited about our guest. Let me tell you about him. So our guest today is an international thought leader, an owner of more than 20 national bestselling books, celebrated a discussion leader and speaker, a puzzle maker. You’re starting to think, oh, who is this going to be? A daily blogger with nearly a half million Instagram fans, a graduate of Tufts and also of Stanford, and a fan of his wife’s baked goods, I’m assuming. And so much more truly, this is an honor. Welcome to the Oven Light. I’m talking with Seth Godin.

Seth (01:13):

What a treat. I mean, there are so many puns to make about rising, but it doesn’t matter because the work of turning microorganisms into deliciousness is underrated. What a pleasure.

Rick (01:25):

And you certainly understand it, but we’re going to hold that. We’re going to talk a little bit about that later on. So hey, we try to have some fun on the oven light, right? We talk baking. We talk a little bit about lifestyle. We’re going to start with some hot pan questions. We’re going to put you in the oven here. So straight up, what’s your favorite baked good. And do you have a backstory or something behind it that was special?

Seth (01:45):

So the day I met Lion Al Pullin was pretty magical for me. He’s probably the most famous, was the most famous baker in the world. He became a friend, as you know, he died in a tragic helicopter crash, and now I’ve been lucky enough to know his daughter for years and years. And so I walked into the bakery on Ruhe Schmid about 25 years ago and I said, I’ll have some Ians and I’ll have a loaf of this and I’ll have a loaf of that and I’d like a one kilo of raw dough please. And the person behind the counter did not know what to do with that. I’m like, look, it’s easier for you to sell me raw dough than cooked. It’s saving you a step. And the plan was to bring the starter home to New York back when you could do things like that. And she said, oh, no, no, no, we could never do that. And I said, I’m pretty confident that Mr would think it would be fine. And this door opens and a not very tall person in a green velvet suit walks out right out of the movies and he says, what’s this all about? He invites me back to his office and I sit with him for two hours. I get the tour of the whole place. I give him internet advice, he gives me unlimited amounts of rod dough. Sounds

Rick (02:55):

Like a fair trade.

Seth (02:56):

We had a wonderful relationship. So I think that I wish I could eat wheat now, but I can’t. But sourdough from poin, from apollonia is a very special thing. I think that the baked goods, they make it, by the way bakery are a miracle and almost impossible. But I’ve also been lucky enough to know Dan Leader. One of the breads I invented is on the menu at the modern Danny Meyers restaurant in midtown Manhattan, a Torah he calls it. So yeah, I love baked goods. I don’t like sweets. So generally it would be something savory.

Rick (03:34):

Awesome. We love it. So you’ve got a kind of a daily insights blog. It’s called SES blogs. Feel free to check it out if you visit SES blog. But do you read things daily or are there certain podcasts that maybe you pull some little inspiration from as well? Because you got to keep your engine going too, right?

Seth (03:51):

80% of my stuff is stolen happily. I read a couple hundred blogs a day. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t have an RSS reader filled with any blog that might even be remotely interesting. I read a blog about the history of canoe paddles. I read blogs about leadership and how people can show up to make change happen, but I also try to be as widely distracted as possible because the way I find ideas is, and I think this is a really useful lesson for people, if there’s something in the world that’s working and you don’t understand why it’s not okay to imagine, it’s a magic trick. And that begins with how do refrigerators work. But it also extends to why would people wait in line to pay $85 for a t-shirt at Supreme when they’re already wearing a t-shirt. So if I see something that I have any expertise in that I can’t understand, I got to figure it out. And if I think that’s generous, I’ll make a blog post about it.

Rick (04:59):

You were born to be curious, right? Curiosity is a

Seth (05:02):

Big piece. Weren’t we all born to be curious?

Rick (05:04):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And maybe some more than others. So I love music and sports, so I have to ask the question, is there a favorite album or could have been a mix tape or something like that back in the day that inspires you or maybe you listen to and it takes you to a place or maybe a sports team that inspires you as well?

