Seth Godin Quotations

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

Being aware of your fear is smart. Overcoming it is the mark of a successful person.

I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn't increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

The Net is not television. It is the finest direct-marketing mechanism in the history of mankind. It is direct mail with free stamps, and it allows you to create richer and deeper relationships than you've ever been able to create before.

Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe; it feels reliable.

The way to work with a bully is to take the ball and go home. First time, every time. When there's no ball, there's no game. Bullies hate that. So they'll either behave so they can play with you or they'll go bully someone else.

When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.

Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it's easier, it scales and it's profitable. But people don't like it - we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.

Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.

The internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest.

Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from, from the leading.

We're not going to outgrow our need for information.

The minute there's a map, there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity.

Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It's not just about entertainment - it's about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.

I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.

What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it's something that people have wanted forever.

This notion that it is up to each person to innovate in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over.

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.

I think there's plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That's just not the kind of blog I'm writing, and I'm not the kind of blogger that could do that.

If you're going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don't work.

The future of publishing is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.

If you're going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.

A bully is playing a game, one that he or she enjoys and needs. You're welcome to play this game if it makes you happy, but for most people, it will make you miserable.

I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it's useless, I think it's a distraction.

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

If a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable - if you can't imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product - it's time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.

I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there - a project a week.

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone.

Canoeing was hard and scary, and the wind could blow you across the lake if you did it wrong. After a year of not doing it right, I could talk to people and get them to sit up straight, take different kinds of chances, to breathe differently, to engage in the moment in the boat. And I changed them, and I changed me in the process.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

Kickstarter isn't a profit center, it's an organizer and an instigator.

The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.

The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There's an exception for business information and super timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win.

Who you hang out with determines what you dream about and what you collide with. And the collisions and the dreams lead to your changes. And the changes are what you become. Change the outcome by changing your circle.

Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It's to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.

No offense intended...Most people online are gorillas. When a gorilla walks into an experiment, what they say is 'What do I do now? Where's the banana?'

If a lens makes a penny or a nickel or a dime a day, it doesn't seem like much until there's a million of them.

Give up control and give it away, ... The more you give your idea away, the more your company is going to be worth.

What Wonder understood, that Otto did not, is that if your idea spreads, you win,

The ability to change fast is the single most important asset in a world that's changing fast.

to click on a link or buy online.

We've had people who were yoga instructors. ... We have a former marine, and we have everything in between,

The most popular TV show in America is a game show, ... People have been playing our games for years and are playing more and more games. The relationship they build is similar to a magazine that has a subscription base or a newspaper with home delivery customers.

How dare you squander even one more day not taking advantage of the greatest shifts of our generation? How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?

The only reason to buy a paper book any longer is to own it and cherish it and remember it and tell a story about it.

Great boss is challenging people in the right way. Leading, not managing. Supporting them by giving them both a platform they can count on and expectations they can stretch for.

I've found that giving gifts is transformative. It makes me better. It clarifies my thinking and allows me to do better work.

Making an average pitch to average people, or having an average gala for average people isn't going to scale anymore. You've got to find the people who care. Those people are worth all of your time.

I feel like I'm treating people as I'd like to be treated.

If you can raise money, you're never going to have trouble getting a job.

You have to pay the price to be in the right place at the right time often enough that people tend to see you as the regular kind.

To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency within otaku is almost impossible. There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku.

What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. They would ignore the geeks, and - God forbid - the laggards. It was all about going for the center. I don't think that's the strategy we want to use anymore.

So by giving people a tool that they can share and benefit from, it's a form of media that isn't controlled by Rupert Murdoch or the guys at Viacom. It is a form of media that is earned every single time it spreads.

Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910's, I wonder what they said? Like, the greatest invention since the telegraph or something? But the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this - that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available, no one bought it, no one knew about it. It was a complete and total failure.

I hope I'm better looking than Yoda, but - I'm really interested in people who have something to say, a change they want to make and can't figure out why they can't make it spread.

Or, if I take that same auditorium and I make it much bigger and put more space between seats, it'll be quieter because it's much harder when you're not in physical contact with people to spread a virus from person-to-person, right? There are all sorts of patterns that we see in epidemiology that help us understand why something spreads.

And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread is not always about what the patent is like or what the factory is like, it's about can you get your idea to spread or not?

And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual or you're in business or flying hot air balloons. People who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. But consumers, they got way more choices than they used to and way less time.

We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?

You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread.

When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn't big 'cause they ran a lot of ads. They're big because someone took out their iPhone and said to their friend, watch this, and pressed a button and a car pulled up.

That the horrible Zika virus or HIV, we can look at what it means to be patient zero, what it means to need not much contact to spread, and all of those things follow into the way ideas spread.

But if the cow is purple, you'd notice it, OK? The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built is, is it remarkable? And remarkable's a really cool word 'cause we think it just means neat, but it also means worth making a remark about, and that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going.

Marketing yourself to a new person often involves being charismatic, clever and quick-but most jobs and most relationships are about being consistent, persistent and brave.

By the time there is a case study about your industry, you are already too late...

You succeed because you've chosen to be confident. It's not really useful to require yourself to be successful before you're able to become confident.

The goal in blogging/ business/ inspiring non-fiction is to share a truth, or at least a truth as the writer sees it. To not just share it, but to spread it and to cause change to happen. You can do that in at least three ways: with research (your own or reporting on others), by building and describing conceptual structures, or with stories that resonate.

Teaching young people to sell is a priceless gift.

If you have a book to write, write it. If you want to record an album, record it. No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you're worthy.

Many Things That Are True Are True Because You Believe Them.

If you use your money to create exceptional products and services, you won't need to spend it on advertising.

You don't have to settle for the status quo, for being good enough, for getting by, for working all night.

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

Nothing about becoming indispensable is easy. If it's easy, it's already been done and it's no longer valuable.

Whining isn't a scalable solution.

Studying entrepreneurshi p without doing it... is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.

Every activity worth doing has a learning curve.

The future of marketing is leadership

No niche is too small if it's yours.

Skepticism doesn't help you hear.

The nature of revolutions is that they destroy the perfect and enable the impossible.

What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.

If you're not willing to get your 'worst one ever' out of the way, how will you possibly do better than that?

Your biggest failure is the thing you dreamed of contributing but didn't find the guts to do.

I have something to say. I know how to do something. I’m doing it. If you want me to do it with you, raise your hand.

The resistance is not something to be avoided, it's something to seek out.

Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.

You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support, and you market every time you send a memo.

You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.

Anticipated, personal, and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.

As long as you want to please everyone, you won't please anyone.

The problem with holding a grudge is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else. It might be the competition or a technology or the lousy things that someone did a decade ago. None of it is going to get better as a result of revisiting the grudge.

Everyone is not your customer.