Seth Godin Quotes

The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven't given them anything else to care about.

Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it.

Pain s the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter.

The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.

You win by trying. And failing. Test, try, fail, measure, evolve, repeat, persist.

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

If you demand that everything that happens be something you are adequately prepared for, I wonder if you’ve chosen never to leap in ways that we need you to leap. Once we embrace this chasm, then for the things for which we can never be prepared, we are of course, always prepared.

Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven't done well. It's that simple.

How often do our heroes stand still? It's hard to imagine Spock and Kirk landing on a planet and just relaxing for a month or two. Just hanging out has nothing to do with boldly going where no one has gone before. What makes us different from every other creature is that we go places, places we've not gone before. We do it willingly, and often. What makes our work and our life interesting is discovery, surprise, and the risk of exploration.

Are you doing work worth doing, or are you just doing your job?

Figure out the people part and the technology gets a whole lot simpler.

People watch what you do more than listen to what you say.

Sharing an idea you care about is a generous way to change your world for the better.

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.

Art is the work of a human being – something a person does with generosity to touch someone else to make a change for the better.

Art is the act of navigating without a map.

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.

You don't need more time in your day. You need to decide.

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

Take the long way. Do the hard work, consistently and with generosity and transparency. And then you won't waste time doing it over.

Here's conventional wisdom: Success makes you happy. Happiness permits you to be generous. In fact, it actually works like this: Generosity makes you happy. Happy people are more likely to be successful.

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.

The only purpose of starting is to finish

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

By my definition, most art has nothing to do with oil paint or marble. Art is what we're doing when we do our best work.

The opposite of coherent is interesting.

Most people are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain. Most paths are neither.

Denigrating art you don't understand doesn't hurt the art - it reveals something about your willingness to learn.

Learning is not watching a video, learning is taking action and seeing what happens.

Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from, from the leading.

Marketing management is now tribal leadership.

It's far easier to put your future into someone else's hands than it is to slog your way forward, owning the results as you go.

The status quo is leaving the building, and quickly.

You are far more likely to do your best work if you are willing to delight a few as opposed to soothe the masses.

The internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest.

People are not afraid of failure, they're afraid of blame.

You can't control other people, and giving them the power to decide if you will continue to produce good work is foolish.

There's nothing wrong with having a plan. Plans are great. But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.

The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we've got. Whining isn't a scalable solution.

Books work as an art form (and an economic one) because they are primarily the work of an individual.

A customer is never out of warranty, even if his product is.

Set up a life you don't need to escape from.

Not adding value is the same as taking it away.

Good marketers measure.

But what if I fail? You will. A better question might be, ‘after I fail, what then?’ If you’ve chosen well, after you fail you will be one step closer to succeeding, you will be wiser and stronger and you almost certainly will be more respected by all of those that are afraid to try.

I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.

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.

The art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact - sooner or later, that can only come from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book.