Seth (05:25):

I checked out a sports a long time ago. I find it has become more manipulative as people have made more money from it. But I had a record label briefly. I think that acoustic music made in the moment. People like Patricia Barber in Chicago, people like my friend Cilla may to go to smoke or the blue note and to watch in real time things unfold before you. That’s a little bit of a miracle. And I make my own speakers and they sound great because I know what it’s supposed to sound like. And the fact that I can get a three watt, two amp to sound like that makes me very happy.

Rick (06:10):

That’s fantastic. I will tell you, I was in Vegas earlier this week and you have one free night. I went and checked out John Fogerty. I had taken my teenage son earlier this year, but he brought up his two sons and his daughter for the Encore and for Guy 79 still brings it and the pipes are there. And if you like rock and roll. Alright, let’s dive into some of the big questions here. So before you got into this whole thought leadership and writing of books and things, you worked at a bagel production plant. How did that started your career? I think,

Seth (06:42):

Yeah, I actually emailed the founder last week and he just retired. He’s got to be older than me, so he is old. I was one of his very first employees. I was terrible and my job was to

Rick (06:57):

Clean. Did you make ’em in squares or what did you do? I’m kidding.

Seth (06:59):

Well, my job was to clean the mixer and it was a mixer that could hold 50 pound bags of flour. So it was giant and it’s a long story, but basically I almost got my hand stuck and then turned into puree inside the mixer, which would’ve been really bad. I just broke my knuckle instead. But then they promoted me to making bagels and that was a pretty good job, but I didn’t have the hourly work ethic. And so I probably wasn’t his best employee. I was probably his worst employee

Rick (07:29):

Actually. But I’m sure he talks about you now, right? He’s talked about

Seth (07:33):

You. It was interesting. I sent this note out of the blue and he got back to me, but I’m pretty sure he had no idea what I do now.

Rick (07:41):

Alright, so by college tutelage, you have a degree in engineering. How has that maybe played a role into your world of marketing and strategic thought and even an author?

Seth (07:53):

Okay, so there are two ways to major in engineering. One way which I’m glad exists is you memorize the process and you become a very useful cog in the system of building things. It was clear after five minutes that that was not a valid path for me. The other way to be trained as an engineer is to realize that some questions have correct answers and that there is a process to get you to a correct answer. And again, suspends magical thinking. And when you suspend magical thinking, magic is easier to create because you can understand how to create the conditions for things to happen. And my sisters and I, all three of us became trained engineers and didn’t really practice because the work is not to figure out how to make a bolt. The six microns tolerance. The work is to realize that there’s probably a bolt that can solve this problem.

Rick (08:53):

Love it. Love it. I did finish this week reading. This is strategy, your latest book, and if you want to talk about, we certainly can. You’re getting some great acclaim. How did this one come about? And I’m going to follow up with another question that maybe you can describe a really cool story. But how did this one go? What are your thoughts now that it’s been out a bit?

Seth (09:14):

So I’ve been lucky enough to run into tens of thousands of hardworking people who have started projects, run businesses, have leadership roles. And many of them say to me, we have a marketing problem, can you help me get the word out? And my answer was almost always actually you have a strategy problem. That strategy is a philosophy of becoming the change we seek to make. What are we going to do about the changes in the system we are dealing with? And as I was, I write every day, but I wasn’t writing a book. Writing a book is fun, but publishing a book is not. As I was writing it started to keep coalescing around this idea that I should name it and describe it because there are problems each of us are facing. And if we can acknowledge that these are strategy problems, we’re more likely to solve them.

Rick (10:10):

Got it. Well, there’s a great story in here that I wasn’t familiar with and I was really intrigued when I just didn’t know the background. There was a real Duncan Hines, right? We’re going to stay in the baking area a little bit. And you wrote the story of a traveling salesman. I think he was in the print world. Do you want to describe a little bit, I think it’s a fascinating story that our listeners are going to want to know.

