The Day Shake Shack Switched Back to Frozen Fries, Profits Finally Recovered

Source: Diary of a CEO | Published: 2026-08-10T07:00:12Z

Shake Shack spent millions replacing frozen fries with fresh-cut ones—only to face staff misery, customer complaints, and reputational damage. Seth Godin uses their reversal story to show how companies often pay dearly for the wrong feedback.

Then he stopped.

His wife Lee Krasner later said Pollock felt he had exhausted everything possible in that phase of his work. So he shut down the production line, went back to the studio, and developed an entirely new style — different canvas sizes, completely different technique, nothing that looked remotely like Jackson Pollock. He brought these new paintings to a major exhibition.

Not one sold.

He wanted two things at the same time: he wanted to live at the edge of his creative work, and he also wanted to remain the celebrated genius whose paintings everyone fought over. He had forgotten how many years it took the first Jackson Pollock to build that reputation. The new style didn't move the market, and the word "but" grew louder and louder in his head. Then came deeper drinking, then the car crash — he died, and took someone else with him.

This is a story Seth Godin tells to illustrate what he considers the most universal human predicament: wanting two things simultaneously that cannot coexist.

The Donkey and the Word "But"

Buridan's philosophical thought experiment involves a donkey. Completely free to move in any direction. But it's positioned exactly halfway between a pile of carrots and a bucket of water — it's hungry and it's thirsty. Every step toward the water is a step away from the carrots. Every step toward the carrots is a step away from the water. So it stands frozen, and eventually dies of both hunger and thirst.

Godin says we all do this. The trigger is a single word: "but."

"I want a creative life, but I never want to be rejected." "I want to run a marathon, but I don't want to feel tired." "I want a job that fulfills me, but I also like my current car and house."

We usually keep this "but" hidden. We don't say it out loud. We think it's well concealed, but it is the core of the entire deadlock.

His suggestion: replace "but" with "and," then say both things in full. "I want to be a creative person, and that means I will be rejected, I will spend a long stretch where no one understands my work, I will face financial strain — I accept all of this, this is what a creative life looks like." When you can say that sentence, you've made a choice. When you've made a choice, whatever was stuck becomes unstuck.

Alexander the Great and the Pole

In antiquity, a 21-year-old Alexander arrived outside a small village in Turkey. There was a wagon tied with an elaborate knot. The legend: whoever could untie the knot would rule all of Asia.

He didn't use a knife. He didn't pick at the rope strand by strand. He walked around the knot for a long time and noticed a pole at its center — the entire knot had been tied around this pole. He pulled out the pole, the structure of the knot became clear, and it came apart easily.

He went on to become Alexander the Great.

Godin uses this story to illuminate the nature of being stuck: we get trapped because we can't see clearly what is actually trapping us. If what's holding you is gravity, that's circumstance — you can only learn to live with it. But if it's a knot, that means there's a solution. You just haven't found the pole yet.

Michael Jordan Was Wrong

Godin went to the gym one morning and saw a Michael Jordan quote on the wall: if you quit once, it becomes a habit. Never quit.

He said Jordan was wrong. Obviously wrong.

"He stopped playing professional baseball. He stopped playing professional golf. He also stopped playing professional basketball. Because people age — he did something, and then he stopped, because continuing no longer made sense."

Jordan used resentment and "never quit" as fuel throughout his entire career. That worked for him, in that particular environment and that particular competitive arena. But Godin says he himself has shut down more companies than most people who've ever heard this conversation, and failed just as many times. He founded a lightbulb fundraising company in 1987. If he had "never quit," none of what came after would exist.

Quitting is a dramatically underrated skill.

When to Push Through, When to Walk Away

This is the concept of "The Dip" — the trough.

The Dip is the grinding stretch between starting something and being good at it. Organic chemistry on the road to medical school is a Dip. The grind of March at the gym you joined over the holidays is a Dip. Most worthwhile things have one in the middle.

But a Dip is not a dead end.

Organic chemistry is a Dip — every doctor has come through it, and you know that if you push through, you'll reach the other side. But no one has ever pushed through emphysema by continuing to smoke. Emphysema doesn't improve with more smoking — the smoking is what caused it. That's not a Dip. That's a dead end.

