Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs

This is the first of 4 Mixergy videos from Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo and bestselling author. In this section, he talks about why and how you can build a tribe. Check in over the next 4 weeks for other big ideas that will help you leave your mark on the world.

Here’s a paraphrased summary of the discussion:

Andrew: What’s the point of having a tribe?

Seth: A tribe is nothing but a tactic, a method, an approach to getting change to occur. And that change could be growing your business, or getting elected or making the world a safer place. All of those things now require a tribe.

Andrew: Why didn’t popular moguls like Sam Walton and Ted Turner have tribes?

Seth: The world has changed fundamentally because a whole bunch of things that used to be critically important aren’t any more.

Darrin Stephens from bewitched got rich with Larry Tate because he bought enough TV time, to interrupt enough people, to sell enough stuff, to make enough money, to interrupt more people, to buy TV time. And around and around it goes.

Andrew: Do your tribe members need to communicate with each other?

Seth: People like talking to each other. We evolved to want to do that. So one of the most highly leveraged and powerful ways to grow a tribe is to connect people to each other. But if you just have that, you have nothing but a coffee shop.

On top of that, there needs to be a message from you, the leader, about where you want to go–about the change that you want to make in your world.

You need a mission, a movement, a place that people want to get to.

Andrew: How did you build your tribe?

Seth: I am not the poster child for how to do this properly. And everyone does it differently.

What I offered members of my tribe is a vocabulary. So if you were in a meeting and said, “purple cow” or “meatball sundae” other people who got it would immediately understand what you were saying.

So what I did was give you a way to communicate with those people.

Hear the full interview