Tweet of the Week: Seth Godin

(Every once in a while this weekly post will feature something that’s not a tweet! I just don’t know what else to call this series of posts and most of them will be tweets so I’m going to keep calling it the Tweet of the Week.

Okay, enough about how the sausage is made around here…)

This week’s post is about a quick passage from a great episode of Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast. Akimbo is a weekly podcast that Seth has been doing for a while now. I am almost an entire year behind! I tend to listen to his stuff so closely that I can’t ever have it on “in the background” but I am making an effort to work my way through them. So much good material!

This clip is from his episode titled Thrash Now. (It’s pretty cool that you can share podcast episodes with time stamps so it goes straight to the part in question!)

In this clip, he talks about changing the culture of something. He says that if 2/3 of people think you are too early, you have a chance to change the culture. That really got me thinking.

Change is hard for all humans. It can be even harder when humans get together and form an institution. So changing the culture of an institution (or a specific corner of the music business) can be very difficult.

I like that Seth specifically says that to have any real shot at changing the culture somewhere that the people who aren’t down with what you’re doing (or at least not when you’re doing it) will outnumber the people on board by a full 2 to 1 ratio! I find this kind of empowering.

Meaningful change is important and difficult and we always have to go in with our eyes wide open. It is a gift that Seth has told us ahead of time that way more people than not won’t be ready for it. It also serves to take that away from us as a usable excuse for not proceeding.

Thank you, Seth!