Seth Godin Quotes

Mostly, the best way to be the next Mark Zuckerberg is to make difficult choices.

Not only must you be an artist, must you be generous, and must you be able to see where you can help but you must also be aware. Aware of where your skills are welcomed.

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.

I think that any time reality doesn't match your expectations, it means that marketing was involved.

If you're working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I'm not sure you're doing your best work if you're doing it on an iPhone.

Trust is precious and easily wasted, and guessing is a lousy foundation for future progress.

If the game is designed for you to lose, don't play that game. Play a different one.

There's no map for being an artist.

When you can swim, who cares how deep the water is?

Don't scale because you think there's a pot of gold over that rainbow. Scale because you're ready and eager to do heroic work, every day, forever.

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

Success brings with it the fear of blowing it. With more to lose, there's more pressure not to lose it.

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.

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

Acknowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead. Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn't at the heart of being human until very recently. We've been culturally brainwashed.

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.

While you may have made money doing something a certain way yesterday, there's no reason to believe you'll succeed at it tomorrow.

No, the only way to know what people think is to watch what they do, not what they say. Do they come back for more? Do you cause them to change their behavior? Can you make them smile?

Is it worth getting one more tweet out, or putting your phone down and doing something that is worth tweeting?

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

You cannot buy your way to share of voice today; you cannot buy attention anymore.

Mass marketing means appealing to the masses which means appealing to the average.

Do the emotional labor of working on things that others fear.

...the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.

Evolution is the most popular way we have for dealing with change.

The only people who get paid what they're worth are people who don't follow the instruction book, who create art, who are innovative, who work without a map.

You don't become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to become indispensable is to be different. That's because if you're the same, so are plenty of other people.

Think big. Start small.

If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?

You can define advertising as the science of creating and placing media that interrupts the consumer and then gets him or her to take some action.

Our job as marketers and leaders, is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.

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 think "creativity" is better described as failing repeatedly until you get something right.

Solving problems—actually solving them, not just claiming you do—solving perceived, urgent problems, is a surefire way to get the world to beat a path to your door.

When we think about what might go wrong, we're more likely to design something that goes right.

Before you promise to change the world, it makes sense to do the hard work of changing your neighborhood.

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but it is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage.

One key to learning and success is the willingness to try something new, and feel momentarily incompetent.

In general, organizations are afraid to fire customers, no matter how unreasonable. This is a mistake. It's good for you.

The market ... demands a signal from you that you're serious, powerful, accepted, and safe.

If you don't get it built, the work doesn't matter.

Learning is not done to you, it is something you choose to do.

What is school for? If you're not asking that, you're wasting time and money.

Mass attention is almost unattainable and it's not clear that you want it.

We need to care enough to connect, to put ourselves at emotional risk and play one note worth hearing.

Everyone will think it's stupid!" "Everyone says it's impossible." Guess what? Everyone works in the balloon factory and everyone is wrong.

You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.

If you can't be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

Habits are more powerful than fears.

The time to look for a new job is when you don't need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.