Quotes from Seth Godin

Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else. "Never

Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. Sure, it's possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It's far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else. Beginner's luck is dramatically overrated. Emotional

The secret of being wrong isn't to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn't fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

Because frequency is free in an online permission program, and much more effective offline, the marketer has the luxury of riding the impact curve up without a matching cost curve.

Before a marketer can build trust, it must breed familiarity. But there's no familiarity without awareness. And awareness—the science of letting people know you exist and getting them to understand your message—can't happen effectively in today's environment without advertising.

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects.

change is the first sign of risk.

the competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion.

Marketing, more than a lake or a forest, is the landscape of our modern lives.

It's not an effort contest, it's an art contest. As customers, we care about ourselves, about how we feel, about whether a product or service or play or interaction changed us for the better. Where it's made or how it's made or how difficult it was to make is sort of irrelevant. That's why emotional labor is so much more valuable than physical labor. Emotional labor changes the recipient, and we care about that. Soft

So we take the deal. We agree to do a job in exchange for a set of instructions. And for the hundred years that it led to increasing standards of living, it seemed like a very good deal.

the best ideas require significant change. They fly in the face of the status quo, and inertia is a powerful force.

What most people want in a leader is something that's very difficult to find: we want someone who listens. Why

Marketers make things better by making change happen.

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

We're so obsessed about the risk of shining brightly that we've traded in everything that matters to avoid it.

effective marketing now relies on empathy and service.

Most of the time, we deal with the obstacles by persevering. Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: "Quitters never win and winners never quit." Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

Like the fox, we've been trained to stay inside the fence, because inside the fence is where it's safe—until it's too late.

We assume that what makes us comfortable also makes us safe.

Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for—those jobs don't get filled by people e-mailing in résumés. Google

The challenge is to ask a two-part question: What next? What now? Asking is the hard part.

The problem is that most schools don't like great teachers. They're organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average.

Those places that felt safe—the corner office, the famous college, the secure job—aren't. You're holding back, betting on a return to normal, but in the new normal, your resistance to change is no longer helpful.