Seth Godin and Stephen King's pencil

Maybe this writing project will just turn into recapping podcasts I enjoyed. Who knows.

Either way, this post is about Seth Godin’s appearance on the Tim Ferris podcast. I mentioned it in an earlier post I wrote at Dunkin Donuts but couldn’t recall whose podcast it was on.

Along with the excerpt, here are some other things I enjoyed while trying to find1 his thoughts on writing rituals.

Bad ideas: Seth says daily blogging is one of his top 5 best business decisions, because it leaves a trail and he can continue doing it forever. Seth says he writes probably five posts a day, but stresses he has no ritual. Sometimes he’ll look at his queue and feels like he can write something better, so he does. But he says any good writer, if they’re being honest, will tell you they write a lot of bad things before getting to the good.

Write right: He writes right in Typepad, the blogging platform he uses and has been using for years. He shares a story about learning something from Chip Conley, who he went to business school with:

He got five of us together, and every Tuesday night we met in the anthropology department for four hours. And we brainstormed more than 5000 business ideas over the course of the first year of business school.

…He picked the anthropology department because he knew someone there and could get the conference room. He said, “This is the only place we will ever do this. And the reason is because when you walk into this room, you will associate this room with what we do here.

It only happened in that location and location is an important thing. The significance of writing in Typepad is not that it’s the best editor or anything, it’s that it’s the location where he goes and knows exactly what he’s there for and what he should be doing. I’m trying to find my location2.

Stephen King’s pencil: Tim asks about Seth’s writing ritual. “What time? Do you write in the morning?”

It’s not interesting to me to talk about how I do it because there’s no correlation that I have ever encountered between how writers write and how good their work is. So they should move on because it doesn’t matter.

I will now write ten more posts about how I write.

My dream is to be considered a good writer so I can tell people that I write in cafes. And I drown out the cafe sounds with headphones playing scientifically focus-approved cafe sounds. And that I use a Dr. Grip.

  1. I tried listening at 3x but have found that 2x is good for finding things and 1.5x is good for listening.

  2. I’m currently at one of the coffee shops around the corner. The coffee is better than Dunkin’ Donuts (possibly), but it feels weird being the only one sitting in the shop. It seems like they know every customer and have conversations with everyone that walks in. There are regulars. Which is what I’d like from a coffee shop. And exactly what I don’t want for a writing location. They look over once in a while. Are they wondering what I’m writing about? I’m certain the people at Dunkin’ Donuts don’t wonder about me at all. It’s great.