Top 100 Seth Godin Quotes
#1. Content Marketing is all the Marketing that's left.
Seth Godin
#2. Saying 'no' or even 'stop' is the hallmark of the professional you want on your team.
Seth Godin
#3. The market ... demands a signal from you that you're serious, powerful, accepted, and safe.
Seth Godin
#4. One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don't show (because it's difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
Seth Godin
#5. Quite or be exceptional. Average is for losers.
Seth Godin
#6. I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.
Seth Godin
#7. What if getting bigger isn't the point? What if you merely got better?
Seth Godin
#8. If you're passionate, be passionate enough to fail. Fail small, accept responsibility, repeat. The people who make change are the survivors of serial failure.
Seth Godin
#9. In other words, they believe it's wiser to focus more on increasing sales to a smaller percentage of your existing customers than to find new ones.
Seth Godin
#10. Be genuine. Be remarkable. Be worth connecting with.
Seth Godin
#11. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.
Seth Godin
#12. The way you feel about giving money to good causes has a lot to do with the way you feel about money
Seth Godin
#13. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 million years. It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it's something that people have wanted forever.
Seth Godin
#14. Before you promise to change the world, it makes sense to do the hard work of changing your neighborhood.
Seth Godin
#15. Sometimes, we're so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.
Seth Godin
#16. The nature of revolutions is that they destroy the perfect and enable the impossible.
Seth Godin
#17. The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.
Seth Godin
#18. I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there - a project a week.
Seth Godin
#19. It doesn't hurt to ask Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.
Seth Godin
#20. Build it, and they will come" only works in the movies. Social Media is a "build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay.
Seth Godin
#21. If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living.
Seth Godin
#22. Marketing tells a story that spreads. Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.
Seth Godin
#23. Not adding value is the same as taking it away.
Seth Godin
#24. Fear is the workout we give ourselves imagining what will happen if things don't work out ... Worry is our effort to imagine every possible way to avoid the outcome that is causing us fear, and failing that, to survive the thing that we fear if it comes to fruition.
Seth Godin
#25. 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.
Seth Godin
#26. By being remarkable, being genuine, you can be worth connecting with. And you don't have to have it figured out perfectly the first time - you can adjust.
Seth Godin
#27. It's foolish to expect that one exposure to your message will instantly convert someone from stranger to raving ideavirus-spreading fan. So plan on a process. Plan on a method that takes people from where they are to where you want them to go.
Seth Godin
#28. Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It's a Purple Cow.
Seth Godin
#29. If you hear my idea but don't believe it, that's not your fault; it's mine. If you see my new product but don't buy it, that's my failure, not yours. If you attend my presentation and you're bored, that's my fault too.
Seth Godin
#30. Viewing the web as a platform for generosity is very different than seeing an opportunity to turn it into an ATM machine.
Seth Godin
#32. The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.
Seth Godin
#33. 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.
Seth Godin
#34. 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.
Seth Godin
#35. Education isn't a problem until it serves as a buffer rom the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.
Seth Godin
#36. Art is the unique work of a human being, work that touches another.
Seth Godin
#37. The only long-term motivation is self motivation. So hire people who are self motivated and get out of their way.
Seth Godin
#38. An organization filled with honest, motivated, connected, eager, learning, experimenting, ethical and driven people will always defeat the one that merely has talent. Every time.
Seth Godin
#39. When you put your ideas in the world, then, and only then, do you know if they're real.
Seth Godin
#40. Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don't like great teachers. They're organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average. Why
Seth Godin
#41. Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.
Seth Godin
#42. People watch what you do more than listen to what you say.
Seth Godin
#43. The purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you're with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.
Seth Godin
#45. We're all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine of our new economy.
Seth Godin
#46. Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns strangers into friends and friends into lifetime customers. Many of the rules of dating apply, and so do many of the benefits.
Seth Godin
#47. Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all.
Seth Godin
#48. Studying entrepreneurshi p without doing it ... is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.
Seth Godin
#49. No one has a transparent view of the world. In fact, we all carry around a personal worldview - the biases and experiences and expectations that color the way we perceive the world.
Seth Godin
#50. Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.
Seth Godin
#51. The easier it is to quantify, the less it's worth.
Seth Godin
#52. A big part of doing your work is defending your time and your attention so you can do your work.
