Web Theologian

Stevens & Seth Godin, he complained about the lighting the entire event...I see why

Yesterday I spent half the day listening and talking with Seth Godin at his interactive session in Seattle.  Okay perhaps I was just listening but there was plenty of questions being asked and thoughtful wrestling going on.  Much of what Seth shared was wisdom from his many books, especially Lynchpin, The Dip, and Poking the Box.  The only one I had not read was Poking the Box and I’m excited to get to it.

The event open with the gospel music of Fivacious!  They were beautiful, of course ended up sitting behind us and Karin and I totally chatted them up.

The highlight from Seth’s comments was about being in a project world, not a factory world.  The factory places people at companies that have the right skills, the project knows the goal of what is being accomplished.  This fits into my understand of sales, consulting and ultimately what I want to do regarding business.  My ability to quickly assimilate information, high emotional intelligence, and natural curiosity makes this very good work for me.  Seth’s encouragement is that we are to draw the map, rather than merely follow it.  This reminds me of a post from my friend Dick Staub, check out the post here.

Another great encouragement from Seth was to challenge our kids with problems to solve, and let them enter into the big problems we are thinking about whether it regarding politics, healthcare, faith, or whatever.  He mentioned bringing the toy drinking bird and getting kids to talk about how it works.  When talking about this it was a personal challenge for me to continue to feed my curiosity and that of my kids.

Overall what made the event so great was who I was there with.  Of course having my wife gain some insight into the world I feed myself on by listening to Seth was wonderful, we had a date night that night so we were able to really bat around some good ideas and thoughts.  I invited another friend who immediately seemed to catch a fire.  Then a husband of a old client ended up attending with us.  They are not only involved in very cool vocational work, but are deeply thoughtful about artists and children and trying to change the world through their work both in their jobs and outside.  My goal for the event was to take people with me that would be the most inspiring folks in my network and who I would most want to spend a morning with.  I am grateful it ended up being that!