Quotes by "Seth Godin"

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

Do What You Want; these are the 4 most frightening words brought to us by the Connection Revolution. If you want to sing, sing. If you want to lead, lead. If you want touch, connect, describe, disrupt, give, support, build, question—Do It. You will not be picked. But, if you want to pick yourself—go for it. The cost is that you own the results.

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing. The common school (now called a public school) was a brand new concept, created shortly after the Civil War. “Common” because it was for everyone, for the kids of the farmer, the kids of the potter, and the kids of the local shopkeeper. Horace Mann is generally regarded as the father of the institution, but he didn’t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine— because industrialists were on his side. The two biggest challenges of a newly industrial economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. The common school solved both problems. The normal school (now called a teacher’s college) was developed to indoctrinate teachers into the system of the common school, ensuring that there would be a coherent approach to the processing of students. If this sounds parallel to the notion of factories producing items in bulk, of interchangeable parts, of the notion of measurement and quality, it’s not an accident. The world has changed, of course. It has changed into a culture fueled by a market that knows how to mass-customize, to find the edges and the weird, and to cater to what the individual demands instead of insisting on conformity. Mass customization of school isn’t easy. Do we have any choice, though? If mass production and mass markets are falling apart, we really don’t have the right to insist that the schools we designed for a different era will function well now.

And it turns out that tribes, not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.

The danger of the Web is that you can go from idea to public announcement in under ten minutes.

I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn't increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

When enough people care about autism or diabetes or global warming, it helps everyone, even if only a tiny fraction actively participate.

Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from, from the leading.

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

I think there's plenty of room for blogs that exist to pay the blogger, or blogs that exist to turn a profit. That's just not the kind of blog I'm writing, and I'm not the kind of blogger that could do that.

Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe; it feels reliable.

Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It's not just about entertainment - it's about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.

Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it's easier, it scales and it's profitable. But people don't like it - we want to be who we are, not who some marketer tells us to be.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it's useless, I think it's a distraction.

Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

Kickstarter eliminates the risk that publishers and booksellers face. They have limited resources and limited shelf space, and Kickstarter is proof to them that something is going to work.

Kickstarter isn't a profit center, it's an organizer and an instigator.