Impact Day in conversation with Seth Godin
By Jim Sharman, September 2025.
With Impact Day 2025 just around the corner, we caught up with our keynote guest speaker, the celebrated, creative, and colourful character Seth Godin. He offered a wide-ranging and, at times, intimate account of his perceptions, worldview, and frank feelings about systems, leadership, and change.
We’ve selected key messages from that interview, in which he talks candidly and humbly about his work, mission, and philosophy. He reminds us that we always find the time for things that are important to us, and that when we make the time, we’ll always find the motivation to create positive and lasting change.
Seth, your reputation precedes you, of course, and I note you have a gloriously varied skill set. You describe yourself as a teacher, writer, entrepreneur, speaker, best-selling author, marketing genius, canoeing instructor, and apparently an “improving juggler!” Which of these is most true for you and why?
There are some keywords you’re talking about there. The first one is “skill,” which differs from talent. Talent is what we’re born with, but we don’t have many talents. Skills are earned, skills are choice. So, I’m pleased to say that the skills I have are available to just about anybody.
The second one, about what’s most true to me, I think authenticity is a little bit of a trap. What people want from you is consistency, that we make a choice about the change we seek to make in the world, the promise we want to make to other people, and then we keep that promise. Left to my own devices, I’m not sure what I would do, because I don’t like being left to my own devices!
My focus, the thing I seek to do, is to help make a difference for other people. And so, the things you listed are on that list because it’s my tool set to do that.
I’m hearing “a consistent change maker.”
I try!
Why is that important to you? What’s your end goal around what you’re looking to change?
When you think about impact, anything about the mess that we’ve made in the last hundred years, since we first started pumping oil out of the ground, we’ve, on one hand, alleviated poverty for an enormous number of people. We’ve offered billions of people more resources than the last king of France had, and at the same time, we’ve paid a price for it. And I guess if I were to capture my mission, it’s this:
Now that we’ve paid the price, what is work worth doing? How do we reclaim our humanity and not show up to, quote, “just do our job”? What industrialism seeks to do is deskill people; take away their agency, get them to comply, at work and as consumers. What lights me up is watching other people light up when they realise what’s available to them.
This will be your first Impact Day – and our fourth. What was it about Impact Day’s approach that appealed to you and persuaded you to become a key part of it this year?
The thing about YouTube is that it means you don’t really have to show up live. You can watch a lock-picking lesson, an old episode of Star Trek, or anything in between. So, if we’re going to bother having an event for a day or longer, there has to be more than that, more than “Here, watch some talks.”
The “more” is “connection” – to other people, to your tribe, to what is possible. It’s also a realisation that better is possible, that when we’re in the room, whether it’s digital or real-life, with people who are on a similar journey, it makes everybody better.
You’re going to be joining us virtually – would you like to have been here live in person and visited Tallinn?
There’s no question about it. And as soon as they invent the Star Trek transporter beam, I’ll be there! I gave a thousand speeches around the world over the last 30 years. Then, about five years ago, I volunteered to organise The Carbon Almanac, which was a 1,900-author project, fact-checked, footnoted bestseller in countries around the world about what’s happening to our climate.
And I realised I’d sacrificed my health, and I also felt like a hypocrite getting on a plane to fly somewhere for an hour. I discovered I can do a better, more impactful job if I show up this way. It’s not as fun for me, but based on the feedback I get from people, it actually lands better because it’s more intimate; it can be happening in real-time, and I’m not jet-lagged at the same time.
So, I haven’t flown for work in a bunch of years – and I don’t miss it.
It’s interesting you reference the personal choice not to fly, and I guess this is one way to promote a more sustainable way of living? And that’s one of Impact Day’s primary purposes – to promote a more sustainable way of living and working for all humanity.
So, what do “sustainable” and “self-sufficient” mean to you, say, economically, societally or philosophically? What needs to change in order to create that sustainability?
It’s such a loaded word. If you’re an engineer like I am, and you look at the silent systemic shifts we’ve made to things like topsoil, you realise that 25% of our climate problem is caused by cows and cows alone, a problem we could solve in one day if we wanted to, and you realise that when someone makes a big deal out of labeling something as recyclable, that’s window dressing.
So, what I’m thinking about when I think about philosophical sustainability is how do we honour our parents with the mantra of, “Don’t make a mess!” or, “Clean up after yourself!” or, “Think about the people down the street!”
Because when we’re acting in that way, not like selfish short-term bores and narcissists, but like people who realise we are actually in community, amazingly, it makes our lives better!