How to tell the difference: Has anyone come through a similar situation before? Do you have enough resources to make it to the other side? If yes, keep going. If your business keeps losing money and there's no evidence that pouring in more resources will turn it around, that's not a Dip. That's a dead end.

He gives the example of a restaurant. For a retail shop or restaurant, if it succeeds, 95% of the profit flows to the landlord; if it fails, 102% of the profit flows to the landlord — that's the only difference between failing and not failing. Someone signs a four-year lease and is still losing money after two years. The remaining two years of rent must be paid whether he stays or not — that's a sunk cost, not a new decision. There's no reason to spend another two years of his life defending a wrong call made two years ago.

Quitting the right things is what makes room for your future self.

Waiting to Be Chosen Is a Carefully Designed Trap

Godin once went to LBC — a British radio station — for an interview. He sat in a chair for two hours, pretending to field calls — all of which were actually LBC staff calling in. He thought he'd done reasonably well but wasn't sure. Then nothing. No result, no feedback.

So he went home to his kitchen and started recording a YouTube podcast.

This system of "being chosen," Godin says, was systematically instilled in generations of people. Perform well in high school so a college will choose you. Perform well in college so a company will choose you. Perform well at the company so you'll get promoted. Then die.

The system worked in the twentieth century — for most people, most of the time. But starting in the nineties, "here's a microphone, here's a camera, go choose yourself" became possible. Now there's AI — you can start a company tomorrow, build a complex website by Friday. Yet many people are still waiting to be chosen.

Waiting to be chosen is sometimes just another name for resistance — a respectable excuse. I wasn't chosen, so it's not my fault. I'm waiting — and that waiting itself becomes a kind of safety.

His advice about the "minimum viable audience" is equally counterintuitive: find the smallest group that exists, and if you can make a real difference for them, that's enough. Not everyone, not a million people — those five people, those twenty-five people, the ones who would miss you if you disappeared. His friend Bob Lefsetz writes the most widely-read music blog in the world. Godin says his own blog has a million readers. Both of them started with five readers. That's how it begins.

What Resistance Is, and How to Work With It

Resistance is a concept Steve Pressfield defined: any feeling that prevents you from doing generous, creative work.

Procrastination is resistance. Changing your outfit six times before a date is resistance. Wanting to start a podcast but never starting it is resistance.

Godin tells a story about a friend named Lisa. She moved to Los Angeles to be with her partner, knowing only three people in the entire city. She didn't want to live a lonely life there, so she decided to host a potluck dinner every Friday — with one rule: everyone who came had to bring one new person the next time. After fifty weeks, she had a social circle of 400 people, all genuine friends.

Anyone could do this. Almost no one does. Resistance.

"What if I invite someone and they say no?" "What if they come and don't like me?" Resistance, resistance, resistance.

His advice for podcast resistance is to break it down to its smallest unit. Don't start by thinking about how to get Michelle Obama on the show. Think about who you'd need to have on first to make Michelle Obama more likely to say yes. Step back further. Keep stepping back — until you reach: can you interview your neighbor for 20 minutes? If you can, do that first.

If you can't even do that, step back further. Start an anonymous blog, write under someone else's name, publish for 100 days. If you make it 100 days and you're still alive, you've proven that publishing something in public doesn't kill you. Which means it wasn't the problem you thought it was.

Shame Only Works If You Accept It

Godin was walking on 74th Street when he heard a four-year-old in a playground mocking passersby — mocking how they looked, mocking someone for being bald. He suddenly realized the child was mocking him. In that moment he was instantly pulled back to the feeling of being bullied in third grade.

Then he paused. The child was on the other side of a fence. They would never see each other again. Shame requires your acceptance to work. You can choose not to accept it.

Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer has a similar story. Shake Shack's french fries had always been frozen crinkle-cut — a memory from Danny's childhood in Missouri. Some of New York's top food critics started pushing back: you claim everything is fresh and handmade, but you're using frozen fries from a freezer bag?

