Project Happily Ever After

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My one-sided love affair with this brilliant man dates back to more than a year ago, when someone told me that Seth’s blog was a must-read for any person who professed to have a brain. I like to think of myself as one of the haves when it comes to the brain department, so I didn’t just start reading Seth. I subscribed.

At first? I didn’t get it. Seth’s posts were short. He seemed to be talking in a secret language, bandying around words like “tribes” and “the edge” and “free gifts.” He didn’t have a comments section. What blog doesn’t have comments?

I got busy. I fell behind on his posts. I felt guilty about falling behind, so I did what any normal guilty-feeling person might do. I unsubscribed.

Then someone tweeted a link to one of Seth’s lectures, one in which he described the secret formula behind his 10 bestselling books. I work as a ghostwriter of books. I was intrigued. I clicked through and watched.

And, that, my friends, is when I became cyber smitten.

I resubscribed to his blog. Within weeks I was a Godin-a-tron. At least half of my sentences began, “Seth Godin says.”

In my mind, Seth and I became close friends. Seth called me several times a week, and he asked whether he could help me with anything. That’s how Seth is, by the way. He might be famous, but he’s also genuine and generous. If you knew him as well as I do, then you would know that.

My conversations with Seth went like this:

Me: I’ve been reading Free Prize Inside, and I’ve been thinking about how that applies to my upcoming book Project: Happily Ever After.

Seth: Yes, and?

Me: This is what I’m thinking. Most people would assume that people buy marital improvement books because they want to save their marriages.

Seth: And you don’t think they do?

Me: Well, of course, they want to save their marriages. But there’s more. There’s something else. I think people buy these books because they are scared.

Seth: Go on.

Me: They are scared that they might be abnormal. One woman and her husband haven’t had sex in at least a year, and she’s scared that this might mean that she’s asexual. One man fantasizes about his wife dying in a car accident, and he’s scared that this might mean he’s really a serial killer. One woman’s husband has an addiction to porn, so she’s scared that her breasts are too small.

Seth: I’m not sure I’m following you.

Me: I don’t think people just want to save their marriages. I think they want to know that they are normal, and that they are not alone. That’s my free prize! My book opens with the line, “I knew something was terribly wrong with my marriage when I planned my husband’s funeral.” It’s impossible to feel abnormal after reading something like that, right?

Seth: Sure, that would make me feel normal.

Me: I knew you’d say that! But is that enough of a free prize? Is that remarkable enough?

Seth: What do you think?

Me: For the record, I hate when you do that—answering a question with a question.

Seth: I’m a figment of your imagination. I can say whatever you want me to say.

When Seth blogged that he planned to give away free copies of his upcoming book Linchpin to the first 3000 people who donated to the Acumen fund, I was online with my credit card faster than ice cream melts in Mexico. Seth said we only had to donate the price of the book, but I put down $100, even though I’d just given my husband the “money is so tight that that time has come for us to switch to cheap toilet paper” lecture.

After a particularly bad workday—one of those workdays that brings a woman to her knees and makes her cry big fat girly tears—I found Linchpin in the mail. You would have thought that Seth had sent me flowers.

I ran my hands over the cover. It was silky. I looked inside. There were hundreds of tiny photos of different people on the inside of the dust jacket. The inside cover was bright orange. In lighter orange, I read these words: gifts, emotional labor, indispensible, lizard, resistance, prajna.

Me: Did you do that on purpose? Is the cover designed to be remarkable?

Seth: You like my cover?

Me: Yes, I can’t stop running my hands over it. I’ve been making love to the cover with my fingers for hours. And the interior! I love the words in the inside cover. No one does anything with the inside cover or the inside of the dust jacket. Usually it’s just wasted white space. But you! You did something with the white space.

Seth: I’m glad you noticed.

Me: Did you choose those words for a reason, or are they random?

Seth: Why don’t you read the book and then you can tell me what you think.

I wanted to make Seth proud, so I set out to be the first of the Godin-a-trons (Seth would call us his “tribe”) to read and review Linchpin. In order to do that, I figured I’d have to read 50 pages a night. At that rate, I’d finish the book by the weekend.

By Friday, I’d read three quarters of the book, and I was right on schedule. That’s when I read Seth’s blog and learned that numerous people had already blogged about his book.

The bastards!

Thanks to Seth’s sage advice in Linchpin, though, I recovered quickly.

“Anyone can write the first review,” I told myself. “But only one person can write the more remarkable review.”

I set out to do exactly what Linchpin prescribed. I would go to the edge. I would find my art. I would write a review that was pee-in-my-pants scary.

That’s when the headline about stalking Seth Godin popped into my head.

