Seth Godin

Possibly the oldest human worldview is fear of strangers. And right next to that is anger as a byproduct of fear.

If a candidate wants to gain attention and possibly votes, then, it makes short-term sense to stir up fear of strangers and turn it into anger. It might even work (once). But it makes it virtually impossible to govern. It's a short-term strategy that eats itself, because sooner or later, everyone is a stranger, and fear is no foundation for work that matters.

It seems as though we're entering a season in which it's easy to ostracize or become righteously indignant over someone's national origin, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.

If this is the best a politician can do to organize and lead, then we all lose.

Just about all sabotage is self-sabotage.

We don't get forced to eat that cookie, we choose to. And so the diet is ended.

Marketing self-sabotage is fascinating to watch and understand. Consider the college application: it's primarily an opportunity for teenagers who aren't sure of where they want to go to undercut their chances by exposing their uncertainty. The lizard brain, the voice in the back of the head that wants security and safety--it's not eager to go to a college that might be 'too hard' or 'too good'. The easy thing to do is to scale back the effort, not do what works, but do what feels right instead.

Or consider the way we resist opportunities to lead, to connect, to do work that matters. We don't resist because we're not capable of it... we resist because if our marketing fails, if we don't get the job or earn the trust, then we're off the hook. No promises made, which means no promises to keep.

We know more than enough about marketing now. We know how to craft a story that will spread, we know how to find and lead tribes. The thing we have trouble with is making the commitment to do it even when it's frightening and difficult.

That's what makes it a monster.

In fact, when you look the monster in the eye, when you calmly and carefully inspect the actual monster, you discover that he's not so bad after all. It's just the shadow that's scary.

When in doubt, ignore the shadow.

Paco Underhill on women and retail.

Nancy Lublin on learning from causes.

Noah Boyd with an FBI thriller beach read. Better than the last Reacher novel, imho.

And stunningly elegant (and lovely to hold) pottery inspired by some of my work from Lori Koop.

100 people doing something at the same time has far more power than 300 people doing it over time.

We unconsciously amplify the power of coordination when we consider the impact of actions. If there's a thousand people waiting outside of a store, we instantly believe we're seeing a phenomenon.

While the internet makes it easier than ever to spread ideas, it makes it far more compelling to coordinate actions.

If everyone in your weekly meeting drops a pencil at precisely 12:03, you'll notice.

The wifi Kindle, $139. Drop the first digit and you're on to something. And it only took them six weeks!

The cost of being first is higher than it's ever been...

It's entirely possible that you're racing.

Racing to the market with a new product or a news story or a decision or an innovation. The race keeps getting faster, doesn't it?

If you're racing, you better figure out what to do about the times that you don't know for sure...because more and more of your inputs are going to be tenuous, speculative and possibly wrong. Day traders have always understood this--all they do is trade on uncertainty. But you, too, if you're racing, are going to have to make decisions on less than perfect information.

Given that fact, what are you going to do about it? I think it's worth a few cycles of your time.

Is it smart to blog on a rumor?

Worth dropping everything and panicking because of a news alert?

Should you hire someone based on information you're not sure of?

What about changing your website (your pricing, your layout...) based on analytics that might not be absolutely correct? How long are you willing to wait?

Given that you will never know everything for sure (unless you're opting out of the race), some of the issues are:

• What's the cost of waiting one more day?
• Are you waiting (or not waiting) because of the cost of being wrong, or because loud people are yelling at you?
• Is the risk of being wrong unreasonably amplified by part of the market or your team? What if you ignore them and focus on customers that matter?
• And have you thought about the costs of waiting too long? If you don't, you'll probably end up last.

Have you noticed how often stock analysts quoted in the news are wrong? Wrong about new products, wrong about management decisions, wrong about the future of a company? In fact, they're almost always first and almost always wrong.

Rule of thumb: being first helps in the short run. Being a little more right than the masses ultimately pays off in the long run. Being last is the worst of all three.

A few people care a lot about scoops. Most of us, though, care about alert people making insightful decisions. Decide who you're trying to please, then ship.

If you work out on a weight machine that has a limit--where you have to push the bar until it stops--you're far more likely to to hit that limit than if you had left it to your own initiative to figure out how far is far enough.

People enjoy going to the max (or in the case of Spinal Tap, a little farther than max, to 11). But if there is no max, no limit, it's much easier to satisfy yourself and declare that you've done enough.

If you want your best users to do more, one way to do it is to announce the most they can do. While this may dissuade a few people from pushing ever farther, it will in fact motivate a large number of people to up their game.

"The maximum number of times a week you can dine here is three."

"The maximum bonus paid is $100k."

"The maximum number of tweets per day is 30."

The only problems you have left are the perfect ones. The imperfect ones, the ones with a clearly evident solution, well, if they were important, you've solved them already.

It's the perfect problems that keep us stuck.

Perfect because they have constraints, unbendable constraints, constraints that keep us trapped. I hate my job, I need this job, there's no way to quit, to get a promotion or to get a new boss, no way to move, my family is in town, etc.

We're human, that's what we do--we erect boundaries, constraints we can't ease, and we get trapped.

Or perhaps it's your product or service or brand. Our factory is only organized to make X, but the market doesn't want X as much, or there is regulation, or a new competitor is now offering X at half the price and the board won't do anything, etc.

There's no way to solve the perfect problem because every solution involves breaking an unbreakable constraint.

