In a box in his New York office, Seth Godin keeps a T-shirt. It cost him $40 billion. At Amsterdam Business Forum 2026, he tells the story behind it, with five lessons for you.
“It’s easy to think that we are stuck in traffic, but we are traffic.”
Seth Godin, author of more than 20 bestsellers and a living legend in marketing and leadership, closes Block 1, about the human role in digital organizations. Decades ago, Seth writes a book on how to use the internet. It sells fewer than 2,000 copies. The T-shirt is for the sales force. At the same time, two guys in California named David and Jerry build a website on how to use the internet. They call it Yahoo. Seth’s half would have been worth $40 billion. Instead, he gets a T-shirt, because he doesn’t see that the systems are changing.
Now AI is here, and Seth calls it “the biggest change in our world since the dawn of electricity.” Here are five lessons to make sure you end up with more than a T-shirt.
“You do not want to work for an AI, because it will push you around in ways that will not make you happy. The alternative is to get an AI to work for you.”
Bosses are adopting AI fast, Seth says, because they are in love with deskilling: they take the talent of their best people, build it into the system, and hire people who aren’t as picky about where they work. To sell the idea, they promise you’ll become a centaur, half horse and half human, with AI doing the heavy lifting underneath and your brain on top. In many situations, though, it’s a reverse centaur: the machine on top, you underneath.
The alternative is upskilling: stop defining your job as a list of tasks, and start working in projects. The tasks can go to AI, or as Seth calls it, your new team of 10,000 unpaid interns. They aren’t that good, but they work for free. And if someone can write down everything you do all day, they will find a computer that does it cheaper. What’s left is the work no one can write down: owning your craft and making decisions. Or, as Seth puts it: “We need to be a landlord, not a tenant.”
Concrete lesson for you: List everything you did yesterday. Whatever someone could write down for you, hand to the interns, and spend the time you save on a project you own.
“When you say but, you are undermining the very thing you want to do.”
In the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock is the single most famous painter in America. He’s in Life magazine. Then he tells his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, that he doesn’t want to spend his life as a cover band of his own paintings. He changes his canvas and the way he paints, he puts on a big show, and everyone comes. But he doesn’t sell one painting. Pollock wants two things, Seth explains: to be on the cutting edge of art, and to be celebrated. “When he wanted both at the same time, he couldn’t have either one.” We all want to run the marathon, but we don’t want to get tired. Change one word, and the sentence changes with it: “I want to run the marathon, and I am prepared to get tired.”
Concrete lesson for you: Write down the “but” sentence that keeps you stuck. Rewrite it with “and,” and decide if you are willing to pay the price.
“Not everyone, but someone.”
You could build a machine that makes coffee, makes toast, and has a pressure cooker built in. “But no one wants this.” Seth’s alternative is the smallest viable audience: the smallest group that’s big enough to make it worth doing. Finding them takes practical empathy: “You don’t have to be three years old to be a toy designer.” And you don’t need 5,000 cowboys to herd 10,000 cattle. A few cowboys herd 10 cattle, those cattle influence the next 100, and before you know it, the cattle are herding themselves.
Concrete lesson for you: Describe the smallest group that really wants your next project, and ask: who’s it for, what’s it for, and what’s in it for them?
“We have been taught to be compliant cogs in a system that needs us to be compliant cogs.”
Picture a really horrible boss. They call you at home at two in the morning to tell you that you did a bad job today, and that tomorrow’s meeting isn’t going to go well. They don’t appreciate you, they don’t support you, and they don’t believe in you. Who is this boss? “It’s you.” It’s the voice in your head, and Seth wants to know how it got there.
So he runs an experiment. He asks the room to raise their right hand as high as they can. Then he says: “Now raise it higher.” The hands go up further. It happens in every city in the world: the industrial system has taught us to hold back, because the boss or the teacher will just ask for more. And now that AI shows up, the question is: are we waiting for it to give us instructions, “or are we going to put it to work and lead and decide?”
Concrete lesson for you: Write down the last thing the boss in your head told you. You would never accept it from a real manager, so stop accepting it from yourself.
"It is not our job to panic about every single thing that did not work."
Seth has taught more than a million people to juggle. High achievers do it like this: the third ball drifts, they reach for it, and because they’re out of position, a ball lands on the floor. Seth starts with one ball. Throw, throw, throw, for twenty minutes. Then a second ball. No catching: let it drop. “When you get good enough at throwing, the catches take care of themselves.” At work, we only measure the catches. Yet “the person who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck.”
Concrete lesson for you: Pick one project your team keeps polishing. Set a release date before it feels ready, and judge your team on the throw.
Fifteen years ago, Seth hears Neil Armstrong tell the story of Apollo 11. Then a huge full moon rises over Armstrong’s shoulder. He stops, turns, and says: “I’ve been there.” NASA did it with less computing power than the phone in your pocket.
Seth keeps a T-shirt in a box to remind him of a change he missed. When the work gets hard, look up: there are footprints on the moon. The question, as a friend of his puts it, is: will you choose to matter?
“There are people just waiting for you to say, follow me.”
Ready to throw? Start here.