Seth Godin: The Song of Significance
When Seth Godin made an exception to his no-flying for work rule to help run a conference for entrepreneurs working on climate, issues, it was at the request of a man named Dan in Australia whose 10-year-old daughter was born with health issues. The day before the conference the man let him know his daughter wasn't feeling well, so he wouldn't be there in person. Seth ended up running the conference with an Australian beekeeper."And he started talking to me about the bees, and he told me the story of Jacqueline Freeman's Song of Increase. And The Song of Increase is just such a great Tim Ferriss story. So heres what happens."
This brief excerpt from Ferriss' interview with Godin shares the fascinating backstory behind Godin's latest book, "The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams."
"A typical feral beehive at the end of a long winter, will have barely made it through. That’s what the honey’s for, to supply them with food during the course of the winter. But if they made it, the council of maidens will meet. They’re the ones who really run the hive, and they will do a couple things. The first thing they will do is build a vertical egg chamber and instruct the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg, which is very unusual because there’s only one queen in a hive. And the second thing they will do is tell the rest of the maidens to go get as much pollen as they possibly can and replenish the honey supply. This happens in May and June in the Northern Hemisphere. [...]
And then based on the weather, because they know what the weather is going to be, they’re very good at this, they will organize without an organizer, leave without a leader. 12,000 bees will leave the hive in a 10-minute period of time. They will leap out of the hive singing the song of increase. And Jacqueline has written beautifully about this. And then they end up in a tree 100 yards away, in a tight ball, because bees have to maintain a body temperature of 98 degrees or else they fall apart. They get into a torpor.
And now they only have three days to find a new place to live. And each one of the bees is doing what the bee does. Almost every bee, except for the queen, is only three weeks old, which I didn’t know. I thought bees lived a really long time. And so the scout bees are doing their scouting and the maidens are doing their — and each bee is doing their thing. But the hive is basically a human brain inside out. There are neurons all working in sync to create this leap forward."
Godin was mesmerized by the implications of this for humans-- before realizing humans aren't bees---
"We’re looking for something with even more internal meaning than simply this leap forward."
On an early morning swim the next morning he was caught in a riptide and---
"came as close to drowning as it is possible for a person to come. And as it happened, I was pretty okay with the fact that that was the end of that. I would miss my family. I would miss so many things. But it was like, “Well, if that’s the end of that, that’s the end of that.” And then this mission of talking about significance just flooded over me and I somehow figured out how to get back to shore. And then the next day I heard from Dan and his daughter Frankie had passed away. And the combination of all those things helped me realize that the world probably doesn’t need another marketing book from me, but probably could benefit from thinking about all of those things at once and realizing that we have so much more power than we want to acknowledge.