Entrepreneur Seth Godin on How to Launch Your Own Food Enterprise

Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Today, my guest is Seth Godin, the insanely popular business blogger and best-selling author (his book, Tribes, is the most inspiring on leadership I've ever read). Seth has been encouraging and inspiring future leaders of every stripe imaginable for over thirty years, and since he loves to eat and cook and talk about food and life, I think he's perfect for Special Sauce. Seth has some unique and seemingly counterintuitive advice for aspiring restaurateurs: "The goal [in opening a restaurant] is not the biggest possible audience. The goal is the smallest possible audience. By possible I mean sustainable. So if you can build a restaurant on 1,000 people and make a living, then obsess about a restaurant for 1,000 people. By focusing on what they need and delighting them, they're going to tell their friends." Seth also believes that anyone interested in the food business has to understand how much human beings crave novelty and crave connection. And when it comes to fear of failure, he says, "You can't make the fear go away, you have to learn to dance with it." He adds, "Pablo Picasso painted 10,000 paintings, only a hundred of them are amazing, fifty changed the world, which means he failed 9,900 times." While we're on the subject of Picasso, here's Seth's definition of an artist: "What it means to be an artist is to do work that matters in a human way that changes someone else." I hope you enjoy this remarkable episode of Special Sauce. It just might change the way you think about your life and work.