Danny cared about the status these people conferred, so Shake Shack spent millions researching potatoes, retrofitted every restaurant, replaced the fryers, and switched to fresh-cut fries. The problem with fresh fries: a May potato and a November potato are completely different things. Sometimes perfect, sometimes limp and falling completely flat. The internet exploded: "What have you done to Shake Shack?" Staff hated the new process, nothing good came of it — except making a handful of New York cultural critics happy.

Danny eventually asked himself one question: what is the purpose of Shake Shack's fries? To make people who don't go to Shake Shack think the place has more credibility? Or to serve the story of going to Shake Shack itself?

They ripped everything out and went back to the crinkle-cut frozen fries. Profit went up, efficiency went up, the world rejoiced.

How Many Voices Are Talking in Your Life at Once

Your parents' expectations are a voice. Your children's needs are a voice. The kid who bullied you on the playground — "I'll show him" — is a voice. The photo of your friend drinking a margarita on a beach in Hawaii on Instagram is a voice, screaming at you: your life is bad, you should be them.

All of these voices talk at once. Most people's lives are being pulled apart by them.

Godin says there are three fundamental drives: fear (I don't want to do things that make me uncomfortable), belonging (everyone around me is doing this, so I should too), and status (who eats first? who gets to drink first?). These three things are tangled together and drive most of the decisions most people make most of the time.

You want that car not because it's fast, but because the person who told you at the high school lunch table that you'd never amount to anything will never be able to afford it. Every time you get in, you can tell yourself: I'm not that kid anymore.

Once you can say that clearly, you know what problem you're actually solving. Then you can decide whether the problem is worth the price.

When we try to serve all the voices simultaneously, we become the donkey stuck between the carrots and the water.

Sunk Costs Trap You Inside a Former Version of Yourself

Godin booked a parking spot on an app before heading into the city — $35, with billing set to kick in five minutes later. On the way, he passed a free street parking spot. Should he take it?

Of course he should. That $35 was already gone. Parking for free wouldn't bring it back.

But he says in that moment his mind still flashed: I wasted that $35.

That's the sunk cost bias. It's everywhere.

Three years of law school, five years in practice, and you've learned one thing: you don't like being a lawyer. You don't want to spend the next forty years doing this. But you can't quit — how do you explain yourself to the former self that sacrificed so much to get you here?

Godin calls the law degree "a gift from your former self." Gifts can be declined. If someone gives you a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig as a pet, you can say no thank you. That law degree — knowing what you know now, if it can't help you do what you want to do — you can say thank you and untie the knot.

He also names three common entanglements: temporal entanglement (today is not yesterday and not tomorrow), social entanglement (what will this person think of me? what about that person?), and entanglement with self-image (if I succeed, who do I see in the mirror? if I fail?). All three operate simultaneously and trap people before they've even announced a goal.

"Do What You Love" and "Love What You Do" Are Not the Same Thing

Warren Buffett's oft-quoted line: in the business world, the most successful people are doing what they love.

Godin says this is backwards.

"Do what you love" implies there's a theme park out there with all your favorite rides waiting — of course you love it. It's passive. It's handing yourself over to an external answer and waiting to be found.

"Love what you do" is an active choice.

He saw a man at a Dean & DeLuca café in midtown — roughly 50 years old, with a developmental disability, responsible for wiping down tables and clearing things away. He was the "mayor" of that shop. He loved the work. Godin and the podcast host couldn't last fifteen minutes in that role — this man chose to love it.

Martin Luther King Jr. said: if you're destined to sweep streets, choose to become the greatest street sweeper in history. Not to please the street-sweeping company, but because if you do that, every single day of your life will be better.

Mark Twain's line about the two most important days of your life — the day you were born, and the day you find out why — Godin revises it: not "find out." "Decide." This isn't something you're born with. It's something you choose.

AI: Are You Working for It, or Is It Working for You?

Godin took Doug Lenat's doctoral AI course at Stanford in 1983. His first real job gave him the chance to collaborate with Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. When AI finally arrived, his reaction was: finally.

He has two core judgments.

First, this is the largest transformation since electricity. The blacksmiths in the 1890s who said "I'll wait for this thing to go away" didn't fare well.

