Why Intentional Habits Define Success - Seth Godin

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Besides your daily writing, what are some of the other habits you've adopted over the years?

[00:00:04]>> Um, I ask why a lot. Uh, I have rules for myself that I make once and then I don't negotiate them again.

[00:00:16]So, I haven't had a piece of meat or chicken since 1980 something because I just don't want to keep revisiting the question. Right? I made a good decision.

[00:00:25]The decision has served me well. I'm done with that decision. I'm going to go on to the next one. Uh the habit of ignoring sunk costs, which is really hard, which is to say doesn't matter how much it took me to get to X. If I don't want X anymore, I shouldn't keep with that. Um the idea of not having a meeting, I don't have meetings. Uh, I will have one-on-one conversations all the time, but it's very hard to persuade me to sit in a room with three or four or six people as we go around the room and do X, Y, or Z.

[00:01:01]Send me a memo, put it in Slack. I don't need to do that. And as a result of no TV and no memos, I have six or seven hours every day that most people don't have.

[00:01:10]>> And why don't you like meetings?

[00:01:12]>> Well, uh, I worked >> performance.

[00:01:15]>> I I worked well, I worked with Al Pit and Pali on a book about this. He wrote it um called Read This Before Our Next Meeting. I published it and the math is overwhelmingly uh compelling, which is that if the people in the meeting are getting build out at $50 or $100 an hour and there's six of them and you're sitting there for an hour, not only did you just wait waste $600, you gave people a place to hide. And most meetings in most organizations are a bunch of people waiting for someone else to take responsibility.

[00:01:49]And why did we do that exactly? I was talking to somebody from Credential yesterday when I was out in California and uh she goes to eight hours of meetings a day. That's not unusual at all. Why? What? Where did that come from? And she can't go to 10 because she goes home after eight and a half. So the point is what would happen if instead we asked every time what is this meeting for and I'll tell you a quick meeting a friend uh who runs a Fortune 1000 company is also a uh brilliant computer guy and one weekend he wrote a hack in Google calendar that erased every meeting in the entire company that was a weekly meeting that had been running for more than two months. And on Monday morning, he sent the company a note. And he said, "Look, I've just deleted all of the persistent weekly meetings. Let's try for two weeks, 3 weeks without them, and if you still want to put it back on the calendar, go ahead." But he cleaned out all the crust. And that was brilliant because it forced people to take responsibility for calling the meeting as opposed to saying, "Well, we always have this meeting." And that it seems like uh trying to run a race with boots on. I don't know why you would do Yeah, it's a great way not to take ownership is call a meeting. Bezos has a famous practice, I think, at Amazon, where if you call a meeting, you have to write a brief like a onepage brief.

[00:03:11]>> Three.

[00:03:12]>> Three. Okay.

[00:03:12]>> I ran one at Amazon.

[00:03:13]>> Oh, really? And then when everyone gets there, they have to sit and read it right >> in front of you.

[00:03:17]>> In front of you >> and then make and then it starts.

[00:03:20]>> Well, it doesn't start because if everyone in the room agrees with your conclusion, the meeting is over.

[00:03:26]>> What has to happen is if someone doesn't if they have more questions, then they then there can be a meeting. So the default is okay go ahead. So the meeting could be six minutes we're done and I went in and there people have played with like you smaller type face and smaller like in high school and so they make rules now about how how many the three pages. So I put laid out all the three pages is when I worked with them on uh the future of the Kindle and I had all these inventions that I wanted them to put into the Kindle and ways that the Kindle could be better.

[00:03:56]>> Okay. And it was super this meeting because I was responsible until after they read the memo and then someone else became respons and the response torch keeps passing and at the end if they're not going to do it they got to say why they're not going to do it. If they are going to do it they got to say when they're going to do it and it just supercharges the whole thing. It was magic. I don't call that a meeting. I have I need a new name for it. But if you want a meaning like that, you have my blessings.