Top 931 Quotes & Sayings by Seth Godin - Page 14

Nothing about becoming indispensable is easy. If it's easy, it's already been done and it's no longer valuable.

You can use social media to turn strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into salespeople.

The conversation is happening about your brand whether you're a part of it or not.

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.

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn’t particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills.

Just start. Start now. Fail often. Enjoy the ride.

The way you feel about giving money to good causes has a lot to do with the way you feel about money.

Studying entrepreneurshi p without doing it... is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.

No one can force you to stand up, speak up and make a difference. But if you back off and play along, please understand that whatever happens happened, at least in part, because you acquiesced.

If there isn't a good reason, go home. If there is, then do something ... loud, now, and memorable.

It's easy to pretend expertise when there's no data to contradict you.

Nobody says, 'Yeah, I'd like to set myself up for some serious criticism!' And yet, the only way to be remarkable is to do just that.

Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.

Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.

Skepticism doesn't help you hear.

Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

As soon as you are willing to say 'it's not for you', you're freed up to make art.

Just saying yes because you can't bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

The opposite of coherent is interesting.

Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Sooner or later, many idealists transform themselves into disheartened realists who mistakenly believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

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.

Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record.

I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.

Every activity worth doing has a learning curve.

I think if you're remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn't have a resume at all.

The future of marketing is leadership

Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value.

Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power.

When in doubt, tell yourself the truth.

I think it's fascinating to note that some of the most successful organizations of our time got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing compensation as an afterthought or a side effect. As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organization seeks.

Sign your work...If you're not proud of it, don't ship it. If you are, sign your work and own the results. We'll know who to thank. If you work for a place where work goes unsigned (internally, in particular) it's worth asking why.

Great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again.

The way the world works now, the way the rules of engagement operate, you can't claim to make sense out of the exterior without booking voyages into the interior. Think about it: How can you understand 'it' if you haven't made any effort to understand 'you'? Because what you're really doing is establishing a living, electrical, vital, energetic connection between it and you. You're creating both of them, simultaneously. A lot like quantum physics.

More process, less innovation. More operations, less innovation. More management, less innovation. More entrepreneurs, more innovation.

All artists are entrepreneurs. All entrepreneurs are artists.

Action or inaction are both forms of leadership and standard setting.

After you produce you can select. you can curate. you can censor. But for now, have bad ideas, lots and lots of bad ideas.

When the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days or a lifetime, you matter.

It's possible that your next frontier isn't to get more efficient, it's to get more brave.

We're often in a hurry to finish. Or in a hurry to close a sale. What happens when we adopt the posture of being in a hurry to be generous? With resources or insight or access or kindness... It's an interesting sort of impatience.

You can't shrink your way to greatness!

If you're not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else.

If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it's almost certain you're not reaching your potential as a leader.

Reputation is what people expect us to do next. It's their expectation of the quality and character of the next thing we produce or say or do. We control our actions (even when it feels like we don't) and our actions over time (especially when we think no one is looking) earn our reputation.

The market and the consumer and idea trump the system.

Real content marketing isn’t repurposed advertising, it is making something worth talking about.

But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about.

Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That's not marketing though, that's efficiency.

How do I dance with the fear? Fear is not the enemy. Paralysis is the enemy.

The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.

Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it

No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn't okay now. Change, by definition, changes things

All Marketers are liars tell stories.

If you can embrace the idea that your success and happiness are tied up in defeating the fear that's holding you back, you're 90 percent of the way to where you need to go, because no, we're not kids, and no, this is not a bike.

If you're a marketer who doesn't know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you're no longer a marketer. You're deadwood.

Networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals.

When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.