Seth (10:31):

Oh, you got to read his biography. It’s fantastic. How I found it. I have no idea. Okay, so it’s the 1910s and twenties. Duncan’s a good eater and he’s on the road driving some premo t kind of car around. And in those days, if you showed up as a traveling salesman in town, you were very likely to get food poisoning. There was no health department. There were very few restaurants and you needed to know which ones you could go to safely. Well, there’s a story that’s not in the book that I’ll just give him a little aside. Once he got stuck in a snowstorm, he was locked in the car for over 24 hours, somehow managed to make his way to town, got to town, ordered five breakfasts and ate them all. That’s the kind of guy Duncan Heinz was. Anyway, so Duncan needs to send out a Christmas gift to his contacts and he’s a little cheap.

Seth (11:26):

So instead of buying Christmas gifts, he uses his printing facility and prints up a directory of a dozen cities where you can get a safe meal. He just mails this five page restaurant guide to people and so many people want more copies that the next year he did it again. But he expanded it and by the time four or five years had gone by, it was the most influential restaurant guide in the country. And restaurants would then come to him and say, can you please put us in the book? And he would inspect them, charge them for the inspection. If they passed the inspection, he’d put a sign up in front of their restaurant that it was approved by Duncan Hines and it grew

Rick (12:11):

Kind of a rating. Right?

Seth (12:13):

Exactly. He was the original health department.

Rick (12:16):

And

Seth (12:16):

Then a few years later he got a phone call and this guy said, I’m starting a canned good company and I know that you’re into food safety. Can I put your name on the canned goods? And the canned goods led to cake mix and that led to the business eventually being sold for over a billion dollars. He didn’t get it much of it, but he owned enough of it. And he was America’s first and famous baker because Betty Crocker is not a real person.

Rick (12:42):

And who knew Duncan Heinz was a real person and had this magical story about travelers and food safety and all that. I mean, it’s truly remarkable. So thanks for shedding the light on that. That is good oven light right

Seth (12:52):

There. And he did not invent the yo-yo, that’s all.

Rick (12:55):

No. Okay. Alright. So how do you seem to, you’re ahead of the curve on a lot of these inspirational, impactful stories. I mean, you were early in on the intranet in terms of being an entrepreneur and the blogging and just communicating. Why does it come so easy and how do you make it happen? What’s your magic?

Seth (13:15):

Okay, it doesn’t come easy. Lemme tell you what’s actually hard. What’s hard is showing up for 10 or 11 hours doing work you don’t like or grinding it out. What’s tempting is to say, oh, I need to be on a beach somewhere, but I would hate that too. What you need to do if you want to innovate is be willing to say, this might not work. And that sentence is so powerful and people are so afraid of it. So let’s go back to Lionel. Lionel used flour, water, salt and starter and some water. He refused to bake baguette and his daughter still won’t make a baguette in Paris, France. Why? Because the laws in Paris ever since Marie Antoinette are that baguette prices are controlled by the government and he would lose money on everyone if he made it to the quality he wanted to make it.

Seth (14:16):

So he said, no, I’m not going to do that. Anyone could have said that, but they didn’t because they didn’t want to be embarrassed because they didn’t want to do something they might regret. And if you look at the iteration, if you look at the hundreds and hundreds of variations my wife has gone through to make a gluten-free, dairy-free baked good, almost everyone would’ve stopped long before she did. And so the work here, and it is work is to be willing to act as if and to show up for the smallest viable audience, a small group of people who you are serving, and make something that’s innovative, that solves a problem that hasn’t been solved before. And no one taught you how to do that in school. In school. Never once did they ask you a question they didn’t know the answer to. But our work going forward has to be to ask questions we don’t know the answer to.

