Seth Godin Quotes

When you walk around braced for impact, you're dramatically decreasing your chances. Your chances to avoid the outcome you fear, your chances to make a difference, and your chances to breathe and connect.

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

If you think your organization needs a bigger marketing budget, maybe you just need to be less average instead.

Giving people what they want isn't always what they want.

Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stores and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another.

Be bold, make mistakes, learn a lesson, and fix what doesn't work.

The world is begging for you to lead.

Before you tell yourself you have no right to invent this or improve that, remind yourself that the person before you had no right either, but did it anyway.

Fans, true fans, are hard to find and precious. Just a few can change everything. What they demand, though, is generosity and bravery.

Design is the last great competitive advantage.

Not changing your strategy merely because you're used to the one you have now is a lousy strategy.

Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific.

I don’t think the shortage of artists has much to do with the innate ability to create or initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it. We’ve had these doors open wide for only a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.

If you think cat food is for cats, how come it doesn't come in mouse flavor?

There are lots of good reasons to abandon a project. Having a little competition is not one of them.

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

A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.

Here's the thing: The book that will most change your life is the book you write.

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.

Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it.

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

Choose your customers, choose your future.

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

We long to connect, all of us. We long to be noticed, to be cared for, to matter. Generosity is the invisible salve on our wound of loneliness, one that benefits both sides, over and over again.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

The only thing all successful people have in common is that they're successful, so don't waste your time copying "the successful strategies" of others.

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.

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.

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.

Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you male, but about the stories you tell.

The problem with requiring people to be loud and angry to get things done is that you're now surrounded by people who are loud and angry.

Own your dreams. There is no better way to make them happen.

'Teamwork' is the word that bosses use when they actually mean 'Do what I say'

If I fail more than you do, I win.

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice.

It's almost impossible to have fun playing ping pong with someone who doesn't care, won't try or isn't any good.

It's much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling.

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

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.

Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them.

People are buying only one thing from you: the way the engagement (hiring you, working with you, dating you, using your product or service, learning from you) makes them feel.

You succeed because you've chosen to be confident. It's not really useful to require yourself to be successful before you're able to become confident.

The definition of a revolution: it destroys the perfect and enables the impossible.

Effort is its own reward if you allow it to be.

The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.

Art is the work of a human, an individual seeking to make a statement, to cause a reaction, to connect. Art is something new, every time, and art might not work, precisely because it's new, because it's human and because it seeks to connect.