Seth Godin Opportunity Quotations

Living with doubt ... is almost always more profitable than living with certainty. People don't like doubt, so they pay money and give up opportunities to avoid it. Entrepreneurshi p is largely about living with doubt. If you need reassurance, you're giving up quite a bit to get it. On the other hand, if you can get in the habit of seeking out uncertainty, you'll have developed a great instinct.

Marketing isn't done by computers, it's done by people. And people who sense opportunity and have the confidence to be remarkable will always defeat defensive actions by people who have given up.

There are always limits, and opportunities. The ones we rehearse and focus on are the ones that shape our future.

Yes, I think it's okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It's okay to say to them, "You're not going where I need to go, and there's no way I'm going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I'm heading off. I'm betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.

The opportunity of a lifetime is to pick yourself. Quit waiting to get picked; quit waiting for someone to give you permission; quit waiting for someone to say you are officially qualified... and pick yourself.

Life is not about gutting out every situation. It's about identifying opportunity or the lack thereof. If your pride is all that is standing in the way of quitting, quit. The right people won't care and the wrong people don't matter. If you know you're on the right path, persevere though the pain. It will be worth it.

The opportunity is not in being momentarily popular with the anonymous masses. It's in being missed when you're gone, in doing work that matters to the tribe you choose.

If you've got the platform and the ability to make a difference, then this goes beyond 'should' and reaches the level of 'must.' You must make a difference or you squander the opportunity. Wasting the opportunity both degrades your own ability to contribute and, more urgently, takes something away from the rest of us.

The goal, then, isn't to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

If you're not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

Viewing the web as a platform for generosity is very different than seeing an opportunity to turn it into an ATM machine.

It's pretty easy to decide to roll with the punches, to look at the enormity of natural disaster and choose to hunker down and do less. It's more important than ever, I think, to persist and make a dent in the universe instead. We've all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.

Too often, we don't give people the opportunity to fill in the blanks.

Faced with the opportunity to become the category of one, we almost always hesitate, almost always compromise, almost always dumb it down to play it a little bit safer

I don't think there's a shortage of remarkable ideas. I think your business has plenty of great opportunities to do great things. Nope, what's missing isn't the ideas. It's the will to execute them.

That's your opportunity - to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.

Gratitude and opportunity create more of the same.

The goal of a marketing interaction isn't to close the sale, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married. No, the opportunity is to move forward, to earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.

Change is not a threat, it's an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.

Our job is to make change. Our job is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get where they'd like to go. Every time we waste that opportunity, every page or sentence that doesn't do enough to advance the cause is waste.

Organizations that destroy the status quo win. Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.

The people who are good in the long run fail a lot, especially at the beginning. So, when you fail early, it might be worth realizing that this is part of the deal, the price you pay for being good in the long run. Every rejection is a gift. A chance to learn and to do it better next time. An opportunity to figure out how to bounce, not break. Don't waste them.