Branding 1

The Freelance Studio Denver, Co. a User Experience Agency Too much salt Why do most restaurants use an unhealthy amount of salt in the food they serve? I'm talking three to five times as much salt as the typical home chef might use. For the same reason that lazy marketers spam people and unsophisticated comic book writers use exclamation points. 1. Because it works (for a while). Salt is a cheap and reliable way to persuade people that the food is tasty. Over time, it merely makes us ill, but in the moment, it amplifies the flavors. It's way cheaper than using herbs or technique. And that's why marketers under pressure push the limits in terms of spamming people or offering urgent discounts. And why Batman is so easily caricatured with the word: POW! Cheap thrills. Shortcuts. Lazy. 2. Because they've been desensitized. Cook with enough salt long enough, and nothing tastes salty after a while. And so the lazy shortcut becomes more than a habit, because it's not even noticed. And so the marketer figures that everyone is used to being treated this way, so he ups the ante. And the other marketers around him are used to it too, so no one says anything. The solution to all of these problems is to zero out. Play for the long haul. Take the more difficult route. Surround yourself with people who insist you avoid the shortcut. Back to the basic principles, so you can learn to cook again. Posted by Seth Godin on October 19, 2015 | Permalink inShare373 What are corporations for? The purpose of a company is to serve its customers. Its obligation is to not harm everyone else. And its opportunity is to enrich the lives of its employees. Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that maximizing investor return was the point. It shouldn't be. That's not what democracies ought to seek in chartering corporations to participate in our society. The great corporations of a generation ago, the ones that built key elements of our culture, were run by individuals who had more on their mind than driving the value of their options up. The problem with short-term stock price maximization is that it's not particularly difficult. If you have market power, if the cost of switching is high or consumer knowledge is low, there are all sorts of ways that a well-motivated management team can hurt its customers, its community and its employees on the way to boosting what the investors say they want. It's not difficult for Dell to squeeze a little more junkware into a laptop, or Fedex to lower its customer service standards, or Verizon to deliver less bandwidth than they promised. But just because it works doesn't mean that they're doing their jobs, or keeping their promise, or doing work that they can be proud of. Profits and stock price aren't the point (with customers as a side project). It's the other way around. Posted by Seth Godin on October 18, 2015 | Permalink inShare666 The power of fear Fear will push you to avert your eyes. Fear will make you think you have nothing to say. It will create a buzz that makes it impossible to meditate... or it will create a fog that makes it so you can do nothing but meditate. Fear seduces us into losing our temper. and fear belittles us into accepting unfairness. Fear doesn't like strangers, people who don't look or act like us, and most of all, the unknown. It causes us to carelessly make typos, or obsessively look for them. Fear pushes us to fit in, so we won't be noticed, but it also pushes us to rebel and to not be trustworthy, so we won't be on the hook to produce. It is subtle enough to trick us into thinking it isn't pulling the strings, that it doesn't exist, that it's not the cause of, "I don't feel like it." When in doubt, look for the fear. Posted by Seth Godin on October 17, 2015 | Permalink inShare493 Does vocabulary matter? Here's Randall Munroe's brilliant explanation of how the Saturn V rocket works. The brilliant part is that he illustrated it using only the 1,000 most common words (which, ironically, doesn't include the word 'thousand'). If you are only able to use 1,000 words, nuance goes out the window. The typical native speaker knows 20,000 words, and there's your opportunity: If you know 40,000 words, if you learn five words a day for a decade, the world changes. Your ability to see, to explain and to influence flies off the charts. It's not about knowing needlessly fancy words (but it's often hard to know if the fancy word is needless until after you learn it). Your vocabulary reflects the way you think (and vice versa). It's tempting to read and write at the eighth-grade level, but there's a lot more leverage when you are able to use the right word in the right moment. A fork in the road for most careers is what we choose to do when we confront a vocabulary (from finance, technology, psychology, literature...) that we don't understand. We can either demand that people dumb down their discourse (and fall behind) or we can learn the words. It's hard to be a doctor or an engineer or key grip if you don't know what the words mean, because learning the words is the same thing as learning the concepts. PS Here's a bonus to get you started, a book I wrote 23 years ago with the effervescent Margery Mandell: Download Million-Dollar Words. It's the not quite final galley, the only one I could find on my hard drive. (Free to share and print, but not to sell or alter). Posted by Seth Godin on October 16, 2015 | Permalink inShare845 Infrastructure The ignored secret behind successful organizations (and nations) is infrastructure. Not the content of what's happening, but the things that allow that content to turn into something productive. Here are some elements worth considering: Transportation: Ideas and stuff have to move around. The more quickly, efficiently and safely, the better. This is not just roads, but wifi, community centers and even trade shows. Getting things, people and ideas from one place to another, safely and on time is essential to what we seek to build. Expectation: When people wake up in the morning expecting good things to happen, believing that things are possible, open to new ideas--those beliefs become self-fulfilling. We expect that it's possible to travel somewhere safely, and we expect that speaking up about a new idea won't lead us to get fired. People in trauma can't learn or leap or produce very much. Education: When we are surrounded by people who are skilled, smart and confident, far more gets done. When we learn something new, our productivity goes up. Civility: Not just table manners, but an environment without bullying, without bribery, without coercion. Clean air, not just to breathe, but to speak in. Infrastructure and culture overlap in a thousand ways. At the organizational level, then, it's possible to invest in a workplace where things work, where the tools are at hand, where meetings don't paralyze progress, where decisions get made when they need to get made (and where they don't get undone). It's possible to build a workplace where people expect good things, from their leaders and their peers and the market. Where we expect to be heard when we have something to say, and expect that with hard work, we can make a difference. It's possible to invest in hiring people who are educated (not merely good grades, but good intent) and to keep those people trained and up to speed. And it's essential for that workplace to be one where the rule of law prevails, where people are treated with dignity and respect and where short term urgency is never used as a chance to declare martial law and abandon the principles that built the organization in the first place. Yes, I believe the same is true for nation states. It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. Here's something that's unavoidably true: Investing in infrastructure always pays off. Always. Not just most of the time, but every single time. Sometimes the payoff takes longer than we'd like, sometimes there may be more efficient ways to get the same result, but every time we spend time and money on the four things, we're surprised at how much of a difference it makes. It's also worth noting that for organizations and countries, infrastructure investments are most effective when they are centralized and consistent. Bootstrapping is a great concept, but it works best when we're in an environment that encourages it. The biggest difference between 2015 and 1915 aren't the ideas we have or the humans around us. It's the technology, the civilization and the expectations in our infrastructure. Where you're born has more to do with your future than just about anything else, and that's because of infrastructure. When we invest (and it's expensive) in all four of these elements, things get better. It's easy to take them for granted, which is why visiting an organization or nation that doesn't have them is such a powerful wake up call. {Ready} Posted by Seth Godin on October 15, 2015 | Permalink inShare732 When in doubt, draw a bell curve "All men are created equal." But after that, culture starts to change things. Almost nothing is evenly distributed. Some people seek out new technology in an area they are focused on... others fear new technology. Some people can dunk a basketball, others will never be athletic enough to do so. Some people are willing to put in the effort to be great at something, most people, by definition, are mediocre. We're puzzled when we see uneven acceptance or uneven performance, because it's easy to imagine that any group of people is homogeneous. But they're not. And the distribution of behaviors and traits is usually predictable. Most people are in the middle, but there are plenty of outliers. Here's one for technology. And for stories. And for medicine. Treat different people differently. Not because they're born this way, but because they choose (or were pushed) to be this way. Posted by Seth Godin on October 14, 2015 | Permalink inShare421 Simple questions for writers 1. What is it for? If this piece of writing works, what will change? What action will be taken? The more specific you are in your intent, the more frightening it is to do the writing (because you might fail). And, magically, the more specific you are in your intent, the more likely it is to succeed. 2. Who are you? Writing comes from someone. Are you writing as scientist, reporting the facts? Are you an angry op-ed writer, seeking political action? Or are you perhaps the voice of an institution, putting up an official warning sign in an official place? 3. Who is it for? It's almost impossible for a piece of writing to change someone. It's definitely impossible for it to change everyone. So... who is this designed to reach? What do they believe? Do they trust you? Are they inclined to take action? 4. Will it spread? After the person you seek to reach reads this, will she share it? Shared action is amplified action. Your resume is written. So is your Facebook update, your garage sale ad and the memo to your employees. Writing can make a difference. Write to make a difference. PS If you applied to the latest session of the altMBA, please take a second to read this note. Thanks. {3} Posted by Seth Godin on October 13, 2015 | Permalink inShare485 Discovery day Bernadette Jiwa's brilliant new book is out this week. Doug Rushkoff's book isn't out until March, but I was lucky enough to read a galley. Worth pre-ordering. Here's the (free) audio of a recent talk I did at Hubspot Inbound. (Video is here, but I think the audio works nicely). If you want to understand how to design cool stuff with your Mac, this huge collection from pioneer DTPer John McWade is worth every penny. A master class. Six years ago I did a free seminar for non-profits. Spreading ideas, Oprah, fundraising, marketing, doing this vital work... You can watch it here. Discovering something new is thrilling and quite an opportunity. Share the good stuff. Posted by Seth Godin on October 12, 2015 | Permalink inShare225 Peak Mac The Grateful Dead hit their peak in 1977. Miles Davis in 1959, Warhol perhaps ten years later. It's not surprising that artists hit a peak—their lives have an arc, and so does the work. It can't possibly keep amazing us forever. Fans say that the Porsche arguably hit a peak in 1995 or so, and the Corvette before that. Sears hit a peak more than a decade ago. It's more surprising to us when a brand, an organization or a business hits a peak, because the purpose of the institution is to improve over time. They gain more resources, more experience, more market acceptance... they're not supposed to get bored, or old or lose their touch. If Disney hadn't peaked, there would never have been a Pixar. If Nokia and Motorola hadn't peaked, there never would have been a smart phone. One reason for peaking turns out to be success. Success means more employees, more meetings and more compromise. Success means more pressure to expand the market base and to broaden the appeal to get there. Success means that stubborn visionaries are pushed aside by profit-maximizing managers. An organization that seeks to continue its success, that wants to keep its promises to customers, employees and investors needs to be on alert for where the peak lies, and be ready to do something about it. And the answer isn't more meetings or more layers of spec. I got my first Mac in 1984. I was a beta tester for the first desktop publishing program (ReadySetGo) and I've used a Mac just about every day for the last thirty years. It occurred to me recently that the Mac hit its peak as a productivity tool about three years ago. Three years or so ago, the software did what I needed it to. The operating system was stable. Things didn't crash, things fit together properly, when something broke, I could fix it. Since then, we've seen: Operating systems that aren't faster or more reliable at running key apps, merely more like the iPhone. The latest update broke my RSS reader (which hasn't been updated) and did nothing at all to make my experience doing actual work get better. Geniuses at the Genius Bar who are trained to use a manual and to triage, not to actually make things work better. With all the traffic they have to face, they have little choice. Software like Keynote, iMovie and iTunes that doesn't get consistently better, but instead, serves other corporate goals. We don't know the names of the people behind these products, because there isn't a public, connected leader behind each of them, they're anonymous bits of a corporate whole. Compare this approach to the one taken by Nisus, the makers of my favorite word processor. An organization with a single-minded focus on making something that works, keeping a promise to users, not investors. Mostly, a brand's products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way. It's always tricky to call a peak. More likely than not, you'll be like the economist who predicted twelve of the last three recessions. The best strategy for a growing organization is to have insiders be the ones calling it. Insiders speaking up and speaking out on behalf of the users that are already customers, not merely the ones you're hoping to acquire. Most Apple parables aren't worth much to others, because it's a special case. But in this case, if it can happen to their organization, it can happen to yours. [/rant] Posted by Seth Godin on October 11, 2015 | Permalink inShare572 Narcissistic altruism (altruistic narcissism) An oxymoron that's true. Everyone who does good things does them because it makes them feel good, because the effort and the donation is worth more than it costs. (And it might be a donation to a charity or merely helping out a neighbor or contributing to a community project). Some people contribute because of the story they are able to tell themselves about the work they're doing. Many people do good things because they like the attention that it brings. Because it feels good to have others see you did good. The Chronicle of Philanthropy annually ranks the top 50 gifts of the year. And every year, virtually all of them are gifts to hospitals and colleges. One reason: you get your name on a building. Many people who work to gain support for good causes don't like this, it feels like a tax on their work, but a building rarely gets worse if it has someone's name on it. It's totally valid to offer a product or service that only appeals to the minority who aren't slightly narcissistic, who seek a different story. But it's a mistake to believe that just because you're 'right' (quotes deliberately used) that your story will match their worldview. If you want to make it more likely that someone contributes (to anything), it might be worth investing a few cycles figuring out how to give them credit, public, karmic or somewhere in between. Posted by Seth Godin on October 10, 2015 | Permalink inShare409 "No one clicked on it, no one liked it..." These two ideas are often uttered in the same sentence, but they're actually not related. People don't click on things because they like them, or because they resonate with them, or because they change them. They click on things because they think it will look good to their friends if they share them. Or they click on things because it feels safe. Or because they're bored. Or mystified. Or because other people are telling them to. Think about the things you chat about over the water cooler. It might be last night's inane TV show, or last weekend's forgettable sporting event. But the things that really matter to you, resonate with you, touch you deeply--often those things are far too precious and real to be turned into an easy share or like or click. Yes, you can architect content and sites and commerce to get a click. But you might also choose to merely make a difference. Posted by Seth Godin on October 09, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare748 Going to the edges The best restaurant in Omaha doesn't serve steak. And it's not a chain. The Kitchen Table is run by two people who care. Colin and Jessica aren't trying to copy what's come before and they're not trying to please everyone. When they first opened, people wanted to know why everything wasn't $5. (You can get a large dinner for two for $30 here). Instead of dumbing down the menu and averaging down on quality, they went the other way. There might be other restaurants in Nebraska that serve homemade dukkah on their salads and homemade sourdough bread with their sandwiches, but I don't know of any. And I think homemade watermelon rind pickles are scarce even in New York. It helps that the rent is (really) cheap on the big city rent scale. It helps that the two people behind the restaurant live upstairs and are willing to put their hearts into it. Now, the place is jammed most days for lunch, and dinner is almost as busy. Now, it's an 'of course', not a crazy scheme. It's a restaurant for people like us. The reason that this is possible now, though, is that the 'us' in "people like us do things like this," can now more easily communicate with each other. A few clicks on the magical phone in your pocket and you can find this place... if you're looking for it. And that's the secret to thriving on the edges: Build something that people will look for, something that people will talk about, something we would miss if it were gone. Not for everyone. For us. Posted by Seth Godin on October 08, 2015 | Permalink inShare600 Sloppy ties It's easy to visualize the efficiency of precise ties. Every phone call goes through. The marching band executes every turn, on cue. The entire band, each and every one of them. The fabric in that sari is flawless. Today, we're seeing more and more sloppy ties, more things created by apparently random waves than in predictable outcomes. Maybe that email doesn't get through or that text isn't answered. Maybe the individuals you thought would spread your idea, don't. Maybe turnover increases in your organization or the provider you count on changes his policies... But the number of connections is so great, it all works out. The haystack doesn't fall down, the nubby wool sweater doesn't ravel, the idea still spreads. Precision ties are still magical. But we shouldn't avoid sloppy ties if they're going to get the job done. Substituting sloppy ties without sufficient mass, though, gets us nothing but disappointment. {9} Posted by Seth Godin on October 07, 2015 | Permalink inShare242 Alphagrams It turns out that competitive Scrabble players always arrange the letters on their rack in alphabetical order. The reason makes sense: By ensuring consistency, the patterns appear. You've seen this before... That same discipline works in most kinds of problem solving. Develop a method where you organize all the inputs, the assumptions and the variables in the same order. Consistently grouping what you see will make it ever more clear that you've seen something like this before. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Posted by Seth Godin on October 06, 2015 | Permalink inShare399 Promotion, demotion and opportunity You can learn a new skill, today, for free. You can take on a new task at work, right now, without asking anyone. You can make a connection, find a flaw, contribute an insight, now. Or not. In a fluid system, when people are moving forward, others are falling behind. The question, then, isn't, "when am I going to get promoted?" No, I think the question is, "will I grab these openings to become someone who's already doing work at a higher level?" Act 'as if'. If the people around you don't figure out what an asset you've become, someone else will. Posted by Seth Godin on October 05, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare976 Sometimes, you have to believe it in order to see it In a hyper-rational world, this sounds like voodoo. Persuading ourselves in advance is no way to see the world as it is. But what if your goal is to see the world as it could be? It's impossible to do important innovation in any field with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face. Missouri might be the show-me state, but I'd rather be from the follow-me state. {12} Posted by Seth Godin on October 04, 2015 | Permalink inShare444 Bikes and cars Bikes should give way to cars: Cars are bigger Cars are faster Cars are powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built for commerce, and powered vehicles are the engine of commerce It's inefficient for a car to slow down I'm in a car, get out of my way I'm on a bike, I'm afraid Cars should give way to bikes: Bikers need a break Bikers are more fragile Bikes aren't nearly as powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built by people, and while commerce is a side effect, the presumption that cars are the reason for a city is a bit... presumptuous It's a lot of work for a bike to stop and start again I'm on a bike, get out of my way I'm in a car, I see you This dichotomy is, of course, a metaphor, a Rorschach that tells each of us a lot about how we see the world. Posted by Seth Godin on October 03, 2015 | Permalink inShare298 On feeling like a failure Feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing. There are people who have failed more times than you and I can count, who are happily continuing in their work. There are others who have achieved more than most of us can imagine, who go to work each day feeling inadequate, behind, and yes, like failures and frauds. These are not cases of extraordinary outliers. In fact, external data is almost useless in figuring out whether or not someone is going to adopt the narrative of being a failure. Failure (as seen from the outside) is an event. It's a moment when the spec isn't met, when a project isn't completed as planned. Feelings, on the other hand, are often persistent, and they are based on stories. Stories we tell ourselves as much as stories the world tells us. As a result, if you want to have a feeling, you'll have it. If you want to seek a thread to ravel, you will, you'll pull at it and focus on it until, in fact, you're proven right, you are a failure. Here's the essential first step: Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed. Thinking of one's self as a failure is not the same as failing. And thus, succeeding (on this particular task) is not the antidote. In fact, if you act on this misconception, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of new evidence that you are, in fact, correct in your feelings, because you will ignore the wins and remind yourself daily of the losses. Instead, begin with the idea that the best way to deal with a feeling is to realize that it's yours. Posted by Seth Godin on October 02, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,082 Choose your impact Is it that simple? Can you choose to make an impact? Of course it is. You can choose to merely do your job, to meet spec and to follow someone else's path. Or, you can dig in and transform your contribution. You can level up, taking advantage of the world-changing array of tools and connections our new economy is making available. Access to tools is a small part of it. Mostly, it’s about taking control over where you go and what you do with your gifts. The dislocations of our time are significant, the sinecures are disappearing, there is real stress and pain as the world changes. We can't control that, but we can control how we respond to it. Those changes open the door for those that choose to stand up and learn to contribute. A chance to be put on the hook instead of let off of it. The altMBA is a workshop designed to push you to see more clearly, speak more effectively and create change that lasts. It’s an intensive online group experience that works. You don’t have to travel, but you do have to be prepared to work hard. When I set out to create this process, I decided to push it uphill. Not to make it easier or faster, but to make it more difficult, to have it take longer. Not to make it more digital and scalable, but to make it more handmade and require a smaller scale. Mostly, not to let people off the hook, but to create a process that would help a few people transform themselves. This $3,000 workshop is for people who want to move up to leadership in their current organization, accelerate their indie projects and take control over their agenda. It’s designed to be the most significant lever for change we could create. This is our third session, and I can say with confidence that it's working. You have far more potential than people realize. You have something to say, a mission to go on, a contribution that matters. I’d like to help you unlock that potential. If you know someone who needs this sort of opportunity, I hope you'll share it with them. There are {15} days left to apply. I’ll post {reminders} now and then over the next two weeks. I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out, but even if you don’t apply, go ahead and use this moment, right now, to make a choice. Level up. Posted by Seth Godin on October 01, 2015 | Permalink inShare457 SUSDAT Abbey Ryan has painted a new painting every day for 8 years. Isaac Asimov published 400 books, by typing every day. This is post #6000 on this blog. Writer's block is a myth, a recent invention, a cultural malady. More important than the output, though, is the act itself. The act of doing it every day. When you commit to a practice, you will certainly have days when you don't feel like it, when you believe it's not your best work, when the muse deserts you. But, when you keep your commitment, the muse returns. When you keep your commitment, the work happens. It doesn't matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up. Show up, sit down and type. (Or paint). Posted by Seth Godin on September 30, 2015 | Permalink inShare558 For less than it's worth The only things we spend time and money on are things that we believe are worth more than they cost. The key words of this obvious sentence are often miscalculated: Believe, worth and cost. Believe as in the story we tell ourselves. Believe as in the eye of the beholder. Believe as in emotion. Worth as in what we'll trade. Worth as in our perception of its worth right now, not later. Worth as in how we remember this decision tomorrow or next year. and Cost, as in our expectation of how much it will hurt to get it, not merely the price tag. If people aren't buying your product, it's not because the price is too high. It's because we don't believe you enough, don't love it enough, don't care enough. Posted by Seth Godin on September 29, 2015 | Permalink inShare670 Thanks, let's write that down One way to deal with clients, with criticism, and with feedback is to not insist on resolving it in the moment. Taking feedback doesn't have to be the same thing as resolving feedback. It's tempting to challenge each bit of criticism, to explain your thinking, to justify the choices. This back and forth feels efficient, but it fails to deliver on a few fronts. First, it makes it more difficult for the client to share her truth, to feel heard. Second, it escalates the tension, because it's almost impossible to successfully resolve each item in real time. If you write it down, you can accept the feedback without judgment. And then, after it's all written down, after the feedback is received, people can change roles. You can sit on the same side of the table, colleagues in search of the best path forward. You can rank by expense, by urgency, by importance. You can agree on timelines and mostly, say, "what do we do now?" Posted by Seth Godin on September 28, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare753 The 2% who misunderstand you Sometimes, it's essential that you be completely understood. That every passenger knows where the emergency exit is, or that every employee knows how it is we do things around here. But most of the time, if 2% of your audience doesn't get the joke, doesn't learn what you seek to teach them, doesn't understand the essence of your argument, it's not the problem you think it is. Sure, the 2% who are underinformed can write reviews, tweet indignantly and speak up. You know what? It doesn't matter that much. If you insist on telling everyone on the airplane precisely how to buckle their seatbelt (!), then yes, of course you're going to not only waste the time of virtually everyone, but you're going to train them not to listen to the rest of what you have to say. If you insist on getting every single person in the room to understand every nuance of your presentation, you've just signed up to bore and alienate the very people you needed most. When you find yourself overwriting, embracing redundancy and overwhelming people with fine print, you're probably protecting yourself against the 2%, at the expense of everyone else. (And yes, it might be 10% or even 90%.... that's okay). When we hold back and dumb down, we are hurting the people who need to hear from us, often in a vain attempt to satisfy a few people who might never choose to actually listen. It's quite okay to say, "it's not for you." Posted by Seth Godin on September 27, 2015 | Permalink inShare974 More of a realist When did being called a 'realist' start to mean that one is a pessimist? Sometimes, people with small goals call themselves realists, and dismiss those around them as merely dreamers. I think this is backwards. "I guess I'm more of a realist than you," actually means, "I guess I've discovered that a positive attitude, a generous posture and a bit of persistence makes things better than most people expect." Hope isn't a strategy, but it is an awfully good tactic. Posted by Seth Godin on September 26, 2015 | Permalink inShare488 Attitude is a skill You can learn math. French. Bowling. You can learn Javascript, too. But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes. If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill. And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it. Which is great news, isn't it? [PS Starting today, we’re running a seven-day email sequence to teach you about the upcoming altMBA workshop. Find out more here.] Posted by Seth Godin on September 25, 2015 | Permalink inShare990 Industrializing, professionalizing, scaling... You could make it into a cookie cutter, a scalable, depersonalized, committee-approved ticket to endless growth. Or you could make it more real, more human and more personal. What is "it"? It is the interaction you have with your best customer. It is the way you talk to your employees. It is your safety policy, your go to market strategy, your approach to the board meeting. If you can't figure out how to talk to one person, it doesn't really pay to scale up your efforts to talk to a thousand. Posted by Seth Godin on September 24, 2015 | Permalink inShare400 The banality of the magazine rack Stop for a minute to consider those magazines that stack up like firewood at the doctor's office, or that beckon you from the high-priced newsstand before you get on the airplane. The celebrity/gossip/self-improvement category. All the airbrushed pretty people, the replaceable celebrities and near celebrities. The mass-market fad diets, the conventional stories, the sameness tailored for a mass audience. It's pretty seductive. If you can just fit in the way all these magazines are pushing you to fit in, then you'll be okay, alright, and beyond criticism. Boys and girls should act like this, dress like this, talk like this. Even the outliers are outliers in tried and true, conventional ways. The headlines are interchangeable. So are the photos and the celebrities, the stories and the escapades and the promises. Magazines believe they have to produce this cultural lighthouse in order to sell ads--there are advertisers that want average readers in order to sell them their average products. But this doesn't have to be you. These aren't cultural norms, they're merely a odd sub-universe, a costume party for people unwilling to find their own voice. Posted by Seth Godin on September 23, 2015 | Permalink inShare334 #WeAreAllWeird (3 contest updates) 1. You can win four books, signed by the authors, with a tweet. Rules are here. Tell us why you are not part of the lockstep masses. 2. I recently blogged about long odds (one in a quadrillion) and how hard it is to predict the future. It turns out that of the 897 people who entered my presidential bracket game, there’s only ONE contender left. Even though only two candidates have dropped out, there's already more than a 99% failure rate in predicting this future. And I think the prize is safe, because the only remaining contender has picked Christie and Bush as the next two to go. 3. Within 24 hours of recent events virtually determining the first question I surveyed, we also have an answer to the second one. Today’s the day my blog hit 500k followers on Twitter. As you can see, the crowd was off a bit on this as well. I’ve emailed the seven top entries to send them a prize. Thanks for giving it a whirl. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare167 Dreams and fears Sooner or later, important action taken comes down to this. Fear: Of being ashamed, feeling stupid, being rejected, being left out, getting hurt, being embarrassed, left alone, dying. Dreams: Of being seen, being needed, becoming independent, relieving anxiety, becoming powerful, making someone proud, fitting in, seen as special, mattering, taken care of, loved. Marketers put many layers atop these basic needs (horsepower, processor speed, features, pricing, testimonials, guarantees, and more) but it all comes down to dreams and fears. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare649 Tires, coffee and people The most important part of a race car is the tires. Good tires will always beat bad ones. The most important part of a cup of coffee is the beans. The grinder, the machine, the barista pale in comparison to the quality of what you start with. And the most important parts of an organization are the people you begin with. Not the systems or the policies or even the real estate. Great people make everything easier. And yet... And yet we spend money on 4 wheel drive instead of snow tires. And yet we upgrade our coffee maker instead of buying from a local roaster (or roasting our own). And mostly, we run classified ads to find the cheapest common denominator employee and spend all our time building systems to protect our customers from people who don't care... Posted by Seth Godin on September 21, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,300 Pathfinding Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path: [The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time] If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one. On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work. A few things to consider as you develop your skills as a pathfinder: If the value you create is in finding the path, are you being patient and generous with yourself as you hack your way through the weeds? You're not a typist, you're an explorer. Are others significantly more efficient and productive at finding paths in your industry? If so, it probably pays to learn what they've figured out. If you're not spending much time at all on pathfinding, what would happen if you did? Lots of people run paths. Very few have the guts to find a new one. Posted by Seth Godin on September 20, 2015 | Permalink inShare477 The Freelance Studio Denver, Co. a User Experience Agency Too much salt Why do most restaurants use an unhealthy amount of salt in the food they serve? I'm talking three to five times as much salt as the typical home chef might use. For the same reason that lazy marketers spam people and unsophisticated comic book writers use exclamation points. 