When it comes to marketing, there would not be many who have not heard of Seth Godin. Godin is a thought leader and a New York Times Bestselling author who has inspired many over the years not only through his books but also his innovative dot com ventures like Yoyodyne and Squidoo.
Godin started his career at Spinnaker which made Non-Curriculum based educational software. He later left this company and using his own savings founded a book packaging business right from his studio apartment in New York.
A few years later Godin sold his book publishing business and founded Yoyodyne which was a digital marketing company focused primarily on Permission Marketing (a concept introduced by Seth). As the name suggests, Permission Marketing is a marketing technique where goods/services are promoted to a user after they have given advance consent.
Yoyodyne used permission marketing by running contests, online games and scavenger hunts to market goods/services to users who agreed to participate (in other words, gave prior consent).
Later Godin sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo! for about $30 million and briefly served as Yahoo's vice president of direct marketing.
After that, Godin launched Squidoo, which is probably the company that made Godin extremely popular with digital entrepreneurs and internet uses alike. Squidoo allowed people to create blogs on the internet and get paid for their content through affiliate links and advertisements. Squidoo was later sold to Hubpages after Google’s algo changes that massively impacted its traffic in a negative way. But by then, Seth had made his money.
Seth was inducted into the American Marketing Association's Marketing Hall of Fame in 2018 and his blog was named by Time among its 25 best blogs of 2009.
As for 2020 Seth is the author of over 18 books some popular ones being The Encyclopedia of Fictional People, Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside.
In this article, let’s look at 25 quotes by Seth Godin and the lessons we can learn from it.
Lesson 1: Focus is the secret to success.
“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”
Lesson 2: Work toward doing something that you love.
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don't need to escape from.”
Lesson 3: Believe in yourself.
“The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”
Lesson 4: Do not settle for less.
“How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”
Lesson 5: Find what you are passionate about.
“Perhaps your challenge isn't finding a better project or a better boss. Perhaps you need to get in touch with what it means to feel passionate. People with passion look for ways to make things happen.”
Lesson 6: Bring passion toward what you are doing.
“Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.”
Lesson 7: Be who you are, be authentic.
“If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you'll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.”
Lesson 8: Do not seek stability.
"The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain, in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability.”
Lesson 9: Don't be afraid to fail. Failure is the path to innovation.
“Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.”
Lesson 10: Do not compete, find your own path.
“The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.”
Lesson 11: Always focus on the bigger picture.
“Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.”
Lesson 12: Think for yourself.
“No one knows more about the way you think than you do.”
Lesson 13: Repetition is the secret to mastery.
“All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.”
Lesson 14: Do not follow others, think out of the box.
“We do not need to teach students to embrace the status quo.”
Lesson 15: Do not create for money, create because you want to.
“You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.”
Lesson 16: Always be optimistic.
“Optimism is the most important human trait, because it allows us to evolve our ideas, to improve our situation, and to hope for a better tomorrow.”
Lesson 17: Become comfortable being uncomfortable.
“The road to comfort is crowded and it rarely gets you there. Ironically, it’s those who seek out discomfort that are able to make a difference and find their footing.”
Lesson 18: Your beliefs are powerful. So stay conscious of your beliefs.
“We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.”
Lesson 19: Let go of perfectionism.
"Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo."
Lesson 20: Do not settle for less. Realize your true potential.
“People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of.”
Lesson 21: Always try to better yourself.
“When your art fails, make better art.”
Lesson 22: Dare to think differently.
“Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done. That would be you.”
Lesson 23: Embrace your curiosity.
“There’s a huge difference between being childlike and being childish. When we embrace joy and look at the world with fresh eyes we’re being childlike. When we demand instant gratification and a guarantee that everything will be ok, we’re only being childish.”
Lesson 24: Always focus on the bigger goal.
"If you are making a decision based on how you feel at that moment, you will probably make the wrong decision.”
Lesson 25: Failure is the secret to success.
“The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.”
Lesson 26: Realize that you are a unique human being with a unique set of skills. You don’t need to be like everyone else.
“The current (educational) structure, which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards, is killing our economy, our culture, and us.”
Lessons 27: Don’t be afraid to take action.
“The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship. Shipping means hitting the publish button on your blog, showing a presentation to the sales team, answering the phone, selling the muffins, sending out your references. Shipping is the collision between your work and the outside world.”
Lesson 28: Stop memorizing, instead, endeavor to understand things from a deeper perspective.
"There is zero value in memorizing anything ever again. Anything that is worth memorizing is worth looking up."
About the Author
Ted Wilson is a senior programming assignment expert at Assignment Core, a professional programming homework service committed to do coding Computer Science projects for students. His main interests are programming, web design and web development.