“Oh, no, I can’t use that headline,” I thought. “What if my husband thinks I’m really stalking Seth? What if my ghosting clients think that I’m not mentally balanced? What if I get arrested?”

According to Seth, that was my lizard brain talking. It was dredging up thoughts to scare me into writing an ordinary book review that no one in their right mind would read until the boring end, but that would definitely not land me in a jail cell, either.

I chattered away with Seth about precisely how I would write the most remarkable book review ever written.

Me: But I’m not so sure about this. Linchpin is a business book. I write a marriage blog. I can’t review a business book on a marriage blog.

Seth: Who says you can’t? Can’t is a word that lives in your lizard brain. And are you sure this book has nothing to do with marriage?

Me: Seth, you are a genius!

Seth: You’re a genius, too!

You see, Linchpin might technically be about how to be indispensible in your career, but it’s about marriage, too. Linchpin is Seth’s secret formula for loving your job. And if I’ve learned nothing about marriage during all of my bad marriage years, I did learn this: career unhappiness spreads to marital unhappiness like the soiled water from an overflowing toilet spreads into the hallway.

And if that’s not enough to encourage all of you run out and buy my imaginary boyfriend’s book, there’s this: everything that Seth recommends you do to improve your career will also improve your marriage. For instance, take this quote from page 3:

Stop asking what’s in it for you and start giving gifts that change people.

All you need to do is change the word “people” to the words “your spouse” and it suddenly applies to marriage.

Or take this one from page 99:

Deciding what to leave out and what to insist on is part of your art.

Swap out the word “art” for the phrase “the art of marriage” and a more profound statement has never been written.

Or take this one from page 114:

The reason the resistance persists in slowing you down and prevents you from putting your heart and soul and art into your work is simple: you might fail.

Use the word “marriage” for the word “work.” See?

It must be said that this book is no blue print. If you are looking for handholding– for 8 Simple Steps That Will Solve All Of Your Sorry Problems–this isn’t it. Seth will teach you how to love your work in much the same way that Yoda teaches Luke Skywalker how to fight the dark side. He doesn’t give you straightforward answers. Rather, he gives you questions, questions like:

What would make you impossibly good at your job?

Who are you trying to please?

Do you have any bad ideas?

Are you going to continue hiding it, holding back, and settling for less than you deserve jut because your lizard brain is afraid?

And just like Yoda, he uses a lot of spiritual lingo. Yoda talked about “the force.” Godin talks about “your art.” He uses many other strange words: emotional labor, thrashing, lizard brain, and prajna. He even talks about purple cows. I can’t explain the significance of all of these words and phrases to you in just one remarkable book review. I can tell you this, though. Once you read the book, you will understand these words, and you’ll understand why he put them on the inside cover.

What makes Linchpin remarkable—absolutely breathtakingly beautiful—is that it’s not a blueprint. There are plenty of blueprints on the bookshelves already. No, Godin gives you something much more life changing.

He gives you guts.

Linchpin is a bright orange courage pill. It’s a self-confidence transplant. It’s every disgruntled and disillusioned employee’s antidote to Xanax addiction.

Godin feeds you one dose of mettle after another, starting at the very first line: You are a genius.

He tells you that you’ve been a genius before, but you just didn’t realize it. He writes sentences like, “We need you.”

And he lets you in on an important secret. It’s this: successful people are not any smarter or better than you. The only thing that separates you from them is this: they are not scared to fail. Godin writes:

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently.

Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond.

You become a winner because you’re good at losing.

I don’t know about you but, after I read that, failure didn’t seem quite so scary to me. It no longer seemed like something to be feared, bur rather something I could embrace and use to my advantage.

That’s why I underlined those words and circled them, too. It’s why I dog-eared that page.

And it was those words that gave me the bravery to tell you about the Seth Godin who lives inside my head. Yes, you might all think I’ve lost an oar. Yes, my husband might forbid me from reading the rest of Seth’s books that I purchased from amazon with the money that could have otherwise been spent on plush toilet paper. Yes, Seth Godin might call his local police department and inquire as to how one gets a restraining order. Yes, the other Godin-a-trons might get miffed that I strived to write a more remarkable book review than they wrote.

Yes, any number of scary things might transpire.

But, no matter what happens, I will learn from it, move on, and use what I’ve learned to write even more remarkable posts in the future. And I’ll have a lot of fun while I’m doing it.

Even if I have to do it all from a jail cell.

So readers, what do you think? Remarkable? Or just ordinary? Are you glad I got over my fear and wrote this review? Or should I have kept it all in my mind? Should I only review marriage books on this blog, or are any exceptionally great books fair game? Let me know your thoughts.

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Tags: linchpin, seth godin

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Career advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.