So, I’m allergic to the sustainability pitch of, “You can get all the things you want if you’ll just pay a little bit extra and get this seal on your short ribs!” I don’t think that’s useful.
Instead, I think we can create a cultural shift that says we possibly can cycle toward something more regenerative, and we can do that at some short-term cost, which can actually make us feel better, not worse.
How can we change a system whilst keeping intact those parts that people perceive as their ‘need’?
The first step is you have to see the system, and most people don’t. To give you a benign example, in my country, a wedding in New York City, how much did it cost? The average is over $100k. Now, a hundred-thousand-dollar wedding doesn’t make your marriage better! It’s just making you a victim of the system.
If you have a six-year-old and they come home with their report card and they have one grade that isn’t very good, most privileged parents get upset at this. Why? Your kid is six! You’re upset because the college industrial complex pioneered by Harvard, and by Oxford 500 years ago, pushes you to want that sticker 15 years from now on the back of your car to show that you did a good job as a parent. That’s a system.
We’re part of these systems, the ones that say lunch should be high protein, cheap, fast – a hamburger. And we don’t think twice about it because we didn’t watch what it took to get you that hamburger!
So, how do we change the system once we see it? The key is we cannot do it alone. We have to do things that are contagious. We have to organise small groups of people to make small changes.
In the US, there’s this concept of ‘Meatless Monday.’ It’s super simple. It’s two words, right? Let’s just have one day a week where we don’t eat any meat! Well, you’re not going to get Meatless Monday nationwide, but you might be able to get one at your local high school.
And if you get Meatless Monday at one local high school, you might be able to get it at four high schools. And if you get it at four high schools, it’s likely to spread. How many people do you need to do that? Not very many – 20, 30?
My town has banned gas-powered leaf blowers most of the year. It took 15 people to do that. So, what we need to do is figure out how to make it normal to find a dozen people and make a small change consistently and persistently and then do it again.
So, these consistent small changes are what you see as being the key to achieving a goal?
But not British Petroleum’s carbon footprint! Most people don’t know that BP invented that to make us feel guilty. Carbon footprint says, “You’re rich. This is all your fault. Stop complaining – because you’re a hypocrite!” And it put a lot of people on their back foot, so they don’t speak up because they took a plane or a jet or whatever; that’s a trap. And the reason it’s a trap is that no individual is changing their behaviour.
My not flying is contagious because now other speakers don’t have to fly, and because now other conferences go digital, and it starts to cycle because it’s not private, it’s shared. And that’s what I’m talking about – having the guts to say to people, “I’m building this almanac. Who wants to do it with me?” And then getting 1,900 people in sync to create something that one person would have had trouble doing by themselves.
And the biggest side effect of The Carbon Almanac was the impact it had on the authors. It gave us a sense of solace and a sense of possibility. And the side effect is it’s helping the world. We can model that. We can multiply that.
There’s this idea that individuals alone can’t make a massive difference, yet for these campaigns to work, it starts with individuals. You modelling good practice, becoming a signpost for others to follow, serves as a source of motivation. I’ve read that you believe that, in order to make a difference, “finding time is one thing, but finding energy and motivation is another.”
Where do you get your motivation from to be this prolific in your work? And what advice do you have for anyone suffering from, say, climate-, pollution- or waste-fatigue?
Well, the first thing I want to acknowledge is that I’m a hypocrite. And I think everyone who is trying to do things better is a hypocrite, because the hypocrite is describing a future they’d like to live in. And if you’re afraid of being called a hypocrite, it’s almost impossible to do anything worthwhile. So I’m happy to own that badge.
Where do we get the time? Well, if you think about it, in the last 20 years, we figured out where to find the time to spend eight hours online. Beforehand, we didn’t spend any hours online. Where did the eight hours come from? If it’s important, you’re going to find the time.
The problem is we’re afraid. And we’re coming up with great excuses to hide our fear. What we’re afraid of is rejection. We’re afraid of being called a hypocrite or being called out or being ignored, or being rejected. It’s okay – because it’s better than sitting at home in the dark.
So, my challenge to people is to start a book group, just three people, once a week on Zoom. And if it goes well, then do another thing. And then do another thing.
You will find the time if you find the motivation!
I’m quoting you on that! To return to the theme of Impact Day for a second, your answer might feed into this question. This year’s theme is “building a bold, self-sufficient Europe.”
