Top 931 Quotes & Sayings by Seth Godin - Page 12

The tragedy is that society (your school, your boss, your government, your family) keeps drumming the genius part out. The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

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

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

Entertainment has seduced us into believing that we have a chance to live the life they live in the movies. Even the people in the movies don't live that life. It doesn't take 135 minutes to make a life, it takes almost a century. Everything doesn't depend on what happens in the next ninety seconds. Ever.

If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.

Laptop computers dramatically increased the time people spend doing work. (The internet dramatically decreased it, so we're even).

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

...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.

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

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.

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.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

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.

Tell your lizard (brain) to shut up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Think big. Start small.

I wonder why anyone would hesitate to be generous with their writing. I mean, if you really want to make a living, go to Wall Street and trade oil futures ... We're writers. We're doing something that is inherently a generous act. We're exposing ourselves to the muse and to the things that frighten us. Why do that if you're not willing to be generous? And paradoxically, almost ironically, it turns out that the more generous you are, the more money you make. But that's secondary. For me, the privilege of being generous is why I get to do this.

Your peer group are people with similar dreams, goals and worldviews. They are people who will push you in exchange for being pushed, who will raise the bar and tell you the truth. They're not in your business, but they're in your shoes. Finding a peer group and working with them, intentionally and on a regular schedule, might be the single biggest boost your career can experience.

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

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

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.

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

If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.

If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?

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

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?

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

I think if your goal is for everything to be okay, that's a mistake. To achieve that goal, the only obstacle you'd have to face tomorrow is to eliminate all risk ... I've made the decision that I'm never trying to make everything okay. I'm trying for there to be more loose ends, not fewer loose ends.

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.

There's no map for being an artist.

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.

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

Any customer that walks away, disrespected and defeated, represents tens of thousands of dollars out the door, in addition to the failure of a promise the brand made in the first place. You can't see it but it's happening, daily.

It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. Stop settling for what's good enough and start creating art that matters.

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

Competence is the enemy of change!

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

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

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

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

Everyone we interact with is changed forever. The only questions are: How will they be different (and how different will they be), and how will we be different (and how different will we be) as a result?

Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is-do you really want more marketing messages?

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.

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.

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

Habits are more powerful than fears.

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

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