The Seth Godin interview: What I learned about the long view from sci-fi legends

For the last decade, Seth Godin has shaped how millions — myself included — think about work, creativity, business, and life itself. He’s written 24 bestselling books, including Linchpin and Purple Cow. His blog has over 10,000 posts and counting.

Godin believes most people fool themselves into thinking long-term. But in reality, we’re wired for short-term wins. He argues that perseverance, not necessarily growth, is the real key to lasting success.

In a recent conversation for The Long Game, we talk about why long-term thinking is so hard, how false metrics distract us, and what it really takes to build something that lasts. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Eric Markowitz: What’s the hardest part of committing to the long game that no one talks about?

Seth Godin: I think the thing that doesn’t get talked about is that no one wants to admit they’re a short-term thinker. We fool ourselves into believing we’re committed to something for the long haul, but we’ve been trained since childhood to be tactical, to chase the short-term win, to have a short attention span. So I think the hard part is acknowledging that we’re often frustrated because we are thinking short-term. Once we open that door and recognize it, we can start leaning into a longer arc.

Eric Markowitz: Why do you think it’s so hard for humans to embrace that mindset? Do you think it’s biologically wired into us for survival?

Seth Godin: I think it’s both. I talk about the Circle of Now and the Circle of Us. The Circle of Now is what a toddler lives in — it’s no more than 180 seconds. One of the lessons from the marshmallow test is that if we can expand our Circle of Now — if we can imagine waiting 15 minutes for an extra cookie — we start to build a muscle. Most wild animals — except beavers, who build dams — live entirely in the moment. They care about what’s happening right now.

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Then there’s the Circle of Us. When you’re a toddler, that’s just you and your parents, or whoever is in the room. Ideally, as we grow, our Circle of Us expands beyond just ourselves. The way we’re raised pushes us toward short-term thinking. We emphasize who just scored a goal in soccer instead of asking, Does this kid have perseverance? Do they have good sportsmanship? Those qualities are much more useful for who they will become. But instead, we reward the kid who cheated or played dirty to score a goal. And that sticks with us.

Eric Markowitz: Could you share some thoughts on how you try to integrate practical ideas of pursuing long-termism in your life — how you take these theories and actually put them into practice?

Seth Godin: It comes down to false proxies. Just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s important. And easy doesn’t always mean shortcut — it can just mean emotionally easy. For example, I don’t read my Amazon reviews. They’re a false proxy. I don’t judge people based on job interviews. That’s a false proxy too — unless I’m hiring a talk show host, being good at a job interview doesn’t matter. Shielding ourselves from false proxies is really hard. Some people just can’t do it. They need immediate feedback, they need to know what’s happening right now.

For me, the key is consistency. I’m about to publish my 10,000th blog post. I didn’t start with that goal — I just committed to writing a blog post tomorrow. Not because it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, but because it’s Wednesday. Once I made that decision, I never had to rethink it. And that one decision — just committing to show up tomorrow — is probably the lowest-cost, highest-value professional decision I’ve ever made.

Eric Markowitz: Have you seen other representations of compounding in your life?

Seth Godin: First of all, it’s fun to talk about things being exponential, but most things aren’t actually exponential. They might be geometric, but I don’t think in terms of exponential outcomes. For me, it’s about: What can I do today that future me will thank me for? I’m really grateful to the me of 1986 and the me of 1996 for avoiding certain temptations. But I’ve also been wrong before. I lost $40 billion by not inventing Yahoo. I misunderstood what I was seeing and dismissed it as a short-term distraction. But I don’t regret it. Because the alternative is constantly running through a maze that has no cheese.

Eric Markowitz: Part of the reason I write this column is because I think the world has become much more short-term focused, and that has led to fragility — in business, in our lives. How do we stop focusing on growth and start focusing on resilience?

Seth Godin: I think a big part of it is who you surround yourself with. Humans care about status and affiliation — who’s next to me? Who’s above or below me? Forbes’ richest 400 list ruins the day of 399 billionaires because they’re not number one. And a lot of billionaires I know are unhappy. They have no constraints. They don’t know what to compare themselves to. If you grow up in an environment where people value history and statesmanship, that’s the game you’ll play. But if you grow up in an environment that values short-term wins, you’ll chase that instead. Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand convinced a generation of high-performers that life is about day trading. But there’s no evidence that’s a meaningful way to spend your days.

