Quotes by Seth Godin
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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.

No more than six words on a slide. Ever. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.

It's easy to be afraid of taking a plunge, because, after all, plunging is dangerous. And the fear is a safe way to do nothing at all. Wading, on the other hand, gets under the radar. It gives you a chance to begin.

We're often in a hurry to finish. Or in a hurry to close a sale. What happens when we adopt the posture of being in a hurry to be generous? With resources or insight or access or kindness... It's an interesting sort of impatience.

The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides...It's the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you're writing, because the teacher won't like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

Don't wait to be picked. Pick yourself.

If it's worth listening to, it's worth questioning until you understand it.

If school is about postponing the day you have to stand up in front of the world and put yourself at risk, the resistance would like to stay there forever.

Playing the game is a form of winning the game. In those competitions, we win by being resilient.

Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion. All of these attributes are choices, not talents, and all of them are available to you.

If you can't be remarkable, perhaps you should consider doing nothing until you can.

We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you've already figured out, demands initiative.

Why do we value leadership, connection and grace? Because it's scarce, and that scacity creates value.

Competence is no longer a scarce commodity.

Art is the act of doing work that matters while dancing with the voice in your head that screams for you to stop.

If you don't like your definition of 'good enough', then feel free to change that, but the goal before shipping is merely that. Not perfect.

If you're going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don't work.

Becoming a superstar takes about 10,000 hours of hard work.

When you can swim, who cares how deep the water is?

It's all a risk. Always. That's not true, actually. The only exception: it's a certainty that there's risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That's because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.

Just because the tide is out, doesn't mean there is less water in the ocean.

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

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

Great work is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it.

If you believe that a given situation should make you unhappy, then it will, and the unhappiness will then reinforce the condition.

Mass attention is almost unattainable and it's not clear that you want it.

I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.

If you're not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it's almost certain you're not reaching your potential as a leader.

It's uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.

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.

Nothing about becoming indispensable is easy. If it's easy, it's already been done and it's no longer valuable.

When in doubt, tell yourself the truth.

Whining isn't a scalable solution.

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

You're competing against people in a state of flow, people who are truly committed, people who care deeply about the outcome.

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt.

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.

Dreamers don't have special genes. They find circumstances that amplify their dreams.

Your positions on everything are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

Surprise and differentiation have far more impact than noise does.

In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs.

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.

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

Just as we don't spend a lot of time worrying about how all those poets out there are going to monetize their poetry, the same is true for most bloggers.

Not only are bloggers suckers for the remarkable, so are the people who read blogs.

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

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice.

All the creativity books in the world aren't going to help you if you're unwilling to have lousy, lame, and even dangerously bad ideas.

Now for the first time, you can choose yourself. You can be responsible for what you do and how you do it. You have to do the hard work of finding and pleasing an audience.

Big ideas are little ideas that no-one killed too soon.

Organizations grow when they persuade a tiny cadre to be passionate, not when they touch millions with a mediocre message.

Design is the last great competitive advantage.

Emotional labor is available to all of us,

but it is rarely exploited as a competitive

advantage.

Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.

Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.

The job is not the work.

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.

The combination of fear and ignorance (two sides of the same coin) can be paralyzing.

There's no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it.

We've been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it's your turn to stand up and stand out.

If there's time for an emergency, why isn't there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?

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

You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.

If you're not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

Even good excuses, really good ones, don't help very much.

Explanations, on the other hand, are both scarce and useful.

And accurate forecasts and insightful intuition are priceless.

Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them.

Fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it. As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.

Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations.

There's no shortage of great ideas. There's a shortage of execution.

I don't think there's a shortage of remarkable ideas. I think your business has plenty of great opportunities to do great things. Nope, what's missing isn't the ideas. It's the will to execute them.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

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

Art is a personal act of courage.

Not adding value is the same as taking it away.

The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That's one reason why the web is so fascinating-it's a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people.

Viewing the web as a platform for generosity is very different than seeing an opportunity to turn it into an ATM machine.

It's rare to find a consistently creative or insightful person who is also an angry person. They can't occupy the same space, and if your anger moves in, generosity and creativity often move out. It's difficult to use revenge or animus to fuel great work.

Just about anything worth doing is worth doing better.

Change isn't made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.

Sign your work...If you're not proud of it, don't ship it. If you are, sign your work and own the results. We'll know who to thank. If you work for a place where work goes unsigned (internally, in particular) it's worth asking why.

There's no map for being an artist.

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 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.

One bad review doesn't ruin my day because I realize what a badge of honor it is to get a bit of criticism at all.

My problem with the search for the badge of real is that it trades your goals and your happiness for someone else's.

You don't have to settle for the status quo, for being good enough, for getting by, for working all night.

You can risk being wrong or you can be boring.

The secret to being wrong isn't to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn't fatal.

We're going to spend our entire future living in tomorrow-investing now, when it's difficult, is the single best moment.

The best experiences and the biggest ideas don't fit into a category. They change it.

I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else.

The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later.

Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.