Rick (15:17):

Well, I can tell you that we face that every day in our office, right? There are always opportunities to try and do new things. So looking back at other, there’s been other thought leaders in marketing and one that’s been quoted in our office a little bit has been Peter Drucker. And I was just curious, have you ever found any resolve looking at, here’s a great quote, management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things, things like that, quote, board material. But did you ever utilize him as maybe a little bit of an inspiration?

Seth (15:53):

So I never got to meet Peter, but I’ve met many of my heroes, Tom Peters, Jay Levinson. I’ve been very fortunate with all my people who were so eager to help me Jamil leg up. I think the thing that’s fascinating about Peter Drucker is he invented the field. And so there were people like Frederick Taylor before him who wrote books about treating humans like cogs in a machine. But for Peter to say there is going to be a library of thinking about this dominant force in our world that people haven’t talked about. And to a lesser extent I confronted the same problem when the internet arose because there are so many things to talk about when you’re talking about transforming the way a billion people interact with each other. Which one should you talk about for first and what should you lean into? And so every day I remind myself of how fortunate I am in my timing and I don’t want to waste a shot. I don’t mind being wrong, but I do mind wasting it.

Rick (17:00):

Love that. Alright, let’s put the brakes on just a quick bit. We’re going to come back to a couple hot pan. Just looking for quick hitters here. I love college campuses. I’ve talked about that in the past. Do you have a specific memory about Stanford or Tufts or an iconic institution? You’re like, oh, it’s a great place to pick up knowledge or to be inspired on anything

Seth (17:19):

Fascinating. Okay, so I’ll tell you the story that at the end of the book, freshman year of college, I’m walking around and there’s some blue signs tacked on almost all the trees. And all it says is on Wednesday, wear blue jeans if you’re gay. And this was a time when almost no one was out of closet. It was a time when the typical fairly and foreign person couldn’t tell you. They knew people who were gay. And in that moment of seeing the sign tension is created, I’m saying to myself, should I wear jeans on Wednesday in solidarity? Should I not wear jeans on Wednesday? I don’t want to. And in that moment, the sign served its function, it made everybody think even just for a second what it’s like to be worried about how other people will see you. And I am very confident that I learned far more at Tufts and especially at Stanford outside of the classroom than inside the classroom. And now you can learn, every class at MIT is online for free, so you don’t need to go to the campus to hear it from a professor, but to be in an environment where people are regularly dancing with possibility and experimenting. So I started 20 businesses when I was in college with my partner Steve Dennis, including a bagel business and a birthday cake business and the chance to start stuff. And if it fails, you’re not going to be homeless. That’s pretty cool.

Rick (18:58):

Yeah, it’s such a great time. Like that era of your life, it’s so rewarding and it sets the tone, but you don’t always know where your career is going to go either. Right?

Seth (19:09):

Right. Exactly.

Rick (19:10):

So let’s stay on geography. You live up in the northeast a little bit. How about living in the big apple in that area? Certain things that inspire you about the big city?

Seth (19:21):

One of my favorite things to do is go to the Union Square Farmer’s Market or the local farmer’s market in my little town to meet a human being who farms for a living and be maybe not a friend, but a good acquaintance and a supporter, and have them hand you a piece of food that grew that they were involved in. And yet to be with the trains and the subways and the jazz clubs. That juxtaposition is extraordinary. And it’s too easy, I think to get stuck in our lane and just keep doing whatever geography tells us to do. And instead when we find the edges where things collide, that’s where the friction happens. And that’s interesting.

Rick (20:08):

That’s where the magic happens too. I would agree with that. Alright, last one on the hot pan questions. And I’m still a channel flipper. My wife likes to spec out things on the apps, whether it’s app or Netflix or whatever. If you’re flipping channels or you see a certain movie on mine as Shawshank Redemption and you’re like, oh, I’m stuck for the next two or three hours, do you have one of those that you’re just like, wow, I can’t get enough of it?

Seth (20:33):

Okay, so never flip channels.

Rick (20:37):

Okay.