1. Because it works (for a while). Salt is a cheap and reliable way to persuade people that the food is tasty. Over time, it merely makes us ill, but in the moment, it amplifies the flavors. It's way cheaper than using herbs or technique. And that's why marketers under pressure push the limits in terms of spamming people or offering urgent discounts. And why Batman is so easily caricatured with the word: POW! Cheap thrills. Shortcuts. Lazy. 2. Because they've been desensitized. Cook with enough salt long enough, and nothing tastes salty after a while. And so the lazy shortcut becomes more than a habit, because it's not even noticed. And so the marketer figures that everyone is used to being treated this way, so he ups the ante. And the other marketers around him are used to it too, so no one says anything. The solution to all of these problems is to zero out. Play for the long haul. Take the more difficult route. Surround yourself with people who insist you avoid the shortcut. Back to the basic principles, so you can learn to cook again. Posted by Seth Godin on October 19, 2015 | Permalink inShare373 What are corporations for? The purpose of a company is to serve its customers. Its obligation is to not harm everyone else. And its opportunity is to enrich the lives of its employees. Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that maximizing investor return was the point. It shouldn't be. That's not what democracies ought to seek in chartering corporations to participate in our society. The great corporations of a generation ago, the ones that built key elements of our culture, were run by individuals who had more on their mind than driving the value of their options up. The problem with short-term stock price maximization is that it's not particularly difficult. If you have market power, if the cost of switching is high or consumer knowledge is low, there are all sorts of ways that a well-motivated management team can hurt its customers, its community and its employees on the way to boosting what the investors say they want. It's not difficult for Dell to squeeze a little more junkware into a laptop, or Fedex to lower its customer service standards, or Verizon to deliver less bandwidth than they promised. But just because it works doesn't mean that they're doing their jobs, or keeping their promise, or doing work that they can be proud of. Profits and stock price aren't the point (with customers as a side project). It's the other way around. Posted by Seth Godin on October 18, 2015 | Permalink inShare666 The power of fear Fear will push you to avert your eyes. Fear will make you think you have nothing to say. It will create a buzz that makes it impossible to meditate... or it will create a fog that makes it so you can do nothing but meditate. Fear seduces us into losing our temper. and fear belittles us into accepting unfairness. Fear doesn't like strangers, people who don't look or act like us, and most of all, the unknown. It causes us to carelessly make typos, or obsessively look for them. Fear pushes us to fit in, so we won't be noticed, but it also pushes us to rebel and to not be trustworthy, so we won't be on the hook to produce. It is subtle enough to trick us into thinking it isn't pulling the strings, that it doesn't exist, that it's not the cause of, "I don't feel like it." When in doubt, look for the fear. Posted by Seth Godin on October 17, 2015 | Permalink inShare493 Does vocabulary matter? Here's Randall Munroe's brilliant explanation of how the Saturn V rocket works. The brilliant part is that he illustrated it using only the 1,000 most common words (which, ironically, doesn't include the word 'thousand'). If you are only able to use 1,000 words, nuance goes out the window. The typical native speaker knows 20,000 words, and there's your opportunity: If you know 40,000 words, if you learn five words a day for a decade, the world changes. Your ability to see, to explain and to influence flies off the charts. It's not about knowing needlessly fancy words (but it's often hard to know if the fancy word is needless until after you learn it). Your vocabulary reflects the way you think (and vice versa). It's tempting to read and write at the eighth-grade level, but there's a lot more leverage when you are able to use the right word in the right moment. A fork in the road for most careers is what we choose to do when we confront a vocabulary (from finance, technology, psychology, literature...) that we don't understand. We can either demand that people dumb down their discourse (and fall behind) or we can learn the words. It's hard to be a doctor or an engineer or key grip if you don't know what the words mean, because learning the words is the same thing as learning the concepts. PS Here's a bonus to get you started, a book I wrote 23 years ago with the effervescent Margery Mandell: Download Million-Dollar Words. It's the not quite final galley, the only one I could find on my hard drive. (Free to share and print, but not to sell or alter). Posted by Seth Godin on October 16, 2015 | Permalink inShare845 Infrastructure The ignored secret behind successful organizations (and nations) is infrastructure. Not the content of what's happening, but the things that allow that content to turn into something productive. Here are some elements worth considering: Transportation: Ideas and stuff have to move around. The more quickly, efficiently and safely, the better. This is not just roads, but wifi, community centers and even trade shows. Getting things, people and ideas from one place to another, safely and on time is essential to what we seek to build. Expectation: When people wake up in the morning expecting good things to happen, believing that things are possible, open to new ideas--those beliefs become self-fulfilling. We expect that it's possible to travel somewhere safely, and we expect that speaking up about a new idea won't lead us to get fired. People in trauma can't learn or leap or produce very much. Education: When we are surrounded by people who are skilled, smart and confident, far more gets done. When we learn something new, our productivity goes up. Civility: Not just table manners, but an environment without bullying, without bribery, without coercion. Clean air, not just to breathe, but to speak in. Infrastructure and culture overlap in a thousand ways. At the organizational level, then, it's possible to invest in a workplace where things work, where the tools are at hand, where meetings don't paralyze progress, where decisions get made when they need to get made (and where they don't get undone). It's possible to build a workplace where people expect good things, from their leaders and their peers and the market. Where we expect to be heard when we have something to say, and expect that with hard work, we can make a difference. It's possible to invest in hiring people who are educated (not merely good grades, but good intent) and to keep those people trained and up to speed. And it's essential for that workplace to be one where the rule of law prevails, where people are treated with dignity and respect and where short term urgency is never used as a chance to declare martial law and abandon the principles that built the organization in the first place. Yes, I believe the same is true for nation states. It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. Here's something that's unavoidably true: Investing in infrastructure always pays off. Always. Not just most of the time, but every single time. Sometimes the payoff takes longer than we'd like, sometimes there may be more efficient ways to get the same result, but every time we spend time and money on the four things, we're surprised at how much of a difference it makes. It's also worth noting that for organizations and countries, infrastructure investments are most effective when they are centralized and consistent. Bootstrapping is a great concept, but it works best when we're in an environment that encourages it. The biggest difference between 2015 and 1915 aren't the ideas we have or the humans around us. It's the technology, the civilization and the expectations in our infrastructure. Where you're born has more to do with your future than just about anything else, and that's because of infrastructure. When we invest (and it's expensive) in all four of these elements, things get better. It's easy to take them for granted, which is why visiting an organization or nation that doesn't have them is such a powerful wake up call. {Ready} Posted by Seth Godin on October 15, 2015 | Permalink inShare732 When in doubt, draw a bell curve "All men are created equal." But after that, culture starts to change things. Almost nothing is evenly distributed. Some people seek out new technology in an area they are focused on... others fear new technology. Some people can dunk a basketball, others will never be athletic enough to do so. Some people are willing to put in the effort to be great at something, most people, by definition, are mediocre. We're puzzled when we see uneven acceptance or uneven performance, because it's easy to imagine that any group of people is homogeneous. But they're not. And the distribution of behaviors and traits is usually predictable. Most people are in the middle, but there are plenty of outliers. Here's one for technology. And for stories. And for medicine. Treat different people differently. Not because they're born this way, but because they choose (or were pushed) to be this way. Posted by Seth Godin on October 14, 2015 | Permalink inShare421 Simple questions for writers 1. What is it for? If this piece of writing works, what will change? What action will be taken? The more specific you are in your intent, the more frightening it is to do the writing (because you might fail). And, magically, the more specific you are in your intent, the more likely it is to succeed. 2. Who are you? Writing comes from someone. Are you writing as scientist, reporting the facts? Are you an angry op-ed writer, seeking political action? Or are you perhaps the voice of an institution, putting up an official warning sign in an official place? 3. Who is it for? It's almost impossible for a piece of writing to change someone. It's definitely impossible for it to change everyone. So... who is this designed to reach? What do they believe? Do they trust you? Are they inclined to take action? 4. Will it spread? After the person you seek to reach reads this, will she share it? Shared action is amplified action. Your resume is written. So is your Facebook update, your garage sale ad and the memo to your employees. Writing can make a difference. Write to make a difference. PS If you applied to the latest session of the altMBA, please take a second to read this note. Thanks. {3} Posted by Seth Godin on October 13, 2015 | Permalink inShare485 Discovery day Bernadette Jiwa's brilliant new book is out this week. Doug Rushkoff's book isn't out until March, but I was lucky enough to read a galley. Worth pre-ordering. Here's the (free) audio of a recent talk I did at Hubspot Inbound. (Video is here, but I think the audio works nicely). If you want to understand how to design cool stuff with your Mac, this huge collection from pioneer DTPer John McWade is worth every penny. A master class. Six years ago I did a free seminar for non-profits. Spreading ideas, Oprah, fundraising, marketing, doing this vital work... You can watch it here. Discovering something new is thrilling and quite an opportunity. Share the good stuff. Posted by Seth Godin on October 12, 2015 | Permalink inShare225 Peak Mac The Grateful Dead hit their peak in 1977. Miles Davis in 1959, Warhol perhaps ten years later. It's not surprising that artists hit a peak—their lives have an arc, and so does the work. It can't possibly keep amazing us forever. Fans say that the Porsche arguably hit a peak in 1995 or so, and the Corvette before that. Sears hit a peak more than a decade ago. It's more surprising to us when a brand, an organization or a business hits a peak, because the purpose of the institution is to improve over time. They gain more resources, more experience, more market acceptance... they're not supposed to get bored, or old or lose their touch. If Disney hadn't peaked, there would never have been a Pixar. If Nokia and Motorola hadn't peaked, there never would have been a smart phone. One reason for peaking turns out to be success. Success means more employees, more meetings and more compromise. Success means more pressure to expand the market base and to broaden the appeal to get there. Success means that stubborn visionaries are pushed aside by profit-maximizing managers. An organization that seeks to continue its success, that wants to keep its promises to customers, employees and investors needs to be on alert for where the peak lies, and be ready to do something about it. And the answer isn't more meetings or more layers of spec. I got my first Mac in 1984. I was a beta tester for the first desktop publishing program (ReadySetGo) and I've used a Mac just about every day for the last thirty years. It occurred to me recently that the Mac hit its peak as a productivity tool about three years ago. Three years or so ago, the software did what I needed it to. The operating system was stable. Things didn't crash, things fit together properly, when something broke, I could fix it. Since then, we've seen: Operating systems that aren't faster or more reliable at running key apps, merely more like the iPhone. The latest update broke my RSS reader (which hasn't been updated) and did nothing at all to make my experience doing actual work get better. Geniuses at the Genius Bar who are trained to use a manual and to triage, not to actually make things work better. With all the traffic they have to face, they have little choice. Software like Keynote, iMovie and iTunes that doesn't get consistently better, but instead, serves other corporate goals. We don't know the names of the people behind these products, because there isn't a public, connected leader behind each of them, they're anonymous bits of a corporate whole. Compare this approach to the one taken by Nisus, the makers of my favorite word processor. An organization with a single-minded focus on making something that works, keeping a promise to users, not investors. Mostly, a brand's products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way. It's always tricky to call a peak. More likely than not, you'll be like the economist who predicted twelve of the last three recessions. The best strategy for a growing organization is to have insiders be the ones calling it. Insiders speaking up and speaking out on behalf of the users that are already customers, not merely the ones you're hoping to acquire. Most Apple parables aren't worth much to others, because it's a special case. But in this case, if it can happen to their organization, it can happen to yours. [/rant] Posted by Seth Godin on October 11, 2015 | Permalink inShare572 Narcissistic altruism (altruistic narcissism) An oxymoron that's true. Everyone who does good things does them because it makes them feel good, because the effort and the donation is worth more than it costs. (And it might be a donation to a charity or merely helping out a neighbor or contributing to a community project). Some people contribute because of the story they are able to tell themselves about the work they're doing. Many people do good things because they like the attention that it brings. Because it feels good to have others see you did good. The Chronicle of Philanthropy annually ranks the top 50 gifts of the year. And every year, virtually all of them are gifts to hospitals and colleges. One reason: you get your name on a building. Many people who work to gain support for good causes don't like this, it feels like a tax on their work, but a building rarely gets worse if it has someone's name on it. It's totally valid to offer a product or service that only appeals to the minority who aren't slightly narcissistic, who seek a different story. But it's a mistake to believe that just because you're 'right' (quotes deliberately used) that your story will match their worldview. If you want to make it more likely that someone contributes (to anything), it might be worth investing a few cycles figuring out how to give them credit, public, karmic or somewhere in between. Posted by Seth Godin on October 10, 2015 | Permalink inShare409 "No one clicked on it, no one liked it..." These two ideas are often uttered in the same sentence, but they're actually not related. People don't click on things because they like them, or because they resonate with them, or because they change them. They click on things because they think it will look good to their friends if they share them. Or they click on things because it feels safe. Or because they're bored. Or mystified. Or because other people are telling them to. Think about the things you chat about over the water cooler. It might be last night's inane TV show, or last weekend's forgettable sporting event. But the things that really matter to you, resonate with you, touch you deeply--often those things are far too precious and real to be turned into an easy share or like or click. Yes, you can architect content and sites and commerce to get a click. But you might also choose to merely make a difference. Posted by Seth Godin on October 09, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare748 Going to the edges The best restaurant in Omaha doesn't serve steak. And it's not a chain. The Kitchen Table is run by two people who care. Colin and Jessica aren't trying to copy what's come before and they're not trying to please everyone. When they first opened, people wanted to know why everything wasn't $5. (You can get a large dinner for two for $30 here). Instead of dumbing down the menu and averaging down on quality, they went the other way. There might be other restaurants in Nebraska that serve homemade dukkah on their salads and homemade sourdough bread with their sandwiches, but I don't know of any. And I think homemade watermelon rind pickles are scarce even in New York. It helps that the rent is (really) cheap on the big city rent scale. It helps that the two people behind the restaurant live upstairs and are willing to put their hearts into it. Now, the place is jammed most days for lunch, and dinner is almost as busy. Now, it's an 'of course', not a crazy scheme. It's a restaurant for people like us. The reason that this is possible now, though, is that the 'us' in "people like us do things like this," can now more easily communicate with each other. A few clicks on the magical phone in your pocket and you can find this place... if you're looking for it. And that's the secret to thriving on the edges: Build something that people will look for, something that people will talk about, something we would miss if it were gone. Not for everyone. For us. Posted by Seth Godin on October 08, 2015 | Permalink inShare600 Sloppy ties It's easy to visualize the efficiency of precise ties. Every phone call goes through. The marching band executes every turn, on cue. The entire band, each and every one of them. The fabric in that sari is flawless. Today, we're seeing more and more sloppy ties, more things created by apparently random waves than in predictable outcomes. Maybe that email doesn't get through or that text isn't answered. Maybe the individuals you thought would spread your idea, don't. Maybe turnover increases in your organization or the provider you count on changes his policies... But the number of connections is so great, it all works out. The haystack doesn't fall down, the nubby wool sweater doesn't ravel, the idea still spreads. Precision ties are still magical. But we shouldn't avoid sloppy ties if they're going to get the job done. Substituting sloppy ties without sufficient mass, though, gets us nothing but disappointment. {9} Posted by Seth Godin on October 07, 2015 | Permalink inShare242 Alphagrams It turns out that competitive Scrabble players always arrange the letters on their rack in alphabetical order. The reason makes sense: By ensuring consistency, the patterns appear. You've seen this before... That same discipline works in most kinds of problem solving. Develop a method where you organize all the inputs, the assumptions and the variables in the same order. Consistently grouping what you see will make it ever more clear that you've seen something like this before. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Posted by Seth Godin on October 06, 2015 | Permalink inShare399 Promotion, demotion and opportunity You can learn a new skill, today, for free. You can take on a new task at work, right now, without asking anyone. You can make a connection, find a flaw, contribute an insight, now. Or not. In a fluid system, when people are moving forward, others are falling behind. The question, then, isn't, "when am I going to get promoted?" No, I think the question is, "will I grab these openings to become someone who's already doing work at a higher level?" Act 'as if'. If the people around you don't figure out what an asset you've become, someone else will. Posted by Seth Godin on October 05, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare976 Sometimes, you have to believe it in order to see it In a hyper-rational world, this sounds like voodoo. Persuading ourselves in advance is no way to see the world as it is. But what if your goal is to see the world as it could be? It's impossible to do important innovation in any field with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face. Missouri might be the show-me state, but I'd rather be from the follow-me state. {12} Posted by Seth Godin on October 04, 2015 | Permalink inShare444 Bikes and cars Bikes should give way to cars: Cars are bigger Cars are faster Cars are powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built for commerce, and powered vehicles are the engine of commerce It's inefficient for a car to slow down I'm in a car, get out of my way I'm on a bike, I'm afraid Cars should give way to bikes: Bikers need a break Bikers are more fragile Bikes aren't nearly as powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built by people, and while commerce is a side effect, the presumption that cars are the reason for a city is a bit... presumptuous It's a lot of work for a bike to stop and start again I'm on a bike, get out of my way I'm in a car, I see you This dichotomy is, of course, a metaphor, a Rorschach that tells each of us a lot about how we see the world. Posted by Seth Godin on October 03, 2015 | Permalink inShare298 On feeling like a failure Feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing. There are people who have failed more times than you and I can count, who are happily continuing in their work. There are others who have achieved more than most of us can imagine, who go to work each day feeling inadequate, behind, and yes, like failures and frauds. These are not cases of extraordinary outliers. In fact, external data is almost useless in figuring out whether or not someone is going to adopt the narrative of being a failure. Failure (as seen from the outside) is an event. It's a moment when the spec isn't met, when a project isn't completed as planned. Feelings, on the other hand, are often persistent, and they are based on stories. Stories we tell ourselves as much as stories the world tells us. As a result, if you want to have a feeling, you'll have it. If you want to seek a thread to ravel, you will, you'll pull at it and focus on it until, in fact, you're proven right, you are a failure. Here's the essential first step: Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed. Thinking of one's self as a failure is not the same as failing. And thus, succeeding (on this particular task) is not the antidote. In fact, if you act on this misconception, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of new evidence that you are, in fact, correct in your feelings, because you will ignore the wins and remind yourself daily of the losses. Instead, begin with the idea that the best way to deal with a feeling is to realize that it's yours. Posted by Seth Godin on October 02, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,082 Choose your impact Is it that simple? Can you choose to make an impact? Of course it is. You can choose to merely do your job, to meet spec and to follow someone else's path. Or, you can dig in and transform your contribution. You can level up, taking advantage of the world-changing array of tools and connections our new economy is making available. Access to tools is a small part of it. Mostly, it’s about taking control over where you go and what you do with your gifts. The dislocations of our time are significant, the sinecures are disappearing, there is real stress and pain as the world changes. We can't control that, but we can control how we respond to it. Those changes open the door for those that choose to stand up and learn to contribute. A chance to be put on the hook instead of let off of it. The altMBA is a workshop designed to push you to see more clearly, speak more effectively and create change that lasts. It’s an intensive online group experience that works. You don’t have to travel, but you do have to be prepared to work hard. When I set out to create this process, I decided to push it uphill. Not to make it easier or faster, but to make it more difficult, to have it take longer. Not to make it more digital and scalable, but to make it more handmade and require a smaller scale. Mostly, not to let people off the hook, but to create a process that would help a few people transform themselves. This $3,000 workshop is for people who want to move up to leadership in their current organization, accelerate their indie projects and take control over their agenda. It’s designed to be the most significant lever for change we could create. This is our third session, and I can say with confidence that it's working. You have far more potential than people realize. You have something to say, a mission to go on, a contribution that matters. I’d like to help you unlock that potential. If you know someone who needs this sort of opportunity, I hope you'll share it with them. There are {15} days left to apply. I’ll post {reminders} now and then over the next two weeks. I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out, but even if you don’t apply, go ahead and use this moment, right now, to make a choice. Level up. Posted by Seth Godin on October 01, 2015 | Permalink inShare457 SUSDAT Abbey Ryan has painted a new painting every day for 8 years. Isaac Asimov published 400 books, by typing every day. This is post #6000 on this blog. Writer's block is a myth, a recent invention, a cultural malady. More important than the output, though, is the act itself. The act of doing it every day. When you commit to a practice, you will certainly have days when you don't feel like it, when you believe it's not your best work, when the muse deserts you. But, when you keep your commitment, the muse returns. When you keep your commitment, the work happens. It doesn't matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up. Show up, sit down and type. (Or paint). Posted by Seth Godin on September 30, 2015 | Permalink inShare558 For less than it's worth The only things we spend time and money on are things that we believe are worth more than they cost. The key words of this obvious sentence are often miscalculated: Believe, worth and cost. Believe as in the story we tell ourselves. Believe as in the eye of the beholder. Believe as in emotion. Worth as in what we'll trade. Worth as in our perception of its worth right now, not later. Worth as in how we remember this decision tomorrow or next year. and Cost, as in our expectation of how much it will hurt to get it, not merely the price tag. If people aren't buying your product, it's not because the price is too high. It's because we don't believe you enough, don't love it enough, don't care enough. Posted by Seth Godin on September 29, 2015 | Permalink inShare670 Thanks, let's write that down One way to deal with clients, with criticism, and with feedback is to not insist on resolving it in the moment. Taking feedback doesn't have to be the same thing as resolving feedback. It's tempting to challenge each bit of criticism, to explain your thinking, to justify the choices. This back and forth feels efficient, but it fails to deliver on a few fronts. First, it makes it more difficult for the client to share her truth, to feel heard. Second, it escalates the tension, because it's almost impossible to successfully resolve each item in real time. If you write it down, you can accept the feedback without judgment. And then, after it's all written down, after the feedback is received, people can change roles. You can sit on the same side of the table, colleagues in search of the best path forward. You can rank by expense, by urgency, by importance. You can agree on timelines and mostly, say, "what do we do now?" Posted by Seth Godin on September 28, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare753 The 2% who misunderstand you Sometimes, it's essential that you be completely understood. That every passenger knows where the emergency exit is, or that every employee knows how it is we do things around here. But most of the time, if 2% of your audience doesn't get the joke, doesn't learn what you seek to teach them, doesn't understand the essence of your argument, it's not the problem you think it is. Sure, the 2% who are underinformed can write reviews, tweet indignantly and speak up. You know what? It doesn't matter that much. If you insist on telling everyone on the airplane precisely how to buckle their seatbelt (!), then yes, of course you're going to not only waste the time of virtually everyone, but you're going to train them not to listen to the rest of what you have to say. If you insist on getting every single person in the room to understand every nuance of your presentation, you've just signed up to bore and alienate the very people you needed most. When you find yourself overwriting, embracing redundancy and overwhelming people with fine print, you're probably protecting yourself against the 2%, at the expense of everyone else. (And yes, it might be 10% or even 90%.... that's okay). When we hold back and dumb down, we are hurting the people who need to hear from us, often in a vain attempt to satisfy a few people who might never choose to actually listen. It's quite okay to say, "it's not for you." Posted by Seth Godin on September 27, 2015 | Permalink inShare974 More of a realist When did being called a 'realist' start to mean that one is a pessimist? Sometimes, people with small goals call themselves realists, and dismiss those around them as merely dreamers. I think this is backwards. "I guess I'm more of a realist than you," actually means, "I guess I've discovered that a positive attitude, a generous posture and a bit of persistence makes things better than most people expect." Hope isn't a strategy, but it is an awfully good tactic. Posted by Seth Godin on September 26, 2015 | Permalink inShare488 Attitude is a skill You can learn math. French. Bowling. You can learn Javascript, too. But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes. If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill. And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it. Which is great news, isn't it? [PS Starting today, we’re running a seven-day email sequence to teach you about the upcoming altMBA workshop. Find out more here.] Posted by Seth Godin on September 25, 2015 | Permalink inShare990 Industrializing, professionalizing, scaling... You could make it into a cookie cutter, a scalable, depersonalized, committee-approved ticket to endless growth. Or you could make it more real, more human and more personal. What is "it"? It is the interaction you have with your best customer. It is the way you talk to your employees. It is your safety policy, your go to market strategy, your approach to the board meeting. If you can't figure out how to talk to one person, it doesn't really pay to scale up your efforts to talk to a thousand. Posted by Seth Godin on September 24, 2015 | Permalink inShare400 The banality of the magazine rack Stop for a minute to consider those magazines that stack up like firewood at the doctor's office, or that beckon you from the high-priced newsstand before you get on the airplane. The celebrity/gossip/self-improvement category. All the airbrushed pretty people, the replaceable celebrities and near celebrities. The mass-market fad diets, the conventional stories, the sameness tailored for a mass audience. It's pretty seductive. If you can just fit in the way all these magazines are pushing you to fit in, then you'll be okay, alright, and beyond criticism. Boys and girls should act like this, dress like this, talk like this. Even the outliers are outliers in tried and true, conventional ways. The headlines are interchangeable. So are the photos and the celebrities, the stories and the escapades and the promises. Magazines believe they have to produce this cultural lighthouse in order to sell ads--there are advertisers that want average readers in order to sell them their average products. But this doesn't have to be you. These aren't cultural norms, they're merely a odd sub-universe, a costume party for people unwilling to find their own voice. Posted by Seth Godin on September 23, 2015 | Permalink inShare334 #WeAreAllWeird (3 contest updates) 1. You can win four books, signed by the authors, with a tweet. Rules are here. Tell us why you are not part of the lockstep masses. 2. I recently blogged about long odds (one in a quadrillion) and how hard it is to predict the future. It turns out that of the 897 people who entered my presidential bracket game, there’s only ONE contender left. Even though only two candidates have dropped out, there's already more than a 99% failure rate in predicting this future. And I think the prize is safe, because the only remaining contender has picked Christie and Bush as the next two to go. 3. Within 24 hours of recent events virtually determining the first question I surveyed, we also have an answer to the second one. Today’s the day my blog hit 500k followers on Twitter. As you can see, the crowd was off a bit on this as well. I’ve emailed the seven top entries to send them a prize. Thanks for giving it a whirl. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare167 Dreams and fears Sooner or later, important action taken comes down to this. Fear: Of being ashamed, feeling stupid, being rejected, being left out, getting hurt, being embarrassed, left alone, dying. Dreams: Of being seen, being needed, becoming independent, relieving anxiety, becoming powerful, making someone proud, fitting in, seen as special, mattering, taken care of, loved. Marketers put many layers atop these basic needs (horsepower, processor speed, features, pricing, testimonials, guarantees, and more) but it all comes down to dreams and fears. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare649 Tires, coffee and people The most important part of a race car is the tires. Good tires will always beat bad ones. The most important part of a cup of coffee is the beans. The grinder, the machine, the barista pale in comparison to the quality of what you start with. And the most important parts of an organization are the people you begin with. Not the systems or the policies or even the real estate. Great people make everything easier. And yet... And yet we spend money on 4 wheel drive instead of snow tires. And yet we upgrade our coffee maker instead of buying from a local roaster (or roasting our own). And mostly, we run classified ads to find the cheapest common denominator employee and spend all our time building systems to protect our customers from people who don't care... Posted by Seth Godin on September 21, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,300 Pathfinding Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path: [The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time] If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one. On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work. A few things to consider as you develop your skills as a pathfinder: If the value you create is in finding the path, are you being patient and generous with yourself as you hack your way through the weeds? You're not a typist, you're an explorer. Are others significantly more efficient and productive at finding paths in your industry? If so, it probably pays to learn what they've figured out. If you're not spending much time at all on pathfinding, what would happen if you did? Lots of people run paths. Very few have the guts to find a new one. Posted by Seth Godin on September 20, 2015 | Permalink inShare477 The Freelance Studio Denver, Co. a User Experience Agency Too much salt Why do most restaurants use an unhealthy amount of salt in the food they serve? I'm talking three to five times as much salt as the typical home chef might use. For the same reason that lazy marketers spam people and unsophisticated comic book writers use exclamation points. 