Seth Godin Quotes

In nearly every case, trying to lead everyone results in leading no one in particular.

We're all born creative, it takes a little while to become afraid.

It's entirely possible that there won't be a standing ovation at the end of your journey. That's okay. At least you lived.

The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.

What are you working on? If someone asks you that, are you excited to tell them the answer? If you're not, you're wasting away.

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.

It's easy to be afraid of taking a plunge, because, after all, plunging is dangerous. And the fear is a safe way to do nothing at all. Wading, on the other hand, gets under the radar. It gives you a chance to begin.

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

The resistance is not something to be avoided, it's something to seek out.

Most people with a big idea, great talent and/or something to say don't get lucky at first. Or second. Or even third. It's so easy to conclude that if you're not lucky, you're not good. So persistence becomes an essential element of good, because without persistence, you never get a chance to get lucky.

A one-hit wonder is a legend who stopped early.

Who gets to decide what you want?

Dreamers don't have special genes. They find circumstances that amplify their dreams.

There's no shortage of remarkable ideas, what's missing is the will to execute them.

The thing is, the future happens. Every single day, like it or not. Sure, tomorrow is risky, frightening and in some way represents one step closer to the end. But it also brings with it the possibility of better and the chance to do something that matters.

The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.

Ideas that spread win.

For most modern marketers, quantity isn't the point. What matters is to matter. Lives changed. Work that made an actual difference. Connection.

Either you defend the status quo, or you invent the future.

The combination of fear and ignorance (two sides of the same coin) can be paralyzing.

Sure, compare. But compare the things that matter to the journey you're on. The rest is noise.

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

In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from. Dismissing actions we don't admire merely because we don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change we seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart.

Being charismatic doesn't make you a leader. Being a leader makes you charismatic.

Desire can't be sated, because if it is, the longing disappears and then we've failed, because desire is the state we seek.

Great work is always shunned at first.

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.

The status quo is persistent and resistant. It exists because everyone wants it to. Everyone believes that what they've got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.

Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map-these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.

I don't like offending people, and it's easy to offend people when you don't know as much as they do. This group knows more about what it takes to lead in this way than I ever will. My goal is to push people, but I need to do it from a place of respect.

People get good gigs because they stand up....You don't get picked. Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.

Here's the fascinating part, call it the golden shoulder: We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there's a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don't know who they are.

Surprise comes from defying expectations.

If you want to get in shape, go to the #‎ gym every single day, change your clothes and take a shower. If you can do that every single day for a month, pretty soon you'll start doing something while you're there.

Are you copying others? People won't pay extra for that. You won't be followed for that.

All motivation is self-motivation. Your family, your boss, or your co-workers can try to get your engine going, but until you decide what to accomplish, nothing will happen.

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

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.

Content Marketing is all the Marketing that's left.

If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living.

Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been...frighten ed enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.

Most people don't see that they have options beyond what society tells them to do. That's the biggest problem. They honestly believe that compliance is the shortcut to success.

Make enough mole hills, and eventually you will build a mountain.

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.

We're going to spend our entire future living in tomorrow-investing now, when it's difficult, is the single best moment.

We don't become mediocre all at once, and we rarely do it on purpose.

Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow.

Confusion sets in when you're not sure if your product or service is bought or sold, or worse, if you are a salesperson just waiting for people to buy.