Seth Godin Quotes
-
Our best work can't possibly appeal to the average masses, only our average work can. Finding the humility to happily walk away from those that don't get it unlocks our ability to do great work.
-
If you hear my idea but don't believe it, that's not your fault; it's mine. If you see my new product but don't buy it, that's my failure, not yours. If you attend my presentation and you're bored, that's my fault too.
-
No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
-
Here's the fascinating part, call it the golden shoulder: We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there's a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don't know who they are.
-
It's much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling.
-
The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.
-
If you think cat food is for cats, how come it doesn't come in mouse flavor?
-
The YouTube video maker gets more out of making a video than you get out of watching it.
-
The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we've got. Whining isn't a scalable solution.
-
You can be right or you can have empathy. You can't do both.
-
Rehearsing failure is simply a bad habit, not a productive use of your time. When you choose to visualize the path that works, you're more likely to shore it up and create an environment where it can take place.
-
Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
-
I look at Starbucks, Howard Schultz has made many brilliant decisions, and one of the things that they did was they invented the third space. It's not work, it's not home. That's one of the engines of its spread. But at the same time he was doing that, he bet the farm to open more and more stores in any given town, and making it ubiquitous made it much easier to say to your friend, I'll meet you at Starbucks.
-
Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.
-
People who make a difference never wait for just the right time. They know that it will never arrive.
-
Too often, we don't give people the opportunity to fill in the blanks.
-
Fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere. Standing out is a long-term strategy that takes guts and produces results.
-
As creators, our pursuit of perfection might be misguided, particularly if it comes at the expense of the things that matter.
-
You don't have enough time to be both unhappy & mediocre. It's not just pointless; it's painful.
-
The combination of fear and ignorance (two sides of the same coin) can be paralyzing.
-
Sooner or later, the ones who told you that this isn't the way it's done, the ones who found time to sneer, they will find someone else to hassle. Sooner or later, they stop pointing out how much hubris you've got, how you're not entitled to make a new thing, how you will certainly come to regret your choices. Sooner or later, your work speaks for itself. Outlasting the critics feels like it will take a very long time, but you're more patient than they are.
-
Just as we don't spend a lot of time worrying about how all those poets out there are going to monetize their poetry, the same is true for most bloggers.
-
Anything worth achieving in life has a dip
-
I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.