1. Because it works (for a while). Salt is a cheap and reliable way to persuade people that the food is tasty. Over time, it merely makes us ill, but in the moment, it amplifies the flavors. It's way cheaper than using herbs or technique. And that's why marketers under pressure push the limits in terms of spamming people or offering urgent discounts. And why Batman is so easily caricatured with the word: POW! Cheap thrills. Shortcuts. Lazy. 2. Because they've been desensitized. Cook with enough salt long enough, and nothing tastes salty after a while. And so the lazy shortcut becomes more than a habit, because it's not even noticed. And so the marketer figures that everyone is used to being treated this way, so he ups the ante. And the other marketers around him are used to it too, so no one says anything. The solution to all of these problems is to zero out. Play for the long haul. Take the more difficult route. Surround yourself with people who insist you avoid the shortcut. Back to the basic principles, so you can learn to cook again. Posted by Seth Godin on October 19, 2015 | Permalink inShare373 What are corporations for? The purpose of a company is to serve its customers. Its obligation is to not harm everyone else. And its opportunity is to enrich the lives of its employees. Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that maximizing investor return was the point. It shouldn't be. That's not what democracies ought to seek in chartering corporations to participate in our society. The great corporations of a generation ago, the ones that built key elements of our culture, were run by individuals who had more on their mind than driving the value of their options up. The problem with short-term stock price maximization is that it's not particularly difficult. If you have market power, if the cost of switching is high or consumer knowledge is low, there are all sorts of ways that a well-motivated management team can hurt its customers, its community and its employees on the way to boosting what the investors say they want. It's not difficult for Dell to squeeze a little more junkware into a laptop, or Fedex to lower its customer service standards, or Verizon to deliver less bandwidth than they promised. But just because it works doesn't mean that they're doing their jobs, or keeping their promise, or doing work that they can be proud of. Profits and stock price aren't the point (with customers as a side project). It's the other way around. Posted by Seth Godin on October 18, 2015 | Permalink inShare666 The power of fear Fear will push you to avert your eyes. Fear will make you think you have nothing to say. It will create a buzz that makes it impossible to meditate... or it will create a fog that makes it so you can do nothing but meditate. Fear seduces us into losing our temper. and fear belittles us into accepting unfairness. Fear doesn't like strangers, people who don't look or act like us, and most of all, the unknown. It causes us to carelessly make typos, or obsessively look for them. Fear pushes us to fit in, so we won't be noticed, but it also pushes us to rebel and to not be trustworthy, so we won't be on the hook to produce. It is subtle enough to trick us into thinking it isn't pulling the strings, that it doesn't exist, that it's not the cause of, "I don't feel like it." When in doubt, look for the fear. Posted by Seth Godin on October 17, 2015 | Permalink inShare493 Does vocabulary matter? Here's Randall Munroe's brilliant explanation of how the Saturn V rocket works. The brilliant part is that he illustrated it using only the 1,000 most common words (which, ironically, doesn't include the word 'thousand'). If you are only able to use 1,000 words, nuance goes out the window. The typical native speaker knows 20,000 words, and there's your opportunity: If you know 40,000 words, if you learn five words a day for a decade, the world changes. Your ability to see, to explain and to influence flies off the charts. It's not about knowing needlessly fancy words (but it's often hard to know if the fancy word is needless until after you learn it). Your vocabulary reflects the way you think (and vice versa). It's tempting to read and write at the eighth-grade level, but there's a lot more leverage when you are able to use the right word in the right moment. A fork in the road for most careers is what we choose to do when we confront a vocabulary (from finance, technology, psychology, literature...) that we don't understand. We can either demand that people dumb down their discourse (and fall behind) or we can learn the words. It's hard to be a doctor or an engineer or key grip if you don't know what the words mean, because learning the words is the same thing as learning the concepts. PS Here's a bonus to get you started, a book I wrote 23 years ago with the effervescent Margery Mandell: Download Million-Dollar Words. It's the not quite final galley, the only one I could find on my hard drive. (Free to share and print, but not to sell or alter). Posted by Seth Godin on October 16, 2015 | Permalink inShare845 Infrastructure The ignored secret behind successful organizations (and nations) is infrastructure. Not the content of what's happening, but the things that allow that content to turn into something productive. Here are some elements worth considering: Transportation: Ideas and stuff have to move around. The more quickly, efficiently and safely, the better. This is not just roads, but wifi, community centers and even trade shows. Getting things, people and ideas from one place to another, safely and on time is essential to what we seek to build. Expectation: When people wake up in the morning expecting good things to happen, believing that things are possible, open to new ideas--those beliefs become self-fulfilling. We expect that it's possible to travel somewhere safely, and we expect that speaking up about a new idea won't lead us to get fired. People in trauma can't learn or leap or produce very much. Education: When we are surrounded by people who are skilled, smart and confident, far more gets done. When we learn something new, our productivity goes up. Civility: Not just table manners, but an environment without bullying, without bribery, without coercion. Clean air, not just to breathe, but to speak in. Infrastructure and culture overlap in a thousand ways. At the organizational level, then, it's possible to invest in a workplace where things work, where the tools are at hand, where meetings don't paralyze progress, where decisions get made when they need to get made (and where they don't get undone). It's possible to build a workplace where people expect good things, from their leaders and their peers and the market. Where we expect to be heard when we have something to say, and expect that with hard work, we can make a difference. It's possible to invest in hiring people who are educated (not merely good grades, but good intent) and to keep those people trained and up to speed. And it's essential for that workplace to be one where the rule of law prevails, where people are treated with dignity and respect and where short term urgency is never used as a chance to declare martial law and abandon the principles that built the organization in the first place. Yes, I believe the same is true for nation states. It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. Here's something that's unavoidably true: Investing in infrastructure always pays off. Always. Not just most of the time, but every single time. Sometimes the payoff takes longer than we'd like, sometimes there may be more efficient ways to get the same result, but every time we spend time and money on the four things, we're surprised at how much of a difference it makes. It's also worth noting that for organizations and countries, infrastructure investments are most effective when they are centralized and consistent. Bootstrapping is a great concept, but it works best when we're in an environment that encourages it. The biggest difference between 2015 and 1915 aren't the ideas we have or the humans around us. It's the technology, the civilization and the expectations in our infrastructure. Where you're born has more to do with your future than just about anything else, and that's because of infrastructure. When we invest (and it's expensive) in all four of these elements, things get better. It's easy to take them for granted, which is why visiting an organization or nation that doesn't have them is such a powerful wake up call. {Ready} Posted by Seth Godin on October 15, 2015 | Permalink inShare732 When in doubt, draw a bell curve "All men are created equal." But after that, culture starts to change things. Almost nothing is evenly distributed. Some people seek out new technology in an area they are focused on... others fear new technology. Some people can dunk a basketball, others will never be athletic enough to do so. Some people are willing to put in the effort to be great at something, most people, by definition, are mediocre. We're puzzled when we see uneven acceptance or uneven performance, because it's easy to imagine that any group of people is homogeneous. But they're not. And the distribution of behaviors and traits is usually predictable. Most people are in the middle, but there are plenty of outliers. Here's one for technology. And for stories. And for medicine. Treat different people differently. Not because they're born this way, but because they choose (or were pushed) to be this way. Posted by Seth Godin on October 14, 2015 | Permalink inShare421 Simple questions for writers 1. What is it for? If this piece of writing works, what will change? What action will be taken? The more specific you are in your intent, the more frightening it is to do the writing (because you might fail). And, magically, the more specific you are in your intent, the more likely it is to succeed. 2. Who are you? Writing comes from someone. Are you writing as scientist, reporting the facts? Are you an angry op-ed writer, seeking political action? Or are you perhaps the voice of an institution, putting up an official warning sign in an official place? 3. Who is it for? It's almost impossible for a piece of writing to change someone. It's definitely impossible for it to change everyone. So... who is this designed to reach? What do they believe? Do they trust you? Are they inclined to take action? 4. Will it spread? After the person you seek to reach reads this, will she share it? Shared action is amplified action. Your resume is written. So is your Facebook update, your garage sale ad and the memo to your employees. Writing can make a difference. Write to make a difference. PS If you applied to the latest session of the altMBA, please take a second to read this note. Thanks. {3} Posted by Seth Godin on October 13, 2015 | Permalink inShare485 Discovery day Bernadette Jiwa's brilliant new book is out this week. Doug Rushkoff's book isn't out until March, but I was lucky enough to read a galley. Worth pre-ordering. Here's the (free) audio of a recent talk I did at Hubspot Inbound. (Video is here, but I think the audio works nicely). If you want to understand how to design cool stuff with your Mac, this huge collection from pioneer DTPer John McWade is worth every penny. A master class. Six years ago I did a free seminar for non-profits. Spreading ideas, Oprah, fundraising, marketing, doing this vital work... You can watch it here. Discovering something new is thrilling and quite an opportunity. Share the good stuff. Posted by Seth Godin on October 12, 2015 | Permalink inShare225 Peak Mac The Grateful Dead hit their peak in 1977. Miles Davis in 1959, Warhol perhaps ten years later. It's not surprising that artists hit a peak—their lives have an arc, and so does the work. It can't possibly keep amazing us forever. Fans say that the Porsche arguably hit a peak in 1995 or so, and the Corvette before that. Sears hit a peak more than a decade ago. It's more surprising to us when a brand, an organization or a business hits a peak, because the purpose of the institution is to improve over time. They gain more resources, more experience, more market acceptance... they're not supposed to get bored, or old or lose their touch. If Disney hadn't peaked, there would never have been a Pixar. If Nokia and Motorola hadn't peaked, there never would have been a smart phone. One reason for peaking turns out to be success. Success means more employees, more meetings and more compromise. Success means more pressure to expand the market base and to broaden the appeal to get there. Success means that stubborn visionaries are pushed aside by profit-maximizing managers. An organization that seeks to continue its success, that wants to keep its promises to customers, employees and investors needs to be on alert for where the peak lies, and be ready to do something about it. And the answer isn't more meetings or more layers of spec. I got my first Mac in 1984. I was a beta tester for the first desktop publishing program (ReadySetGo) and I've used a Mac just about every day for the last thirty years. It occurred to me recently that the Mac hit its peak as a productivity tool about three years ago. Three years or so ago, the software did what I needed it to. The operating system was stable. Things didn't crash, things fit together properly, when something broke, I could fix it. Since then, we've seen: Operating systems that aren't faster or more reliable at running key apps, merely more like the iPhone. The latest update broke my RSS reader (which hasn't been updated) and did nothing at all to make my experience doing actual work get better. Geniuses at the Genius Bar who are trained to use a manual and to triage, not to actually make things work better. With all the traffic they have to face, they have little choice. Software like Keynote, iMovie and iTunes that doesn't get consistently better, but instead, serves other corporate goals. We don't know the names of the people behind these products, because there isn't a public, connected leader behind each of them, they're anonymous bits of a corporate whole. Compare this approach to the one taken by Nisus, the makers of my favorite word processor. An organization with a single-minded focus on making something that works, keeping a promise to users, not investors. Mostly, a brand's products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way. It's always tricky to call a peak. More likely than not, you'll be like the economist who predicted twelve of the last three recessions. The best strategy for a growing organization is to have insiders be the ones calling it. Insiders speaking up and speaking out on behalf of the users that are already customers, not merely the ones you're hoping to acquire. Most Apple parables aren't worth much to others, because it's a special case. But in this case, if it can happen to their organization, it can happen to yours. [/rant] Posted by Seth Godin on October 11, 2015 | Permalink inShare572 Narcissistic altruism (altruistic narcissism) An oxymoron that's true. Everyone who does good things does them because it makes them feel good, because the effort and the donation is worth more than it costs. (And it might be a donation to a charity or merely helping out a neighbor or contributing to a community project). Some people contribute because of the story they are able to tell themselves about the work they're doing. Many people do good things because they like the attention that it brings. Because it feels good to have others see you did good. The Chronicle of Philanthropy annually ranks the top 50 gifts of the year. And every year, virtually all of them are gifts to hospitals and colleges. One reason: you get your name on a building. Many people who work to gain support for good causes don't like this, it feels like a tax on their work, but a building rarely gets worse if it has someone's name on it. It's totally valid to offer a product or service that only appeals to the minority who aren't slightly narcissistic, who seek a different story. But it's a mistake to believe that just because you're 'right' (quotes deliberately used) that your story will match their worldview. If you want to make it more likely that someone contributes (to anything), it might be worth investing a few cycles figuring out how to give them credit, public, karmic or somewhere in between. Posted by Seth Godin on October 10, 2015 | Permalink inShare409 "No one clicked on it, no one liked it..." These two ideas are often uttered in the same sentence, but they're actually not related. People don't click on things because they like them, or because they resonate with them, or because they change them. They click on things because they think it will look good to their friends if they share them. Or they click on things because it feels safe. Or because they're bored. Or mystified. Or because other people are telling them to. Think about the things you chat about over the water cooler. It might be last night's inane TV show, or last weekend's forgettable sporting event. But the things that really matter to you, resonate with you, touch you deeply--often those things are far too precious and real to be turned into an easy share or like or click. Yes, you can architect content and sites and commerce to get a click. But you might also choose to merely make a difference. Posted by Seth Godin on October 09, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare748 Going to the edges The best restaurant in Omaha doesn't serve steak. And it's not a chain. The Kitchen Table is run by two people who care. Colin and Jessica aren't trying to copy what's come before and they're not trying to please everyone. When they first opened, people wanted to know why everything wasn't $5. (You can get a large dinner for two for $30 here). Instead of dumbing down the menu and averaging down on quality, they went the other way. There might be other restaurants in Nebraska that serve homemade dukkah on their salads and homemade sourdough bread with their sandwiches, but I don't know of any. And I think homemade watermelon rind pickles are scarce even in New York. It helps that the rent is (really) cheap on the big city rent scale. It helps that the two people behind the restaurant live upstairs and are willing to put their hearts into it. Now, the place is jammed most days for lunch, and dinner is almost as busy. Now, it's an 'of course', not a crazy scheme. It's a restaurant for people like us. The reason that this is possible now, though, is that the 'us' in "people like us do things like this," can now more easily communicate with each other. A few clicks on the magical phone in your pocket and you can find this place... if you're looking for it. And that's the secret to thriving on the edges: Build something that people will look for, something that people will talk about, something we would miss if it were gone. Not for everyone. For us. Posted by Seth Godin on October 08, 2015 | Permalink inShare600 Sloppy ties It's easy to visualize the efficiency of precise ties. Every phone call goes through. The marching band executes every turn, on cue. The entire band, each and every one of them. The fabric in that sari is flawless. Today, we're seeing more and more sloppy ties, more things created by apparently random waves than in predictable outcomes. Maybe that email doesn't get through or that text isn't answered. Maybe the individuals you thought would spread your idea, don't. Maybe turnover increases in your organization or the provider you count on changes his policies... But the number of connections is so great, it all works out. The haystack doesn't fall down, the nubby wool sweater doesn't ravel, the idea still spreads. Precision ties are still magical. But we shouldn't avoid sloppy ties if they're going to get the job done. Substituting sloppy ties without sufficient mass, though, gets us nothing but disappointment. {9} Posted by Seth Godin on October 07, 2015 | Permalink inShare242 Alphagrams It turns out that competitive Scrabble players always arrange the letters on their rack in alphabetical order. The reason makes sense: By ensuring consistency, the patterns appear. You've seen this before... That same discipline works in most kinds of problem solving. Develop a method where you organize all the inputs, the assumptions and the variables in the same order. Consistently grouping what you see will make it ever more clear that you've seen something like this before. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Posted by Seth Godin on October 06, 2015 | Permalink inShare399 Promotion, demotion and opportunity You can learn a new skill, today, for free. You can take on a new task at work, right now, without asking anyone. You can make a connection, find a flaw, contribute an insight, now. Or not. In a fluid system, when people are moving forward, others are falling behind. The question, then, isn't, "when am I going to get promoted?" No, I think the question is, "will I grab these openings to become someone who's already doing work at a higher level?" Act 'as if'. If the people around you don't figure out what an asset you've become, someone else will. Posted by Seth Godin on October 05, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare976 Sometimes, you have to believe it in order to see it In a hyper-rational world, this sounds like voodoo. Persuading ourselves in advance is no way to see the world as it is. But what if your goal is to see the world as it could be? It's impossible to do important innovation in any field with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face. Missouri might be the show-me state, but I'd rather be from the follow-me state. {12} Posted by Seth Godin on October 04, 2015 | Permalink inShare444 Bikes and cars Bikes should give way to cars: Cars are bigger Cars are faster Cars are powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built for commerce, and powered vehicles are the engine of commerce It's inefficient for a car to slow down I'm in a car, get out of my way I'm on a bike, I'm afraid Cars should give way to bikes: Bikers need a break Bikers are more fragile Bikes aren't nearly as powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built by people, and while commerce is a side effect, the presumption that cars are the reason for a city is a bit... presumptuous It's a lot of work for a bike to stop and start again I'm on a bike, get out of my way I'm in a car, I see you This dichotomy is, of course, a metaphor, a Rorschach that tells each of us a lot about how we see the world. Posted by Seth Godin on October 03, 2015 | Permalink inShare298 On feeling like a failure Feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing. There are people who have failed more times than you and I can count, who are happily continuing in their work. There are others who have achieved more than most of us can imagine, who go to work each day feeling inadequate, behind, and yes, like failures and frauds. These are not cases of extraordinary outliers. In fact, external data is almost useless in figuring out whether or not someone is going to adopt the narrative of being a failure. Failure (as seen from the outside) is an event. It's a moment when the spec isn't met, when a project isn't completed as planned. Feelings, on the other hand, are often persistent, and they are based on stories. Stories we tell ourselves as much as stories the world tells us. As a result, if you want to have a feeling, you'll have it. If you want to seek a thread to ravel, you will, you'll pull at it and focus on it until, in fact, you're proven right, you are a failure. Here's the essential first step: Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed. Thinking of one's self as a failure is not the same as failing. And thus, succeeding (on this particular task) is not the antidote. In fact, if you act on this misconception, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of new evidence that you are, in fact, correct in your feelings, because you will ignore the wins and remind yourself daily of the losses. Instead, begin with the idea that the best way to deal with a feeling is to realize that it's yours. Posted by Seth Godin on October 02, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,082 Choose your impact Is it that simple? Can you choose to make an impact? Of course it is. You can choose to merely do your job, to meet spec and to follow someone else's path. Or, you can dig in and transform your contribution. You can level up, taking advantage of the world-changing array of tools and connections our new economy is making available. Access to tools is a small part of it. Mostly, it’s about taking control over where you go and what you do with your gifts. The dislocations of our time are significant, the sinecures are disappearing, there is real stress and pain as the world changes. We can't control that, but we can control how we respond to it. Those changes open the door for those that choose to stand up and learn to contribute. A chance to be put on the hook instead of let off of it. The altMBA is a workshop designed to push you to see more clearly, speak more effectively and create change that lasts. It’s an intensive online group experience that works. You don’t have to travel, but you do have to be prepared to work hard. When I set out to create this process, I decided to push it uphill. Not to make it easier or faster, but to make it more difficult, to have it take longer. Not to make it more digital and scalable, but to make it more handmade and require a smaller scale. Mostly, not to let people off the hook, but to create a process that would help a few people transform themselves. This $3,000 workshop is for people who want to move up to leadership in their current organization, accelerate their indie projects and take control over their agenda. It’s designed to be the most significant lever for change we could create. This is our third session, and I can say with confidence that it's working. You have far more potential than people realize. You have something to say, a mission to go on, a contribution that matters. I’d like to help you unlock that potential. If you know someone who needs this sort of opportunity, I hope you'll share it with them. There are {15} days left to apply. I’ll post {reminders} now and then over the next two weeks. I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out, but even if you don’t apply, go ahead and use this moment, right now, to make a choice. Level up. Posted by Seth Godin on October 01, 2015 | Permalink inShare457 SUSDAT Abbey Ryan has painted a new painting every day for 8 years. Isaac Asimov published 400 books, by typing every day. This is post #6000 on this blog. Writer's block is a myth, a recent invention, a cultural malady. More important than the output, though, is the act itself. The act of doing it every day. When you commit to a practice, you will certainly have days when you don't feel like it, when you believe it's not your best work, when the muse deserts you. But, when you keep your commitment, the muse returns. When you keep your commitment, the work happens. It doesn't matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up. Show up, sit down and type. (Or paint). Posted by Seth Godin on September 30, 2015 | Permalink inShare558 For less than it's worth The only things we spend time and money on are things that we believe are worth more than they cost. The key words of this obvious sentence are often miscalculated: Believe, worth and cost. Believe as in the story we tell ourselves. Believe as in the eye of the beholder. Believe as in emotion. Worth as in what we'll trade. Worth as in our perception of its worth right now, not later. Worth as in how we remember this decision tomorrow or next year. and Cost, as in our expectation of how much it will hurt to get it, not merely the price tag. If people aren't buying your product, it's not because the price is too high. It's because we don't believe you enough, don't love it enough, don't care enough. Posted by Seth Godin on September 29, 2015 | Permalink inShare670 Thanks, let's write that down One way to deal with clients, with criticism, and with feedback is to not insist on resolving it in the moment. Taking feedback doesn't have to be the same thing as resolving feedback. It's tempting to challenge each bit of criticism, to explain your thinking, to justify the choices. This back and forth feels efficient, but it fails to deliver on a few fronts. First, it makes it more difficult for the client to share her truth, to feel heard. Second, it escalates the tension, because it's almost impossible to successfully resolve each item in real time. If you write it down, you can accept the feedback without judgment. And then, after it's all written down, after the feedback is received, people can change roles. You can sit on the same side of the table, colleagues in search of the best path forward. You can rank by expense, by urgency, by importance. You can agree on timelines and mostly, say, "what do we do now?" Posted by Seth Godin on September 28, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare753 The 2% who misunderstand you Sometimes, it's essential that you be completely understood. That every passenger knows where the emergency exit is, or that every employee knows how it is we do things around here. But most of the time, if 2% of your audience doesn't get the joke, doesn't learn what you seek to teach them, doesn't understand the essence of your argument, it's not the problem you think it is. Sure, the 2% who are underinformed can write reviews, tweet indignantly and speak up. You know what? It doesn't matter that much. If you insist on telling everyone on the airplane precisely how to buckle their seatbelt (!), then yes, of course you're going to not only waste the time of virtually everyone, but you're going to train them not to listen to the rest of what you have to say. If you insist on getting every single person in the room to understand every nuance of your presentation, you've just signed up to bore and alienate the very people you needed most. When you find yourself overwriting, embracing redundancy and overwhelming people with fine print, you're probably protecting yourself against the 2%, at the expense of everyone else. (And yes, it might be 10% or even 90%.... that's okay). When we hold back and dumb down, we are hurting the people who need to hear from us, often in a vain attempt to satisfy a few people who might never choose to actually listen. It's quite okay to say, "it's not for you." Posted by Seth Godin on September 27, 2015 | Permalink inShare974 More of a realist When did being called a 'realist' start to mean that one is a pessimist? Sometimes, people with small goals call themselves realists, and dismiss those around them as merely dreamers. I think this is backwards. "I guess I'm more of a realist than you," actually means, "I guess I've discovered that a positive attitude, a generous posture and a bit of persistence makes things better than most people expect." Hope isn't a strategy, but it is an awfully good tactic. Posted by Seth Godin on September 26, 2015 | Permalink inShare488 Attitude is a skill You can learn math. French. Bowling. You can learn Javascript, too. But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes. If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill. And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it. Which is great news, isn't it? [PS Starting today, we’re running a seven-day email sequence to teach you about the upcoming altMBA workshop. Find out more here.] Posted by Seth Godin on September 25, 2015 | Permalink inShare990 Industrializing, professionalizing, scaling... You could make it into a cookie cutter, a scalable, depersonalized, committee-approved ticket to endless growth. Or you could make it more real, more human and more personal. What is "it"? It is the interaction you have with your best customer. It is the way you talk to your employees. It is your safety policy, your go to market strategy, your approach to the board meeting. If you can't figure out how to talk to one person, it doesn't really pay to scale up your efforts to talk to a thousand. Posted by Seth Godin on September 24, 2015 | Permalink inShare400 The banality of the magazine rack Stop for a minute to consider those magazines that stack up like firewood at the doctor's office, or that beckon you from the high-priced newsstand before you get on the airplane. The celebrity/gossip/self-improvement category. All the airbrushed pretty people, the replaceable celebrities and near celebrities. The mass-market fad diets, the conventional stories, the sameness tailored for a mass audience. It's pretty seductive. If you can just fit in the way all these magazines are pushing you to fit in, then you'll be okay, alright, and beyond criticism. Boys and girls should act like this, dress like this, talk like this. Even the outliers are outliers in tried and true, conventional ways. The headlines are interchangeable. So are the photos and the celebrities, the stories and the escapades and the promises. Magazines believe they have to produce this cultural lighthouse in order to sell ads--there are advertisers that want average readers in order to sell them their average products. But this doesn't have to be you. These aren't cultural norms, they're merely a odd sub-universe, a costume party for people unwilling to find their own voice. Posted by Seth Godin on September 23, 2015 | Permalink inShare334 #WeAreAllWeird (3 contest updates) 1. You can win four books, signed by the authors, with a tweet. Rules are here. Tell us why you are not part of the lockstep masses. 2. I recently blogged about long odds (one in a quadrillion) and how hard it is to predict the future. It turns out that of the 897 people who entered my presidential bracket game, there’s only ONE contender left. Even though only two candidates have dropped out, there's already more than a 99% failure rate in predicting this future. And I think the prize is safe, because the only remaining contender has picked Christie and Bush as the next two to go. 3. Within 24 hours of recent events virtually determining the first question I surveyed, we also have an answer to the second one. Today’s the day my blog hit 500k followers on Twitter. As you can see, the crowd was off a bit on this as well. I’ve emailed the seven top entries to send them a prize. Thanks for giving it a whirl. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare167 Dreams and fears Sooner or later, important action taken comes down to this. Fear: Of being ashamed, feeling stupid, being rejected, being left out, getting hurt, being embarrassed, left alone, dying. Dreams: Of being seen, being needed, becoming independent, relieving anxiety, becoming powerful, making someone proud, fitting in, seen as special, mattering, taken care of, loved. Marketers put many layers atop these basic needs (horsepower, processor speed, features, pricing, testimonials, guarantees, and more) but it all comes down to dreams and fears. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare649 Tires, coffee and people The most important part of a race car is the tires. Good tires will always beat bad ones. The most important part of a cup of coffee is the beans. The grinder, the machine, the barista pale in comparison to the quality of what you start with. And the most important parts of an organization are the people you begin with. Not the systems or the policies or even the real estate. Great people make everything easier. And yet... And yet we spend money on 4 wheel drive instead of snow tires. And yet we upgrade our coffee maker instead of buying from a local roaster (or roasting our own). And mostly, we run classified ads to find the cheapest common denominator employee and spend all our time building systems to protect our customers from people who don't care... Posted by Seth Godin on September 21, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,300 Pathfinding Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path: [The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time] If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one. On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work. A few things to consider as you develop your skills as a pathfinder: If the value you create is in finding the path, are you being patient and generous with yourself as you hack your way through the weeds? You're not a typist, you're an explorer. Are others significantly more efficient and productive at finding paths in your industry? If so, it probably pays to learn what they've figured out. If you're not spending much time at all on pathfinding, what would happen if you did? Lots of people run paths. Very few have the guts to find a new one. Posted by Seth Godin on September 20, 2015 | Permalink inShare477 The Freelance Studio Denver, Co. a User Experience Agency Too much salt Why do most restaurants use an unhealthy amount of salt in the food they serve? I'm talking three to five times as much salt as the typical home chef might use. For the same reason that lazy marketers spam people and unsophisticated comic book writers use exclamation points. 