From the perspective of a US citizen in the current zeitgeist, what would you say is the magic ingredient that Europeans need to add to our mix to achieve the goal of crafting resilience? Is there something specific you feel we should be doing differently, like forming a book club?
I think the keyword is “bold.” If you don’t have bold, you can’t get to the second part. So, you know, one of the beautiful things about the many places in Europe I’ve been is how deep and wide the useful resilient bureaucracy is to make sure that things are just and that things are consistent and maintained.
But it’s very easy for a system codified in a bureaucracy to get stuck. And getting stuck makes it hard to find possibilities. Getting stuck ends up putting us in yesterday, not in tomorrow. So, what it is to be bold is to say, “I’m going over there. Who wants to come follow me?”
There is no such thing as Europe. It’s just a fiction on a map. But there are people. And people who see themselves as European can choose to lead, connect, measure, eliminate false proxies, and create cycles that go in the right direction. This ratchet is how everything changes. Everything! You know, back to my culture. How do three cowboys herd 50,000 cattle? If three cowboys need to move 50,000 cattle across Texas, how do they do it?
Well, the answer is they don’t. They herd 10 cattle, and those 10 cattle create a model for 50 cattle, and those 50 cattle influence 500 cattle, and then you’re on your way. So, we’ve got just a few cowboys coming to this event. We’re trying to herd a billion people. We’re going to do that by finding the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people who trust us, who care enough, who want to go somewhere.
We work with them, multiply it, repeat it, do it again!
Is that what appeals to you about Impact Day, the fact that there’s a small group of people looking to make that change?
It doesn’t matter to me how big the group is. It matters to me that they’re enrolled in the journey. You know, I spoke to 150 incarcerated people in Arizona by Zoom, including some on death row. And, even if you’re in prison in the US, which is a horrible place, you got things you can do today. But they decided to tune in and talk to me about where they wanted to go when they got out or while they were there. If you’re enrolled in the journey, you’ve already done the hard part.
You mentioned codified systems earlier as well, which seem to be about control. There’s not much education happening in such environments. I wanted to pick up an education, a subject I’ve seen you refer to often, and indeed, your own alt MBA looks like a highly effective way of challenging (and then improving) what looks like a stagnant and prescriptive status quo.
What is most wrong about modern education? And I don’t necessarily mean academic education, I mean education in society, from generation to generation. What’s the radical solution that you would like to see implemented to ensure current and future generations are better educated about how we interact?
Education isn’t the same thing as learning. Education is a certified accredited compliance stamp that we offer to people in the industrialised world. Learning is basic human nature. We learn to walk and to talk. We learn to do almost everything in our lives that’s important to us.
We are educated to be certified, and we spend a trillion dollars on education, and we’re not creating as much learning as we could. And so the book I wrote about this, which is free online at www.stopstealingdreams.com, argues that, in a post-industrial AI world, anything worth memorising is worth writing down and looking up later, that we don’t need to see if you can write an essay better than ChatGPT or Claude, because you can’t, not when you’re eight! So what are we going to teach people? Well, I think only two things are important.
One, solve interesting problems. And what makes something an interesting problem is if it hasn’t been solved yet. And two, lead. These are things we know how to teach. If we teach people these two things, everything else will take care of itself.
But if leadership is key, then why is it that it seems like a majority of leaders in our world today are failing in their duty to lead us in a direction that’s better for us all? What is it about leaders now that’s missing?
Okay, so you’re describing people who are narcissistic enough to devote their lives to getting elected to a job. That gives them a label, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. That’s a different thing. There’s always been a role for kings and figureheads and people we put on the front of the boat. The leadership I’m talking about is the alternative to management. Management says, “I have power and authority. Go do what I said.”
Leadership is voluntary. It says, “I’m going over there. Who wants to come?” So, your work on Impact Day is leadership, because you can’t order anybody to show up. You can’t order anyone to follow you. And if you don’t do a good job, no one’s going to come. But you’re doing a good job, and people are going to come. You’re a leader. And so, leading comes from the foundation. I don’t like to say the bottom because it’s not the bottom, it’s the top, the grassroots, the people who are around us.
When those people lead, the world changes.
And you’re in a position to inspire those leaders. How does that feel?
I think that people inspire themselves. My job is to create the conditions for them to realise the voice in their head that they’ve been ignoring might be worth listening to.
