Seth Godin Quotes

Or, more accurately, spend all day trying to avoid making a mistake? These are very different things. Defect-free is what people are often in search of. Meeting spec. Blameless.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another…so they follow.

We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.

You are not your work. Your work is a series of choices made with generous intent to cause something to happen. We can always learn to make better choices.

the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it’s worth doing. Faith that failure won’t destroy you.

The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.

You will fail at this. Often. Why is that a problem? In fact, this is a boon. It’s a boon because when others fail to be remarkable or make a difference or share their art or have an impact, they will give up.

You can keep waiting to get plucked from obscurity, or you can learn how to champion your project one person at a time.

As it becomes easier to monitor informal consumer networks, the winners will be companies that figure out what’s working fastest – and do it more (and figure out what’s not working – and kill it). Zara, a fast-growing retailer in Europe, changes its clothing line every three or four weeks. By carefully watching what’s working and what’s not, they can evolve their lineup far faster than the competition can ever hope to.

Seeing clearly means that you’re smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else’s is the first step in being able to see things as they are.

How we respond to the opportunities and challenges of the outside world now determines how much the outside world values us.

Before you are a “bestselling author,” you’re an author, and authors write. Before you are an “acclaimed entrepreneur,” you’re simply someone who is building something.

The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that’s in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees.