BIGG success is life on your own terms. You own your life.

You are the entrepreneur in charge. And sometimes you have to break the rules.

Today we’ll share four rules we are breaking in our pursuit of BIGG success. Conventional wisdom is often best ignored.

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The rule is that love and friendship don’t go together.

We broke this one. We were best friends before we started dating. And we’re proud to report that it’s working out well.

It’s kind of like Harry and Sally. And there are a lot of us in spite of the rule!

Don’t go into business with your spouse

If the business sours, so will the relationship. Besides, who can stand spending that much time with their spouse?

Us!

We love being in business together. Partly for the time we get to spend together. But also because we get to see each other grow in a way we couldn’t if we weren’t in business together.

However, this is one of the comments we get most often. A lot of people just don’t think they could ever work so closely with their spouse.

It’s a BIGG bonus to us.

Don’t make your passion your business

Of course, a lot of people say that you should do this. But there’s also a choir that sings about not turning your passion into a business.

The thought is that you may come to hate your passion and your business. You need a hobby and a business, so the thinking goes.

But we’re very happy combining the two.

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I love to write. I love learning new things. I love helping others learn, too. BIGG Success is my outlet for all those things. The thought that maybe something we say may make a BIGG difference in someone’s life drives me.

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And I love audio production. Creating a high quality production. Bringing all the elements together to make it fun to listen to in addition to helping people reach BIGG success on their own terms.

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Don’t mix business with pleasure

The rule is to keep your personal and professional worlds separate. We break this rule all the time.

We do business with friends. In fact, I prefer it that way. I think the social web is changing this rule for a lot of people.

When we travel – even if it’s just a day trip – we often carve out a little time for ourselves. For example, when we’re in Chicago, we’ll go for a walk along the shores of Lake Michigan.

There are more, but we’ll stop for now. The key thing is to remember this – no matter what anyone says, no matter what the rule is – if it works for you, it works.

That’s life on your own terms. That’s BIGG success!

What rules have you broken?

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file | podcast:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/biggsuccess/00733-090711.mp3

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I have to tell you, Seth, that your book The Dip was very influential in my decision to leave radio to build my own brand. You talked about how the industry forgot they were in the relationship business, not just the radio business. That really helped take me over the top and I said, “Yes, I’m going to start Bigg Success!”

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I’m so glad to hear that and Tribes is going to help you even more because I talk a lot about the difference between having faith in a vision, faith in the future, or faith in the content about what you do and abandoning the rules or the religion of the status quo.

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What is a tribe?

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We love this book, Seth. We see some of the themes from your previous books and you pull it all together, which is fantastic. Why don’t you start by telling us what a “tribe” is?

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A tribe is a group of people that are connected by a common goal, a common language, and common rituals. Usually they have a leader and a movement – they’re trying to make something happen. A tribe is very different than a crowd. A crowd is just a bunch of people. A crowd is people coming to your Grand Opening Sale, people clicking through to your web site, or people looking at your ads on TV. Marketers love crowds, but they have to earn a tribe, which is a totally different thing.

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Because a tribe interacts with each other and that’s what starts creating the movement.

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That’s exactly right. Tribes are always bigger than the leader himself. We can look at some famous ones, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Clearly it was the movement and the tribe that made the difference, not the person at the front of the room. We see tribes in everything from marathon runners or triathletes all the way to the Red Hat Ladies, the fifty- or sixty-year old women you’ll see around the world at cafes or the women who have now taken up roller derby and do it in the evenings instead of watching TV.

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Engagement comes from quality, not quantity

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One of the things in your new book goes back to the crowd theme. It’s the quality, not the quantity, that matters.

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Exactly. What we’re seeing is there’s a guy named Gary Vaynerchuk, who has his own TV show about wine. Gary has a tribe. It’s only a couple of hundred thousand strong, so it’s tiny compared to what any TV network would want. But Gary has benefited enormously, both in terms of revenue and public appearances but also in terms of his impact on society and the people he wants to reach. It’s far more effective than if he had a spot on The Today Show.

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In your book, you point out something about Gary that I thought was very interesting. What he does is narrate his tribe’s passion. He doesn’t push it on them; he just leads the passion.

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That’s right. Almost every tribe was there before you got there to lead it. Almost all the things that human beings want to do, they’ve already figured out. What they’ve been waiting for is someone to connect them and give them a voice. My friend, Jacqueline Novogratz, runs the Acumen Fund, a very important philanthropic venture out of New York. She has trouble finding people who all along believed there was a better solution to the developing world. Once she finds them, all she has to do is point them in the right direction and they’re eager to get on board. It’s not about persuading the undecided; it’s about connecting the committed.

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Seth is also the founder of Squidoo, where you can find a special page about Tribes.

Next time, we’ll continue our conversation with Seth. We’ll learn what pushed Seth to become a tribe leader. He’ll also tell us about the power of one. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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Related posts

Seth Godin on Tribes: Part 2

Seth Godin on Tribes: Part 3