And there's your solution.

The way to solve the perfect problem is to make it imperfect. Don't just bend one of the constraints, eliminate it. Shut down the factory. Walk away from the job. Change your product completely. Ignore the board.

If the only alternative is slow and painful failure, the way to get unstuck is to blow up a constraint, deal with the pain and then run forward. Fast.

When a newspaper loses 15% of its readers or 15% of its advertisers, it goes out of business. There are still people who want to read it, still people who want to advertise, but it's gone.

When a technology company increases its sales by 15%, profits will double. The sales line doesn't have to increase that much for profits to soar.

It's so tempting to head for green fields with a new thing, a new market, a new business. But in fact, 15% right here and right now might be exactly what you need.

When a newspaper loses 15% of its readers or 15% of its advertisers, it goes out of business. There are still people who want to read it, still people who want to advertise, but it's gone. When a technology company... Seth Godin

Every brand, every organization and every individual is either running away from something or running toward something (or working hard to stand still). Are you chasing or being chased? Are you leading or following? Are you fleeing or climbing? Seth Godin

Every brand, every organization and every individual is either running away from something or running toward something (or working hard to stand still).

Are you chasing or being chased? Are you leading or following? Are you fleeing or climbing?

Carole Mallory was Norman Mailer's mistress. Seducing him probably wasn't that difficult, though, as he was already on his sixth wife at the time.

Marketers seek to seduce. So do painters, authors and job seekers. The most important thing to understand about seduction is this: it only works when the other person cooperates, contributes and is at some level interested in being seduced.

In short: it's a lot easier to seduce someone whose worldview and attitude makes them open to it. If you want to be successful at whatever form of seduction you have in mind, seek out the right people.

Some people were seduced by the iPad. Many ignored it. It wasn't that the iPad changed from person to person, what changed was the audience's worldview and openness.

And yet...

And yet as marketers we seem to want to treat everyone the same, want to please everyone, want to come up with the magic words that open every heart.

Defenders of the status quo at newspapers, book publishers and the magazine industry are in a panic. Some are even misguidedly asking for government regulation or a bailout. All three industries are doomed (if doomed means that they will be... Seth Godin

Defenders of the status quo at newspapers, book publishers and the magazine industry are in a panic. Some are even misguidedly asking for government regulation or a bailout.

All three industries are doomed (if doomed means that they will be unrecognizable in ten--probably three--years). And yet...

And yet there's no shortage of writing, or things to read. No shortage of news, either. And there doesn't appear to be one on the horizon. In fact, there's more news, more images and more writing available to more people more often than ever before in history.

No, just about all of the whining is about protecting paper, the stuff the ideas are printed on, not the ideas themselves.

It's paper that makes the economics of the newspaper industry work (or not work). It's paper that creates cost and slows things down and generates scarcity. And scarcity is what they sell.

It's paper that makes the book industry what it is. As soon as you remove paper from the equation, the costs change, the timing changes, the barriers to entry change, the risk changes. And defenders of the status quo don't like change.

Is there not enough paper in your life? Why are we wringing our hands about the demise of paper as the economic gating factor for ideas? In fact, some of the trees I know are delighted that we've found a better, faster, cheaper way to spread ideas.

If the demise of paper means that good people doing good work in important industries will have to find faster and better ways to do their jobs, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Carole Mallory was Norman Mailer's mistress. Seducing him probably wasn't that difficult, though, as he was already on his sixth wife at the time. Marketers seek to seduce. So do painters, authors and job seekers. The most important thing to... Seth Godin

A mass marketer needs to reach the masses, and to do it in many ways, simultaneously. The mass marketer needs retail outlets and fliers and a website and public relations and tv ads and more more more and then... bam...... Seth Godin

A mass marketer needs to reach the masses, and to do it in many ways, simultaneously. The mass marketer needs retail outlets and fliers and a website and public relations and tv ads and more more more and then... bam... critical mass is reached and success occurs.

Best Buy is a mass marketer, but so are Microsoft and the Red Cross. Ubiquity, once achieved, brings them revenue, which advances the cycle and they reach scale.

The direct marketer, on the other hand, must get it right in the small. That pitch letter can be tested on 100 houses and if it gets a 2% response rate, then it can be mailed to 100,000 houses with confidence. That business-to-business sales pitch can be honed on one or two or three prospects, and then when it works, can be taught to dozens or hundreds of other salespeople.

The key distinction is when you know it's going to work. The mass marketer doesn't know until the end. The direct marketer knows in the beginning.

The mass marketer is betting on thousands of tiny cues, little clues, and unrecorded (but vital) conversations. The direct marketer is measuring conversion rates from the first day.

That's the reason we often default to acting like mass marketers. We're putting off the day of reckoning, betting on the miracle around the corner, spending our time and energy on the early steps without the downside of admitting failure to the boss.

Of course, just because it's our default doesn't mean it's right. Business to business marketing is almost always better if you treat it like direct marketing. Most websites that do conversion as well. Same with non-profit fundraising. As well as marketing goods and services to the bottom of the pyramid, people who live in villages where mass media and mass distribution are difficult and have little impact.

Get it right for ten people before you rush around scaling up to a thousand. It's far less romantic than spending money at the start, but it's the reliable, proven way to get to scale if you care enough to do the work.

Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger). This is a function of the difference between what you promise and what you deliver (see clever MBA chart to the right--->). The thing is, if you promise very... Seth Godin