Eric Markowitz: How do you encourage people to build real networks that add meaning and resilience to their lives?

Seth Godin: I think you answered the question just by asking it. Aren’t these just choices? Why do we need a hack or a tactic? We get what we measure. If you measure your life in basis points, don’t be surprised when that’s all it becomes. Just because Mark Zuckerberg wants you to spend your time online doesn’t mean you should.

More and more people are making deliberate choices about how they spend their days. And for me, I’d rather be in discourse than Discord. The systems that profit from our attention want us to be frantic, constantly plugged in, constantly reacting. But when you step back and actually measure what matters to you, the answer becomes pretty clear.

Look, word by word, I’ve written 3 million words in blog posts and 24 bestsellers. And I don’t feel like I’ve been ostracized because I don’t use social media.

So these are just choices. If you want a roadmap, I can’t help you. But if you want a compass, there it is.

Eric Markowitz: You’re now off Twitter and increasingly living a private, offline life. Do you ever feel pushed or pulled to use these platforms more?

Seth Godin: Every single day. Every day, someone says, “Oh, you have to be on this platform.” Or they say, “We worked really hard to publish your book — go make a kerfuffle about it on social media!” And it’s super tempting.

Twelve years ago, I gave a speech in Atlanta to 18,000 people. It was simulcast to another 100,000, which at the time was huge. I was nervous. I prepped for four months. And I nailed it. Afterward, I got in the car to the airport, feeling great. And I thought: Oh, I’ll indulge myself and check Twitter to see what people are saying. And out of 40 comments, one person said something nasty. And it ruined my day. That was the last time I ever checked social media about my work. Because I realized — I’m not seven years old. Why am I letting the bully in the corner of the playground dictate my mood?

So yeah, I get distracted. I feel the pull. But I intentionally build systems that protect me from it. For example, I play Word Master Pro on my phone — but only against myself. It’s a pleasant way to spend 20 minutes, but it can’t expand beyond that. Or take Bongo, the [word] game I built. You can play it once a day — and then you move on. It’s designed to be immersive but finite. So I build my own rules. And I think that’s the key — knowing where your distractions come from and setting up guardrails before you get sucked in.

Eric Markowitz: You talk a lot about false proxies. But what about the flip side?

Seth Godin: For me, I focus on two things:

1. Earning the benefit of the doubt from people who trust me.
2. Creating a body of work that opens doors for others.

What does that look like? It means if I do something new, and someone takes a chance on it because they trust me, that’s a good proxy. It means if I get a note from a stranger — like the 22-year-old woman I spoke to yesterday in Philadelphia, who’s read five of my books and gets the joke— that’s a good proxy. I don’t need millions of people in that category. But if no one was in that category, I’d know I was just hustling. And I’m not hustling. I’m laying track for ideas that persist. That’s what matters to me.

Eric Markowitz: So I’ve been asking people this question: If you were advising an entrepreneur who wanted to build a business that could last 20 or 50 or 500 or 1,000 years, what advice would you give them?

Seth Godin: As a science fiction fan, this is something I think about a lot. But first, there’s a selection bias problem. The companies that are still around aren’t necessarily the ones you would have predicted — they’re just the ones that survived. So we have to be careful with our data.

But here’s what I’ve learned from science fiction, from working with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury: Culture lasts. Business is just a tactic. If you want something to last, you don’t just create a company— you create a community of people who want it to last.

Look at the things that have stuck around for hundreds or thousands of years — many of them have a belief system at their core. Religion lasts. Traditions last.

And if you’re willing to let go of the business but hold onto the belief system, you’ll create something that endures. That’s why, for example, I let go of the altMBA. It was one of the foundational pieces of online learning. But I let it go, and it’s been imitated in all sorts of ways. That’s thrilling to me — because I don’t have to run it anymore, but the idea persists.

So if you think about longevity in terms of abundance instead of scarcity, the number of meaningful things you can build is extraordinary.