Second, you're either working for AI, or AI is working for you.

What does working for AI look like? Your boss treats AI as ultra-cheap labor, lets it do all the good parts, and lets you do the leftovers AI can't handle yet — insecure, undignified, no future.

What does AI working for you look like? You use AI to connect people and build networks of trust. AI can never replace trust between human beings. If you are the trusted person, using any AI tool as leverage, you will always find a way to sustain yourself.

The analogy: electric companies brought electricity to many industries, but someone invented the movie theater — getting you to pay five dollars to watch a film. The movie theater invented that business model. The electric company didn't.

A simple test for whether a job can withstand AI substitution: could someone write down everything you do in a day? If they can write it down, AI will soon do it faster and cheaper. If they can't write it down — your perception of the world, your judgment about who to trust, the relationships you've built person by person over years — there is nothing that can replace you.

Throwing, Not Catching

Godin juggles. The most counterintuitive thing about juggling: most people think it's about catching, but it's actually about throwing.

A beginner's typical pattern: throw one ball, catch it, throw a second, then one ball drifts sideways, he lunges for it, the lunge throws off his position, the next ball hits the floor. He gives up because he thinks he's bad at catching.

The right way to teach juggling: one ball first, throw, catch, throw, catch, until it's boring. Then two balls, throw, throw, catch, catch. Twenty minutes of practice and every ball lands exactly where it should. The skill of juggling is in the throw. The catch takes care of itself.

All self-improvement content is about catching — will this help me lose weight? will this help me make friends? will this help me build a business? These are catching questions. Nobody asks about the throw.

Practice is the point. If you can build a practice, you stop being attached to results — results aren't in your control, practice is. As your throwing gets better, the catching happens on its own.

The host mentioned a spy he had interviewed. One of the world's top intelligence officers was asked: how do you get someone you just met to tell you their secrets? The answer: listen. I get into taxis and listen to people talk for eight weeks, because no one is listening to them. Listening is the throw.

Perfectionism and "Authenticity" Are Both Ways of Hiding

Someone told Godin she'd been working on her podcast for two years. She'd never published an episode.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with quality. Quality has a very specific meaning — not luxury, but "fit for specification." A 1998 Toyota Celica had higher quality than a 1998 Rolls-Royce because its parts were assembled more precisely, more according to spec. If you're unhappy with quality, you can raise your specifications. But "perfect" is unreachable.

Declaring yourself a perfectionist is declaring that you never have to ship the work — because it will never be perfect. It's resistance wearing its most elegant mask.

"Authenticity" is equally a trap. Your friends and family need you to be authentic. Everyone else does not. Professionals aren't authentic — professionals are consistent. Professionals make commitments and keep them. When you go in for knee surgery, you don't want the surgeon to "authentically" be in a bad mood and botch the procedure. You want him to perform at his best. Keanu Reeves wasn't authentically Neo. He's an actor, playing a character.

Godin says when he writes his blog, he's playing the character of "blogger Seth Godin." That's not how he genuinely feels in that moment — it's the best version of what he thinks blogger Seth Godin would say today.

"Authenticity" is often just a more flattering way of saying "I was just being a jerk."

Dame Whina Cooper: 78 Years Old, 50 People, One Country Changed

New Zealand was the last major country colonized by the British. Vast stretches of indigenous land were taken, and the indigenous people were disenfranchised in numerous ways.

Dame Whina Cooper, at around 78 years old, decided to act.

No fame, not much money, nearly 80. She organized 50 people — Godin notes that most of us can organize 50 people — and began a march on Parliament, spreading word of the march ahead of them as they went. Day after day, for over a month, this group kept walking. Halfway there, she was on the front page of every newspaper in New Zealand. The group grew from 100 to 200 to 2,000. By the time they reached Parliament, 4,000 people were walking steadily, side by side.

They presented their demands to Parliament. Too late, not enough — but it fundamentally changed the entire country's culture and law around land distribution.

She didn't do it alone. But she understood that she had enough power to connect others, to build a culture, to sustain a practice day after day.

The only way the world changes, Godin says, is a small number of people coming together, building a culture, and then repeating it again and again and again.