Seth Godin
#53. If you're not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else.
Seth Godin
#54. We don't become mediocre all at once, and we rarely do it on purpose.
Seth Godin
#55. Marketing guru Jay Levinson figures you have to run an ad twenty-seven times against one individual before it has its desired impact. Why? Because only one out of nine ads is seen, and you've got to see it at least three times before it sinks in.
Seth Godin
#56. We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?
Seth Godin
#57. You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it's getting raised regardless.
Seth Godin
#58. Finding new ways, more clever ways to interrupt people doesn't work.
Seth Godin
#59. In a story so good that it should be apocryphal, Zappos offers graduates of their two-week paid training school $2,000 if they will quit their new jobs.
Seth Godin
#60. Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better.
Seth Godin
#61. If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be too late!
Seth Godin
#63. If you think the solution is more rules and less humanity, I fear you will be disappointed by the results. Organizations that can bring humanity and flexibility to their interactions with other human beings will thrive.
Seth Godin
#64. Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design.
Seth Godin
#65. The ladder of success isn't a ladder. It's a series of steps with leaps interspersed along the way.
Seth Godin
#66. Marketing isn't done by computers, it's done by people. And people who sense opportunity and have the confidence to be remarkable will always defeat defensive actions by people who have given up.
Seth Godin
#67. Perhaps your challenge isn't finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.
Seth Godin
#68. Any customer that walks away, disrespected and defeated, represents tens of thousands of dollars out the door, in addition to the failure of a promise the brand made in the first place. You can't see it but it's happening, daily.
Seth Godin
#69. I see things differently when I'm focused on opening doors for other people, and more often than not, my doors are opened as well.
Seth Godin
#70. The goal is to be on the hook, not to let someone else do the scary parts.
Seth Godin
#71. If you can't sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million?
Seth Godin
#72. We notice what we choose to notice.
Seth Godin
#73. We don't need more stuff, we need more humanity.
Seth Godin
#74. How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?
Seth Godin
#75. Seeing, despite the name, isn't merely visual.
Seth Godin
#76. The way I understand gifts is that the giver must make a sacrifice, create an uneven exchange, bring himself closer to the recipient, create change and do it all with the right spirit.
Seth Godin
#77. Turn strangers into friends. Turn friends into donors. And then do the most important job: Turn your donors into fundraisers.
Seth Godin
#78. Two different things: A crowd is a tribe without a leader. A crowd is a tribe without communication. Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe.
Seth Godin
#80. The goal of a marketing interaction isn't to close the sale, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married. No, the opportunity is to move forward, to earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.
Seth Godin
#81. I've found that giving gifts is transformative. It makes me better. It clarifies my thinking and allows me to do better work.
Seth Godin
#82. The best creative solutions don't come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented ... They come from inventing new questions!
Seth Godin
#83. Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn't.
Seth Godin
#84. It's really easy to insist that people read the manual. It's really easy to blame the user/student/prospect/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it, or for not caring enough to pay attention.
Seth Godin
#85. Fans, true fans, are hard to find and precious. Just a few can change everything. What they demand, though, is generosity and bravery.
Seth Godin
#86. It's easy to pretend expertise when there's no data to contradict you.
Seth Godin
#87. Too often, we don't give people the opportunity to fill in the blanks.
Seth Godin
#88. What They Should Teach in School Only two things: 1. Solve interesting problems 2. Lead SOLVE
Seth Godin
#89. 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.
Seth Godin
#90. It's okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.
Seth Godin
#91. Strategy is empty without change, empty without passion, and empty without people willing to confront the void.
Seth Godin
#92. It's much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling.
Seth Godin
#93. It's possible that your next frontier isn't to get more efficient, it's to get more brave.
Seth Godin
#94. You don't need more time in your day. You need to decide.
Seth Godin
#95. Surprise and delight and connection are remarkable.
Seth Godin
#96. Marketing used to be about advertising, and advertising is expensive. Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread.
Seth Godin
#97. Plans are great, but missions are better.
Seth Godin
#98. Most people are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain. Most paths are neither.
Seth Godin
#99. No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn't okay now. Change, by definition, changes things
Seth Godin
#100. We're seeing an explosion in new approaches, new models and new forms of interaction. This growth comes from change, insight and exploration, not obedience.
Seth Godin
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