Seth (20:38):

Never flip channels because we needed to do that when there were three channels and when TV guide was over there,

Rick (20:45):

I grew up in that era. Yeah,

Seth (20:46):

Exactly.

Rick (20:47):

Rabbit ears. Three channels. Yeah,

Seth (20:49):

I haven’t seen a TV commercial in 20 years unless I went looking for it, because I don’t think you want your attention held hostage. And can I act out scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Do I want to talk in detail about the lessons of the Matrix or how Frank Herbert somehow thought of Dune? Of course I do, but I’m going to go get those on purpose. And for me, what I want is the mystery of something like the Prisoner, not the predictability of something like friends.

Rick (21:32):

Okay, gotcha. But I’m going to jump in here, and this is going to tie back to your book. This is marketing, I think you referenced it in this is strategy too, and you have a quote in your work Matters, make a ruckus. And it reminds me of the movie Back to School in the eighties, not Back to School, but the Breakfast Club, if you remember that movie, mid eighties coming of Age, all these high schoolers spending time at school on a weekend. What do you mean by make a ruckus? There’s a scene in there and it’s like, can you describe the ruckus? What did the ruckus sound like?

Seth (22:04):

I don’t remember any of that. Molly Ringwald moved nearby and when she moved in, a mutual friend asked if we would loan her some baking pans, which we did and we never got them back.

Rick (22:17):

Alright, I’m going to call out Molly, get her on another show.

Seth (22:18):

Please do. So a ruckus, I use that word very specifically, it means challenging the status quo to make things better for other people. It’s not a commotion, it is this generous act of opening doors.

Rick (22:39):

A little bit of a statement, a little bit of, yeah, something that’s dynamic and intentional, right?

Seth (22:44):

Yeah, exactly.

Rick (22:46):

Okay, a couple more things from your book. This is really intriguing. You have a statement here of the urgency of no saying the word no and meaning no, not everything is yes, there is a movie, yes, man, but there is no, and there’s some importance to being able and some privilege and some honor to say it, right?

Seth (23:07):

Oh, I think it goes even further than that. My friend Tim is writing a book about No right now, which I haven’t read yet. But for example, there’s a fabulous book called Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play. And it’s about business to business selling. If anybody who’s listening to this is in that profession, you have to go,

Rick (23:23):

That’s us. That’s us too. We’ll take this.

Seth (23:25):

Yes. And so if you are a good salesperson in the era of the internet, what you need to be doing when a prospect engages with you is be very clear about what the transaction is. I will teach you these things. If you will tell me you really want. And if I have what you really want, then we should work together to solve your problem. But if you’re just shopping around, if you’re just trying to get bids for an RFP, if you’re racing to the bottom, thank you so much for your call. No, let’s get real. I have time. You have time. We’re not going to waste it putting on a show. We’re going to find out if we can sit on the same side of the table and solve a problem.

Rick (24:11):

Boy, that’s fantastic advice.

Seth (24:13):

Every time you say yes without realizing it, you’re saying no to something else. And so just say your no on purpose.

Rick (24:22):

Wow, that’s a good one. I think I’m going to hand carry that one home today too. I appreciate that. So I know we’re not going to dive deep in this. I told you I wouldn’t, but I at least have to touch on it because your wife, Helene, left a legal career and started her own bakery. It’s called, by the way, maybe I’ll have her on a future show I would love and I would encourage that, but it kind of shows her following a passion point as well. And so one is how important is it following your passion? Two is, since you’re not eating wheat now, were you part of the inspiration for the gluten-free?

Seth (24:55):

The second question is, no, absolutely not. I had nothing to do with it. She runs business all by herself. The thing about passion is it’s way overrated. And when you hear about someone say, I’m passionate about music, and then they go get a job in the music industry doing filing, they’re not doing music, they’re just near music. And if I have a surgeon who’s working on a broken wrist, I want a surgeon who is a professional, not who’s passionate. A professional, makes promises and keeps them. Someone who’s passionate by definition will have days. They are not passionate, they don’t feel like it. That’s not professional. So my wife is passionate about making an impact and she’s passionate about doing the work. She’s not actually passionate about brownies. And if you sign up to be a baker because you’re passionate about the actual baked good, you’re going to burn out. But if you are passionate about showing up in a community to create something, so now by the way, the biggest craft gluten-free bakery in the world, and what she does is she makes it so that everyone can sit around the table together. You don’t have to ostracize the person who can’t eat dairy or who can’t eat wheat or gluten because food and sharing are part of it. That’s what she’s passionate about. And it’s so much more resilient to do work as a professional than it is to demand you be entertained.

Rick (26:30):

Well, I was thinking about your book yesterday on a flight and on Southwest they give you these Remys a graham cracker cookies, and if you’ve had ’em, and they talk a lot about that on the back of the packaging where they’re inclusive, everybody can even, they’re made in a nut free facility, all that sort. And it really tied into, hey, it’s for everybody. Everybody can sit down, eat these at the same time, and there’s no issues and no challenges. So I do like that. Some other quotes that I like, and I have one on my wall, I have a great one from Bear Bryant, if you remember, he was a famous Alabama football coach, and he talked about, Hey, if we lose, that’s on me. If we win, if we have a small win, we did it together. And if we win big, then it’s you, the players that did it.

Rick (27:15):

And I like that one. But here I’m going to read one for you. It says, never lose sight of the fact. The most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people, your family, your friends, coworkers, and even strangers. You meet along the way. And I’ve had it pinned up there for years and I had to relook like who it was from, and it was from former First Lady and she’s passed now, but Barbara Bush. And I just thought, wow, it’s still a great measurement in terms of what’s a successful life. But do you have any like that, that you’re like, wow, I hold onto that and that it just kind of helps me move forward?

Seth (27:51):

Well, that’s the advantage of having a couple page a day calendars. I got 730 of those. I know the shortest blog post I ever wrote is one of my favorites. And it says, you don’t need more time. You just need to decide.

Rick (28:08):

Well, I didn’t count the word count here, but it’s less than a dozen words. But wow, it says a lot. You can say a lot in few words, right? Absolutely. Another couple items that I noticed in the book, you talk about marketers in the world of building scaffolding. Can you explain that? Because as a marketer am intrigued by it and other people out there, right? Everybody’s marketing a product or maybe a project or an idea. Why is that important?

Seth (28:38):

So education experts for a hundred years have known about scaffolding. And what they mean by that is this. Most learning is autodidactic. We teach ourselves, that’s how we learn to walk and how we learn to talk and how we learn to do most of the things that are innate. And when you get stuck, a teacher who intervenes in just the right way is offering you scaffolding. If you grow up in a home where you get support, that helps you learn ethics, that’s scaffolding. So let’s think you just held up your iPhone the first week and month and year. The iPhone was on sale. It was not a success. When did you buy your first iPhone? What did it take for you to buy it? And the answer is, there had to be enough peer pressure, enough systems, enough things in the app store. The conditions had to be created for you to decide you wanted one.

Seth (29:41):

It wasn’t that finally Apple had enough money to run an ad that you would see. It was that the hard work is how do you build the scaffolding to create the conditions for people to choose you? And too many marketers are hustling or racing to the bottom or interrupting people. They aren’t Haitian enough to build scaffolding. And the last part of that riff, I met Sergey about a year after they started Google. And he heard I was a marketer and he said, we don’t do any marketing at all. I said, whatcha talking about? And he said, well, every day Google gets better and we don’t want first time users to come right away. If they wait a little bit, that would be better. Their first impression would be improved. They’ll come, they’ll get here. And that mindset of how do we delight the smallest viable audience to create the conditions so that their friends decide to come? That’s how you build something that matters.

