Seth Godin
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Seth Godin did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsnobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 1st of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsThe internet is a micro medium. It is the best medium ever developed to reach specific people, but it is terrible at reaching everyone. There is no homepage. It is impossible to reach a hundred million people in one day on the internet, which is something TV used to do every night.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 2nd of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsUh Harry Potter, the most successful uh book franchise in history, it made the author over a billion dollars. That book is for almost no one. Right? That book is for precocious 12-year-olds and people who like to remember what was like to be a precocious 12-year-old. That's not everyone. That's a very small group of people.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 3rd of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsthe way to be on the hook is to say, "This is only for people who are like this." Because if those people hate it, then you were wrong. Whereas if you say, "This is for everyone," you're allowed to hide behind, "Well, everyone hasn't found it yet."
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 4th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsThe only way to learn is by doing things. That we can read about how to swim and we can read about how to make uh uh uh a vegetarian maki roll, but you will not learn how to do it until you do it. And the reading, the listening is important preparation, but learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 5th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsa new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 6th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsYour product might be great, but how do you get it on the shelves of Walmart? Or how do you get it on the shelves of Google? Because if you're not on the shelves of Walmart, you're not on the shelves of Google, you might be invisible. And it's friction that kept you there, not some sort of merit contest.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 7th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsIf you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation. If your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that insight, then you should either write a book or write a memo and say, here, in an asynchronous way, this is what we know. If you're going to show up live, in person, in real time, synchronized, you are performing. And the goal is to not deliver the information, but to deliver emotion.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 8th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsThe authors of most books are looking for many of the magical elements of status that come from successfully being published. They pay attention to the bestseller list. They game it. They pay attention to reviews. They uh worry about what their friends think of the book, even though their friends don't read books.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 9th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsreassurance is futile. Reassurance that we seek is like a warm bath, it feels great, and then you need more of it. Because the future is unpredictable, and when the future doesn't match what you hoped for, the reassurance you used to have isn't enough. You need more reassurance.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 10th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsIt means that you have to extend yourself with empathy to the person you're seeking to serve, to the person who the work is for. And you have to extend yourself not just through space, but through time into the future, announcing something that might or might not work. You don't know yet. That's what makes it creative. If you exert the emotional labor to do those two things, sometimes you will have a successful creative outcome. That's a choice.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 11th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsA professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it. Amateurs get to be authentic, whatever that means. And amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 12th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsQuality is not luxury. Quality is not expensive. Quality is not that you love it. Quality is just one thing. It meets spec. So, if I look under an electron microscope at any part of a Lexus, which is by any measure the highest quality car there is, uh under an electron microscope, it's filled with defects. But they're not defects that matter because they're defects that are within spec.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 13th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsshame has been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance. That what people have figured out is that shame is a is a soft spot on almost everybody. And if you press that spot, people will shrink. They will run away. It is particularly used against women, but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 14th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsCriticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge who is not trying to earn status by hurting you is able to help you see the world as it is. And those three pieces are the key, right? Because most of the criticism I've gotten in my life has come from people who felt like they would feel better if I felt worse.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 15th of 16 in this recording
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Their wordsEmployees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
↗Seth Godin: "Failure is Learning on Your Way to Mastery" and Other Advice for Creativity (The Knowledge Project #105, published 23 February 2021)youtube.com 16th of 16 in this recording