So, okay, so thinking more future-oriented. I’d like to discuss legacy, the work you’re doing, and the legacy you want to leave behind. Imagine you have the power to influence every single world leader. At the same time, you have command over their ears and minds and an opportunity to create a truly impactful legacy. Firstly, what one piece of firm advice would you give them in order to make that legacy a reality? And what consequence would you put in place for any leader who singularly fails to follow said advice?
Well, I have no idea how to do consequences, so I’ll do the first part. “You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic!” The systems that make us think things are normal, culture systems hide behind culture. So you can try to change a policy, but if it doesn’t change a system, then nothing good is going to come of it.
So, there are all sorts of systems – capitalism, consumption, convenience – that we take for granted. And if you want to do a top-down shift (which I don’t believe is going to work unless an alien power with great patience comes to this place in UFOs and commands us all to do something), you want to change the inherent nature of systems. Examine, for example, whether all taxation should be based on not how much money you made, but how many assets you already own – suddenly a whole bunch of things would shift.
If you change a system based on how we decide who gets ahead, a whole bunch of systems will change that people care about status, affiliation and the freedom of fear from fear. Those three things are built into culture. People like us do things like this. What are things like around here? And, generally, elected and despotic leaders follow the culture; they don’t change it! Culture is driven by invisible systems, ones that we could change if we organise enough people to do so.
So, change the system and generate policies that support system change rather than hinder it?
Yeah, I mean, you know, you can look at something as simple as why does real estate work the way it does in the United States? Well, it’s because there’s a tax deduction on mortgages. It went in that order, right? Real estate started to grab a hold in the 30s and 40s. Tax deduction on mortgages kicked in; therefore, banks showed up to be in the mortgage business. And then now there’s 2 million real estate brokers. You can like that or not, but that’s a system. And in a place where that system isn’t present, a lot of smart people say, “I’m just going to rent my house because I need a place to live. But I don’t have to be a landlord. I don’t have to invest my life savings in this piece of ground.”
So, we should decide what we’re measuring. If we decided, for example, to have a super-simple carbon dividend where everyone on earth got a cheque every year, thousands of dollars, and all that money was collected from people who burned carbon, then choices would be made.
If you want to fly on your jet to London, go ahead, but it’s going to cost you €400,000 more because you’re gonna have to pay for all the stuff you’re burning. That cash isn’t going to go to any government. It’s going straight to everybody who’s affected.
So, what would happen very quickly is we would value things that don’t use carbon, and people would go out of their way to not use carbon, and the size of the cheques would quickly go down because people have been motivated by culture to look at how much things cost.
When you charge the right amount for things, people make better decisions. It’s super-simple. We could change that system in one day, but we can’t because the system has built itself deeply into our culture.
There are companies with a trillion dollars worth of oil underground. They don’t want us to recognise the true cost of things. And so we feel stuck. But we don’t have to feel that way. We can organise and make a difference.
In order to make that difference, what do you think the next great step should be? How do we challenge the system, and how do we shift that culture?
It’s tempting to say, “I don’t want to start on this walk from here to the top of Mount McKinley unless I’m sure I’m going to be able to get there!” But the best walks we go on, we’re not sure. We might have a map, but we also know that the map might be incorrect, and we might have to improvise along the way.
If you’re asking, “What’s the guaranteed path, what’s the map step by step?”, I don’t have a map. All I have is a compass. And the beauty of something like Impact Day is it shows you which direction is north.
So, let’s start heading north.
Literally!
That’s it, let’s go.
Finally, I’d like to ask you a question about yourself again. You said on your website that you’d like people who meet you to tell you their favourite post, question, quote, book or course. So here’s a question in two parts:
In terms of a favourite, what’s yours? What’s the favourite thing you’ve written?
I’ll pick a book that I was listening to this morning and I posted about. The book is called ”The Practice”, and it’s about showing up to do creative work and to lead. And the post is the shortest one I’ve ever written, and it is this.
“You don’t need more time, you just need to decide.”
Of the most recent things I’ve seen you write, and the one that appealed to me the most, was about “making a point” versus “making a difference.” You wrote, “Making a point doesn’t take very long and it can be gratifying in the moment, but making an impact happens over time and rarely brings the same sort of short-term glee.”
When it comes to you attending Impact Day, what point do you most want to make, what difference do you hope it will have, and what does “long-term glee” look like?
If I went to Point Day, I would spend my time coming up with zingers and ways to undermine people’s perception of the world.
If I’m going to go to Impact Day, the only thing I want to have happen is for people to lead and to organise. If people can leave as leaders and organisers, then it was worth it.
