Seth Godin Quotes

...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.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

While you may have made money doing something a certain way yesterday, there's no reason to believe you'll succeed at it tomorrow.

What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship.

If you try to delight the undelightable, you've made yourself miserable for no reason.

Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

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.

If you don't require the journey to be easy or comfortable or safe, you can change the world.

That's your opportunity - to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.

This notion that it is up to each person to innovation in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over.

Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker.

You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support, and you market every time you send a memo.

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the thirst place.

Go ahead, do something impossible.

Teaching young people to sell is a priceless gift.

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

It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

There's no life-work balance. I think you have to have the discipline to have the life you want to have. And if you are stealing from one part of your life in order to make the other part work, you are going to pay for it.

Leading is a skill, not a gift. You're not born with it, you learn how.

Black Friday is a media trap, an orchestrated mass hallucination based on herd dynamics and the media cycle.

In other words, If you don't take action, you won't get any results You are not your resume, you are your work

Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you're doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they're hiding out in the comfortable zone. When your uncomfortable actions lead to success, the organization rewards you and brings you back for more.

The public square is more public than ever, but minds are rarely changed in 140 character bursts and by selfies.

You don't win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive training.

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn't necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it.

You want it to be hard. If it's hard, then that means others can't do it easily and you can charge for that value.

Every great company, brand, career has been built in exactly the same way: bit by bit, step by step, little by little.

We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate.

As creators, our pursuit of perfection might be misguided, particularly if it comes at the expense of the things that matter.

Why waste a sentence saying nothing?

Facts are irrelevant. What matters is what the consumer believes.

Competence is no longer a scarce commodity.

The rules are now clear: no one is going to inform you, but it's easier than ever to inform yourself.

Cheap is the last refuge of a product developer or marketer who is out of great ideas.

If it's work, we try to figure out how to do less, If it's art, we try to figure out how to do more

No, the only way to know what people think is to watch what they do, not what they say. Do they come back for more? Do you cause them to change their behavior? Can you make them smile?

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

The challenge with being an initiator of projects is that you are never, ever done.

You don't become indispensable merely because you are different. But the only way to become indispensable is to be different. That's because if you're the same, so are plenty of other people.

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.

Believe in what you do, because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.

Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design.

Great leaders don't try to please everyone. Great leaders don't water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. Instead, they realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group could ever be.

Saying 'no' or even 'stop' is the hallmark of the professional you want on your team.

Art changes posture and posture changes innocent bystanders.

Kings fear change. Leaders crave it.

You are not your resume, you are your work.