1. Because it works (for a while). Salt is a cheap and reliable way to persuade people that the food is tasty. Over time, it merely makes us ill, but in the moment, it amplifies the flavors. It's way cheaper than using herbs or technique. And that's why marketers under pressure push the limits in terms of spamming people or offering urgent discounts. And why Batman is so easily caricatured with the word: POW! Cheap thrills. Shortcuts. Lazy. 2. Because they've been desensitized. Cook with enough salt long enough, and nothing tastes salty after a while. And so the lazy shortcut becomes more than a habit, because it's not even noticed. And so the marketer figures that everyone is used to being treated this way, so he ups the ante. And the other marketers around him are used to it too, so no one says anything. The solution to all of these problems is to zero out. Play for the long haul. Take the more difficult route. Surround yourself with people who insist you avoid the shortcut. Back to the basic principles, so you can learn to cook again. Posted by Seth Godin on October 19, 2015 | Permalink inShare373 What are corporations for? The purpose of a company is to serve its customers. Its obligation is to not harm everyone else. And its opportunity is to enrich the lives of its employees. Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that maximizing investor return was the point. It shouldn't be. That's not what democracies ought to seek in chartering corporations to participate in our society. The great corporations of a generation ago, the ones that built key elements of our culture, were run by individuals who had more on their mind than driving the value of their options up. The problem with short-term stock price maximization is that it's not particularly difficult. If you have market power, if the cost of switching is high or consumer knowledge is low, there are all sorts of ways that a well-motivated management team can hurt its customers, its community and its employees on the way to boosting what the investors say they want. It's not difficult for Dell to squeeze a little more junkware into a laptop, or Fedex to lower its customer service standards, or Verizon to deliver less bandwidth than they promised. But just because it works doesn't mean that they're doing their jobs, or keeping their promise, or doing work that they can be proud of. Profits and stock price aren't the point (with customers as a side project). It's the other way around. Posted by Seth Godin on October 18, 2015 | Permalink inShare666 The power of fear Fear will push you to avert your eyes. Fear will make you think you have nothing to say. It will create a buzz that makes it impossible to meditate... or it will create a fog that makes it so you can do nothing but meditate. Fear seduces us into losing our temper. and fear belittles us into accepting unfairness. Fear doesn't like strangers, people who don't look or act like us, and most of all, the unknown. It causes us to carelessly make typos, or obsessively look for them. Fear pushes us to fit in, so we won't be noticed, but it also pushes us to rebel and to not be trustworthy, so we won't be on the hook to produce. It is subtle enough to trick us into thinking it isn't pulling the strings, that it doesn't exist, that it's not the cause of, "I don't feel like it." When in doubt, look for the fear. Posted by Seth Godin on October 17, 2015 | Permalink inShare493 Does vocabulary matter? Here's Randall Munroe's brilliant explanation of how the Saturn V rocket works. The brilliant part is that he illustrated it using only the 1,000 most common words (which, ironically, doesn't include the word 'thousand'). If you are only able to use 1,000 words, nuance goes out the window. The typical native speaker knows 20,000 words, and there's your opportunity: If you know 40,000 words, if you learn five words a day for a decade, the world changes. Your ability to see, to explain and to influence flies off the charts. It's not about knowing needlessly fancy words (but it's often hard to know if the fancy word is needless until after you learn it). Your vocabulary reflects the way you think (and vice versa). It's tempting to read and write at the eighth-grade level, but there's a lot more leverage when you are able to use the right word in the right moment. A fork in the road for most careers is what we choose to do when we confront a vocabulary (from finance, technology, psychology, literature...) that we don't understand. We can either demand that people dumb down their discourse (and fall behind) or we can learn the words. It's hard to be a doctor or an engineer or key grip if you don't know what the words mean, because learning the words is the same thing as learning the concepts. PS Here's a bonus to get you started, a book I wrote 23 years ago with the effervescent Margery Mandell: Download Million-Dollar Words. It's the not quite final galley, the only one I could find on my hard drive. (Free to share and print, but not to sell or alter). Posted by Seth Godin on October 16, 2015 | Permalink inShare845 Infrastructure The ignored secret behind successful organizations (and nations) is infrastructure. Not the content of what's happening, but the things that allow that content to turn into something productive. Here are some elements worth considering: Transportation: Ideas and stuff have to move around. The more quickly, efficiently and safely, the better. This is not just roads, but wifi, community centers and even trade shows. Getting things, people and ideas from one place to another, safely and on time is essential to what we seek to build. Expectation: When people wake up in the morning expecting good things to happen, believing that things are possible, open to new ideas--those beliefs become self-fulfilling. We expect that it's possible to travel somewhere safely, and we expect that speaking up about a new idea won't lead us to get fired. People in trauma can't learn or leap or produce very much. Education: When we are surrounded by people who are skilled, smart and confident, far more gets done. When we learn something new, our productivity goes up. Civility: Not just table manners, but an environment without bullying, without bribery, without coercion. Clean air, not just to breathe, but to speak in. Infrastructure and culture overlap in a thousand ways. At the organizational level, then, it's possible to invest in a workplace where things work, where the tools are at hand, where meetings don't paralyze progress, where decisions get made when they need to get made (and where they don't get undone). It's possible to build a workplace where people expect good things, from their leaders and their peers and the market. Where we expect to be heard when we have something to say, and expect that with hard work, we can make a difference. It's possible to invest in hiring people who are educated (not merely good grades, but good intent) and to keep those people trained and up to speed. And it's essential for that workplace to be one where the rule of law prevails, where people are treated with dignity and respect and where short term urgency is never used as a chance to declare martial law and abandon the principles that built the organization in the first place. Yes, I believe the same is true for nation states. It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. Here's something that's unavoidably true: Investing in infrastructure always pays off. Always. Not just most of the time, but every single time. Sometimes the payoff takes longer than we'd like, sometimes there may be more efficient ways to get the same result, but every time we spend time and money on the four things, we're surprised at how much of a difference it makes. It's also worth noting that for organizations and countries, infrastructure investments are most effective when they are centralized and consistent. Bootstrapping is a great concept, but it works best when we're in an environment that encourages it. The biggest difference between 2015 and 1915 aren't the ideas we have or the humans around us. It's the technology, the civilization and the expectations in our infrastructure. Where you're born has more to do with your future than just about anything else, and that's because of infrastructure. When we invest (and it's expensive) in all four of these elements, things get better. It's easy to take them for granted, which is why visiting an organization or nation that doesn't have them is such a powerful wake up call. {Ready} Posted by Seth Godin on October 15, 2015 | Permalink inShare732 When in doubt, draw a bell curve "All men are created equal." But after that, culture starts to change things. Almost nothing is evenly distributed. Some people seek out new technology in an area they are focused on... others fear new technology. Some people can dunk a basketball, others will never be athletic enough to do so. Some people are willing to put in the effort to be great at something, most people, by definition, are mediocre. We're puzzled when we see uneven acceptance or uneven performance, because it's easy to imagine that any group of people is homogeneous. But they're not. And the distribution of behaviors and traits is usually predictable. Most people are in the middle, but there are plenty of outliers. Here's one for technology. And for stories. And for medicine. Treat different people differently. Not because they're born this way, but because they choose (or were pushed) to be this way. Posted by Seth Godin on October 14, 2015 | Permalink inShare421 Simple questions for writers 1. What is it for? If this piece of writing works, what will change? What action will be taken? The more specific you are in your intent, the more frightening it is to do the writing (because you might fail). And, magically, the more specific you are in your intent, the more likely it is to succeed. 2. Who are you? Writing comes from someone. Are you writing as scientist, reporting the facts? Are you an angry op-ed writer, seeking political action? Or are you perhaps the voice of an institution, putting up an official warning sign in an official place? 3. Who is it for? It's almost impossible for a piece of writing to change someone. It's definitely impossible for it to change everyone. So... who is this designed to reach? What do they believe? Do they trust you? Are they inclined to take action? 4. Will it spread? After the person you seek to reach reads this, will she share it? Shared action is amplified action. Your resume is written. So is your Facebook update, your garage sale ad and the memo to your employees. Writing can make a difference. Write to make a difference. PS If you applied to the latest session of the altMBA, please take a second to read this note. Thanks. {3} Posted by Seth Godin on October 13, 2015 | Permalink inShare485 Discovery day Bernadette Jiwa's brilliant new book is out this week. Doug Rushkoff's book isn't out until March, but I was lucky enough to read a galley. Worth pre-ordering. Here's the (free) audio of a recent talk I did at Hubspot Inbound. (Video is here, but I think the audio works nicely). If you want to understand how to design cool stuff with your Mac, this huge collection from pioneer DTPer John McWade is worth every penny. A master class. Six years ago I did a free seminar for non-profits. Spreading ideas, Oprah, fundraising, marketing, doing this vital work... You can watch it here. Discovering something new is thrilling and quite an opportunity. Share the good stuff. Posted by Seth Godin on October 12, 2015 | Permalink inShare225 Peak Mac The Grateful Dead hit their peak in 1977. Miles Davis in 1959, Warhol perhaps ten years later. It's not surprising that artists hit a peak—their lives have an arc, and so does the work. It can't possibly keep amazing us forever. Fans say that the Porsche arguably hit a peak in 1995 or so, and the Corvette before that. Sears hit a peak more than a decade ago. It's more surprising to us when a brand, an organization or a business hits a peak, because the purpose of the institution is to improve over time. They gain more resources, more experience, more market acceptance... they're not supposed to get bored, or old or lose their touch. If Disney hadn't peaked, there would never have been a Pixar. If Nokia and Motorola hadn't peaked, there never would have been a smart phone. One reason for peaking turns out to be success. Success means more employees, more meetings and more compromise. Success means more pressure to expand the market base and to broaden the appeal to get there. Success means that stubborn visionaries are pushed aside by profit-maximizing managers. An organization that seeks to continue its success, that wants to keep its promises to customers, employees and investors needs to be on alert for where the peak lies, and be ready to do something about it. And the answer isn't more meetings or more layers of spec. I got my first Mac in 1984. I was a beta tester for the first desktop publishing program (ReadySetGo) and I've used a Mac just about every day for the last thirty years. It occurred to me recently that the Mac hit its peak as a productivity tool about three years ago. Three years or so ago, the software did what I needed it to. The operating system was stable. Things didn't crash, things fit together properly, when something broke, I could fix it. Since then, we've seen: Operating systems that aren't faster or more reliable at running key apps, merely more like the iPhone. The latest update broke my RSS reader (which hasn't been updated) and did nothing at all to make my experience doing actual work get better. Geniuses at the Genius Bar who are trained to use a manual and to triage, not to actually make things work better. With all the traffic they have to face, they have little choice. Software like Keynote, iMovie and iTunes that doesn't get consistently better, but instead, serves other corporate goals. We don't know the names of the people behind these products, because there isn't a public, connected leader behind each of them, they're anonymous bits of a corporate whole. Compare this approach to the one taken by Nisus, the makers of my favorite word processor. An organization with a single-minded focus on making something that works, keeping a promise to users, not investors. Mostly, a brand's products begin to peak when no one seems to care. Sure, the organization ostensibly cares, but great tools and products and work require a person to care in an apparently unreasonable way. It's always tricky to call a peak. More likely than not, you'll be like the economist who predicted twelve of the last three recessions. The best strategy for a growing organization is to have insiders be the ones calling it. Insiders speaking up and speaking out on behalf of the users that are already customers, not merely the ones you're hoping to acquire. Most Apple parables aren't worth much to others, because it's a special case. But in this case, if it can happen to their organization, it can happen to yours. [/rant] Posted by Seth Godin on October 11, 2015 | Permalink inShare572 Narcissistic altruism (altruistic narcissism) An oxymoron that's true. Everyone who does good things does them because it makes them feel good, because the effort and the donation is worth more than it costs. (And it might be a donation to a charity or merely helping out a neighbor or contributing to a community project). Some people contribute because of the story they are able to tell themselves about the work they're doing. Many people do good things because they like the attention that it brings. Because it feels good to have others see you did good. The Chronicle of Philanthropy annually ranks the top 50 gifts of the year. And every year, virtually all of them are gifts to hospitals and colleges. One reason: you get your name on a building. Many people who work to gain support for good causes don't like this, it feels like a tax on their work, but a building rarely gets worse if it has someone's name on it. It's totally valid to offer a product or service that only appeals to the minority who aren't slightly narcissistic, who seek a different story. But it's a mistake to believe that just because you're 'right' (quotes deliberately used) that your story will match their worldview. If you want to make it more likely that someone contributes (to anything), it might be worth investing a few cycles figuring out how to give them credit, public, karmic or somewhere in between. Posted by Seth Godin on October 10, 2015 | Permalink inShare409 "No one clicked on it, no one liked it..." These two ideas are often uttered in the same sentence, but they're actually not related. People don't click on things because they like them, or because they resonate with them, or because they change them. They click on things because they think it will look good to their friends if they share them. Or they click on things because it feels safe. Or because they're bored. Or mystified. Or because other people are telling them to. Think about the things you chat about over the water cooler. It might be last night's inane TV show, or last weekend's forgettable sporting event. But the things that really matter to you, resonate with you, touch you deeply--often those things are far too precious and real to be turned into an easy share or like or click. Yes, you can architect content and sites and commerce to get a click. But you might also choose to merely make a difference. Posted by Seth Godin on October 09, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare748 Going to the edges The best restaurant in Omaha doesn't serve steak. And it's not a chain. The Kitchen Table is run by two people who care. Colin and Jessica aren't trying to copy what's come before and they're not trying to please everyone. When they first opened, people wanted to know why everything wasn't $5. (You can get a large dinner for two for $30 here). Instead of dumbing down the menu and averaging down on quality, they went the other way. There might be other restaurants in Nebraska that serve homemade dukkah on their salads and homemade sourdough bread with their sandwiches, but I don't know of any. And I think homemade watermelon rind pickles are scarce even in New York. It helps that the rent is (really) cheap on the big city rent scale. It helps that the two people behind the restaurant live upstairs and are willing to put their hearts into it. Now, the place is jammed most days for lunch, and dinner is almost as busy. Now, it's an 'of course', not a crazy scheme. It's a restaurant for people like us. The reason that this is possible now, though, is that the 'us' in "people like us do things like this," can now more easily communicate with each other. A few clicks on the magical phone in your pocket and you can find this place... if you're looking for it. And that's the secret to thriving on the edges: Build something that people will look for, something that people will talk about, something we would miss if it were gone. Not for everyone. For us. Posted by Seth Godin on October 08, 2015 | Permalink inShare600 Sloppy ties It's easy to visualize the efficiency of precise ties. Every phone call goes through. The marching band executes every turn, on cue. The entire band, each and every one of them. The fabric in that sari is flawless. Today, we're seeing more and more sloppy ties, more things created by apparently random waves than in predictable outcomes. Maybe that email doesn't get through or that text isn't answered. Maybe the individuals you thought would spread your idea, don't. Maybe turnover increases in your organization or the provider you count on changes his policies... But the number of connections is so great, it all works out. The haystack doesn't fall down, the nubby wool sweater doesn't ravel, the idea still spreads. Precision ties are still magical. But we shouldn't avoid sloppy ties if they're going to get the job done. Substituting sloppy ties without sufficient mass, though, gets us nothing but disappointment. {9} Posted by Seth Godin on October 07, 2015 | Permalink inShare242 Alphagrams It turns out that competitive Scrabble players always arrange the letters on their rack in alphabetical order. The reason makes sense: By ensuring consistency, the patterns appear. You've seen this before... That same discipline works in most kinds of problem solving. Develop a method where you organize all the inputs, the assumptions and the variables in the same order. Consistently grouping what you see will make it ever more clear that you've seen something like this before. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Posted by Seth Godin on October 06, 2015 | Permalink inShare399 Promotion, demotion and opportunity You can learn a new skill, today, for free. You can take on a new task at work, right now, without asking anyone. You can make a connection, find a flaw, contribute an insight, now. Or not. In a fluid system, when people are moving forward, others are falling behind. The question, then, isn't, "when am I going to get promoted?" No, I think the question is, "will I grab these openings to become someone who's already doing work at a higher level?" Act 'as if'. If the people around you don't figure out what an asset you've become, someone else will. Posted by Seth Godin on October 05, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare976 Sometimes, you have to believe it in order to see it In a hyper-rational world, this sounds like voodoo. Persuading ourselves in advance is no way to see the world as it is. But what if your goal is to see the world as it could be? It's impossible to do important innovation in any field with your arms crossed and a scowl on your face. Missouri might be the show-me state, but I'd rather be from the follow-me state. {12} Posted by Seth Godin on October 04, 2015 | Permalink inShare444 Bikes and cars Bikes should give way to cars: Cars are bigger Cars are faster Cars are powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built for commerce, and powered vehicles are the engine of commerce It's inefficient for a car to slow down I'm in a car, get out of my way I'm on a bike, I'm afraid Cars should give way to bikes: Bikers need a break Bikers are more fragile Bikes aren't nearly as powerful A car can hurt a biker Cities are built by people, and while commerce is a side effect, the presumption that cars are the reason for a city is a bit... presumptuous It's a lot of work for a bike to stop and start again I'm on a bike, get out of my way I'm in a car, I see you This dichotomy is, of course, a metaphor, a Rorschach that tells each of us a lot about how we see the world. Posted by Seth Godin on October 03, 2015 | Permalink inShare298 On feeling like a failure Feeling like a failure has little correlation with actually failing. There are people who have failed more times than you and I can count, who are happily continuing in their work. There are others who have achieved more than most of us can imagine, who go to work each day feeling inadequate, behind, and yes, like failures and frauds. These are not cases of extraordinary outliers. In fact, external data is almost useless in figuring out whether or not someone is going to adopt the narrative of being a failure. Failure (as seen from the outside) is an event. It's a moment when the spec isn't met, when a project isn't completed as planned. Feelings, on the other hand, are often persistent, and they are based on stories. Stories we tell ourselves as much as stories the world tells us. As a result, if you want to have a feeling, you'll have it. If you want to seek a thread to ravel, you will, you'll pull at it and focus on it until, in fact, you're proven right, you are a failure. Here's the essential first step: Stop engaging with the false theory that the best way to stop feeling like a failure is to succeed. Thinking of one's self as a failure is not the same as failing. And thus, succeeding (on this particular task) is not the antidote. In fact, if you act on this misconception, you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of new evidence that you are, in fact, correct in your feelings, because you will ignore the wins and remind yourself daily of the losses. Instead, begin with the idea that the best way to deal with a feeling is to realize that it's yours. Posted by Seth Godin on October 02, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,082 Choose your impact Is it that simple? Can you choose to make an impact? Of course it is. You can choose to merely do your job, to meet spec and to follow someone else's path. Or, you can dig in and transform your contribution. You can level up, taking advantage of the world-changing array of tools and connections our new economy is making available. Access to tools is a small part of it. Mostly, it’s about taking control over where you go and what you do with your gifts. The dislocations of our time are significant, the sinecures are disappearing, there is real stress and pain as the world changes. We can't control that, but we can control how we respond to it. Those changes open the door for those that choose to stand up and learn to contribute. A chance to be put on the hook instead of let off of it. The altMBA is a workshop designed to push you to see more clearly, speak more effectively and create change that lasts. It’s an intensive online group experience that works. You don’t have to travel, but you do have to be prepared to work hard. When I set out to create this process, I decided to push it uphill. Not to make it easier or faster, but to make it more difficult, to have it take longer. Not to make it more digital and scalable, but to make it more handmade and require a smaller scale. Mostly, not to let people off the hook, but to create a process that would help a few people transform themselves. This $3,000 workshop is for people who want to move up to leadership in their current organization, accelerate their indie projects and take control over their agenda. It’s designed to be the most significant lever for change we could create. This is our third session, and I can say with confidence that it's working. You have far more potential than people realize. You have something to say, a mission to go on, a contribution that matters. I’d like to help you unlock that potential. If you know someone who needs this sort of opportunity, I hope you'll share it with them. There are {15} days left to apply. I’ll post {reminders} now and then over the next two weeks. I hope you’ll get a chance to check it out, but even if you don’t apply, go ahead and use this moment, right now, to make a choice. Level up. Posted by Seth Godin on October 01, 2015 | Permalink inShare457 SUSDAT Abbey Ryan has painted a new painting every day for 8 years. Isaac Asimov published 400 books, by typing every day. This is post #6000 on this blog. Writer's block is a myth, a recent invention, a cultural malady. More important than the output, though, is the act itself. The act of doing it every day. When you commit to a practice, you will certainly have days when you don't feel like it, when you believe it's not your best work, when the muse deserts you. But, when you keep your commitment, the muse returns. When you keep your commitment, the work happens. It doesn't matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up. Show up, sit down and type. (Or paint). Posted by Seth Godin on September 30, 2015 | Permalink inShare558 For less than it's worth The only things we spend time and money on are things that we believe are worth more than they cost. The key words of this obvious sentence are often miscalculated: Believe, worth and cost. Believe as in the story we tell ourselves. Believe as in the eye of the beholder. Believe as in emotion. Worth as in what we'll trade. Worth as in our perception of its worth right now, not later. Worth as in how we remember this decision tomorrow or next year. and Cost, as in our expectation of how much it will hurt to get it, not merely the price tag. If people aren't buying your product, it's not because the price is too high. It's because we don't believe you enough, don't love it enough, don't care enough. Posted by Seth Godin on September 29, 2015 | Permalink inShare670 Thanks, let's write that down One way to deal with clients, with criticism, and with feedback is to not insist on resolving it in the moment. Taking feedback doesn't have to be the same thing as resolving feedback. It's tempting to challenge each bit of criticism, to explain your thinking, to justify the choices. This back and forth feels efficient, but it fails to deliver on a few fronts. First, it makes it more difficult for the client to share her truth, to feel heard. Second, it escalates the tension, because it's almost impossible to successfully resolve each item in real time. If you write it down, you can accept the feedback without judgment. And then, after it's all written down, after the feedback is received, people can change roles. You can sit on the same side of the table, colleagues in search of the best path forward. You can rank by expense, by urgency, by importance. You can agree on timelines and mostly, say, "what do we do now?" Posted by Seth Godin on September 28, 2015 | Permalink | TrackBack (0) inShare753 The 2% who misunderstand you Sometimes, it's essential that you be completely understood. That every passenger knows where the emergency exit is, or that every employee knows how it is we do things around here. But most of the time, if 2% of your audience doesn't get the joke, doesn't learn what you seek to teach them, doesn't understand the essence of your argument, it's not the problem you think it is. Sure, the 2% who are underinformed can write reviews, tweet indignantly and speak up. You know what? It doesn't matter that much. If you insist on telling everyone on the airplane precisely how to buckle their seatbelt (!), then yes, of course you're going to not only waste the time of virtually everyone, but you're going to train them not to listen to the rest of what you have to say. If you insist on getting every single person in the room to understand every nuance of your presentation, you've just signed up to bore and alienate the very people you needed most. When you find yourself overwriting, embracing redundancy and overwhelming people with fine print, you're probably protecting yourself against the 2%, at the expense of everyone else. (And yes, it might be 10% or even 90%.... that's okay). When we hold back and dumb down, we are hurting the people who need to hear from us, often in a vain attempt to satisfy a few people who might never choose to actually listen. It's quite okay to say, "it's not for you." Posted by Seth Godin on September 27, 2015 | Permalink inShare974 More of a realist When did being called a 'realist' start to mean that one is a pessimist? Sometimes, people with small goals call themselves realists, and dismiss those around them as merely dreamers. I think this is backwards. "I guess I'm more of a realist than you," actually means, "I guess I've discovered that a positive attitude, a generous posture and a bit of persistence makes things better than most people expect." Hope isn't a strategy, but it is an awfully good tactic. Posted by Seth Godin on September 26, 2015 | Permalink inShare488 Attitude is a skill You can learn math. French. Bowling. You can learn Javascript, too. But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes. If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill. And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it. Which is great news, isn't it? [PS Starting today, we’re running a seven-day email sequence to teach you about the upcoming altMBA workshop. Find out more here.] Posted by Seth Godin on September 25, 2015 | Permalink inShare990 Industrializing, professionalizing, scaling... You could make it into a cookie cutter, a scalable, depersonalized, committee-approved ticket to endless growth. Or you could make it more real, more human and more personal. What is "it"? It is the interaction you have with your best customer. It is the way you talk to your employees. It is your safety policy, your go to market strategy, your approach to the board meeting. If you can't figure out how to talk to one person, it doesn't really pay to scale up your efforts to talk to a thousand. Posted by Seth Godin on September 24, 2015 | Permalink inShare400 The banality of the magazine rack Stop for a minute to consider those magazines that stack up like firewood at the doctor's office, or that beckon you from the high-priced newsstand before you get on the airplane. The celebrity/gossip/self-improvement category. All the airbrushed pretty people, the replaceable celebrities and near celebrities. The mass-market fad diets, the conventional stories, the sameness tailored for a mass audience. It's pretty seductive. If you can just fit in the way all these magazines are pushing you to fit in, then you'll be okay, alright, and beyond criticism. Boys and girls should act like this, dress like this, talk like this. Even the outliers are outliers in tried and true, conventional ways. The headlines are interchangeable. So are the photos and the celebrities, the stories and the escapades and the promises. Magazines believe they have to produce this cultural lighthouse in order to sell ads--there are advertisers that want average readers in order to sell them their average products. But this doesn't have to be you. These aren't cultural norms, they're merely a odd sub-universe, a costume party for people unwilling to find their own voice. Posted by Seth Godin on September 23, 2015 | Permalink inShare334 #WeAreAllWeird (3 contest updates) 1. You can win four books, signed by the authors, with a tweet. Rules are here. Tell us why you are not part of the lockstep masses. 2. I recently blogged about long odds (one in a quadrillion) and how hard it is to predict the future. It turns out that of the 897 people who entered my presidential bracket game, there’s only ONE contender left. Even though only two candidates have dropped out, there's already more than a 99% failure rate in predicting this future. And I think the prize is safe, because the only remaining contender has picked Christie and Bush as the next two to go. 3. Within 24 hours of recent events virtually determining the first question I surveyed, we also have an answer to the second one. Today’s the day my blog hit 500k followers on Twitter. As you can see, the crowd was off a bit on this as well. I’ve emailed the seven top entries to send them a prize. Thanks for giving it a whirl. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare167 Dreams and fears Sooner or later, important action taken comes down to this. Fear: Of being ashamed, feeling stupid, being rejected, being left out, getting hurt, being embarrassed, left alone, dying. Dreams: Of being seen, being needed, becoming independent, relieving anxiety, becoming powerful, making someone proud, fitting in, seen as special, mattering, taken care of, loved. Marketers put many layers atop these basic needs (horsepower, processor speed, features, pricing, testimonials, guarantees, and more) but it all comes down to dreams and fears. Posted by Seth Godin on September 22, 2015 | Permalink inShare649 Tires, coffee and people The most important part of a race car is the tires. Good tires will always beat bad ones. The most important part of a cup of coffee is the beans. The grinder, the machine, the barista pale in comparison to the quality of what you start with. And the most important parts of an organization are the people you begin with. Not the systems or the policies or even the real estate. Great people make everything easier. And yet... And yet we spend money on 4 wheel drive instead of snow tires. And yet we upgrade our coffee maker instead of buying from a local roaster (or roasting our own). And mostly, we run classified ads to find the cheapest common denominator employee and spend all our time building systems to protect our customers from people who don't care... Posted by Seth Godin on September 21, 2015 | Permalink inShare1,300 Pathfinding Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path: [The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time] If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one. On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work. A few things to consider as you develop your skills as a pathfinder: If the value you create is in finding the path, are you being patient and generous with yourself as you hack your way through the weeds? You're not a typist, you're an explorer. Are others significantly more efficient and productive at finding paths in your industry? If so, it probably pays to learn what they've figured out. If you're not spending much time at all on pathfinding, what would happen if you did? Lots of people run paths. Very few have the guts to find a new one. Posted by Seth Godin on September 20, 2015 | Permalink inShare477