Top 931 Quotes & Sayings by Seth Godin - Page 16

Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

Competence is no longer scarce.

It takes confidence and guts to intentionally create tension.

That the horrible Zika virus or HIV, we can look at what it means to be patient zero, what it means to need not much contact to spread, and all of those things follow into the way ideas spread.

If you're not willing to get your 'worst one ever' out of the way, how will you possibly do better than that?

To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible... There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku.

It’s okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.

The only reason to buy a paper book any longer is to own it and cherish it and remember it and tell a story about it.

You have to pay the price to be in the right place at the right time often enough that people tend to see you as the regular kind.

And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual or you're in business or flying hot air balloons. People who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. But consumers, they got way more choices than they used to and way less time.

If you set your bar at 'amazing' it's awfully difficult to start. Your first paragraph, sketch, formula, sample or concept isn't going to be amazing. Your tenth one might not be either. Confronted with the gap between your vision of perfect and the reality of what you've created, the easiest path is no path. Shrug. Admit defeat. Hit delete. One more reason to follow someone else and wait for instructions. Of course, the only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing. But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are.

So by giving people a tool that they can share and benefit from, it's a form of media that isn't controlled by Rupert Murdoch or the guys at Viacom. It is a form of media that is earned every single time it spreads.

I feel like I'm treating people as I'd like to be treated.

What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. They would ignore the geeks, and - God forbid - the laggards. It was all about going for the center. I don't think that's the strategy we want to use anymore.

Or, if I take that same auditorium and I make it much bigger and put more space between seats, it'll be quieter because it's much harder when you're not in physical contact with people to spread a virus from person-to-person, right? There are all sorts of patterns that we see in epidemiology that help us understand why something spreads.

believe that giving up is the same thing as being realistic.

Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But... the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this - that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure.

The job is not the work.

No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.

I hope I'm better looking than Yoda, but - I'm really interested in people who have something to say, a change they want to make and can't figure out why they can't make it spread.

But if the cow is purple, you'd notice it, OK? The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built is, is it remarkable? And remarkable's a really cool word 'cause we think it just means neat, but it also means worth making a remark about, and that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going.

We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?

Your success is no longer about your ability to do what you are told, and do it well.

I've found that giving gifts is transformative. It makes me better. It clarifies my thinking and allows me to do better work.

Great boss is challenging people in the right way. Leading, not managing. Supporting them by giving them both a platform they can count on and expectations they can stretch for.

When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn't big 'cause they ran a lot of ads. They're big because someone took out their iPhone and said to their friend, watch this, and pressed a button and a car pulled up.

...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

The goal, then, isn't to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.

You know, if I look at an auditorium full of high school students and the big man on campus and his girlfriend are busy talking while the lecture's going on, the rest of the room is going to do it because they're powerful sneezers. They have influence. They reach out to a whole bunch of people in a way that makes the idea of being disrespectful spread.

Our cultural instinct is to wait to get pickedNo one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.

And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread... is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like - it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not.