Rick (30:40):

So we’re talking today with Seth Godin, incredible thought leader. I mentioned earlier, it has a wonderful blog. I’m now a recipient of it, SETHS blog. So check that out. If you’re looking for a way to kick off your day, it’s there when you wake up in the morning. And sometimes they’re short, sometimes they’re longer, but always inspirational. But if you have a question for Seth in the future or a question for us at the oven light, you can email this at the oven light@abmario.com. If we reference your question and we find inspiration in it, we might even send you some swag, maybe some baked good items, some promotional swag, maybe even. I’ll pick up Seth’s latest book and ship it to you as well. So feel free to stay in contact with us

Seth (31:21):

Since we’re doing a commercial break here. You know what I need? I make Dosa every day. It’s my favorite food I have to confess, and I make it from scratch. And I find my microorganism management skills are weak. I need somebody to make me a hack, a shortcut, some powdered slightly alive stuff that I can add to my batter and get it. When you make it in South India, you’re supposed to massage it with your fingers. And they do that because the stuff on your fingers is the key to this whole thing growing. The same way when I used to bring Lionel’s starter home, I could make his bread in my backyard pizza oven for a few weeks and then eventually it would become New York starter instead of Paris starter because of the stuff that’s in the air. And so if someone on the team comes up with that, just have ’em let me know.

Rick (32:10):

Okay? Absolutely, we will. So one other item you did talk about in your book, and I think this one’s really powerful and certainly we talk a little bit about this in our careers, is embracing change. Change is scary. It can be the unknown. Why do you go in and you give a bear hug to change?

Seth (32:28):

I wouldn’t give a bear hug to a bear. You can run away from a bear.

Rick (32:30):

That’s true.

Seth (32:31):

I don’t know how to run away from change. So if the systems are going to shift with or without me, how can I dance with that possibility? Where can I don’t embrace every single change that comes because if I can’t contribute in a positive way, it doesn’t do me any good. But the thing that makes a good surfer is they pick good waves. And so when you see the world changing, denying it isn’t helpful, cursing it isn’t helpful. But if you can figure out how to turn that change into a wave that’s worth riding, that’s a good idea.

Rick (33:09):

Love the surfing analogy. I grew up in central Florida. I spent a long, long time on the beach there, so that’s a powerful reference. So hey, before we let you go, any final words of wisdom or anything that maybe today’s audience, and again you’ve got some bakers on here, people within the food production world and that kind of audience, is there anything that you’re like, wow, here’s something that could motivate you or something that might be helpful to you?

Seth (33:40):

Every single person who buys something from you already has food at home. Every single person who buys something from you had a baked good yesterday. So they’re not buying from you. They have no choice. They’re buying from you because it’s worth it. And we have to get out of the industry mindset. When Henry Ford pushed forward with the Model T, no one had a car. So the race to scale and productivity was all that mattered. The reason you can get any car you want, as long as it’s black. Henry Ford liked black because black paint dries four hours faster than any other. And so when something like the Cronut shows up in New York City and there are lines around the block, it’s not because there weren’t any other places in New York City to get a laminated baked good, it’s because someone leaned into. But is this one worth traveling for?

Seth (34:36):

Is this one worth talking about? And the opportunity here is this. There’s always going to be a company bigger than yours and more cutthroat than yours. That’s racing to the bottom. And the problem with racing to the bottom is you might win or come in second. And the alternative is to, in whatever field you’re in, race to the top and be the one we would miss if you were gone. And if we can remind yourself of that, then you can more easily lean in to that feeling of uhoh. This might not work, but it’s still worth it.

Intro/Outro (35:09):

Wow, that’s a great way to finish. And you talk about choice, and boy, we’re honored by your choice of spending some time with us and having you on the oven light today. Seth, thank you so much. That’s it for today, folks. We appreciate the switch is now off the oven, light is now off, and we look forward to seeing you real soon. Thanks a lot. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Oven Light. Until next time, when we discuss more about the wonderful world of baking technology trends and more, the switch is officially off. Goodbye for now. See you next time.