Quotes from Seth Godin

Kiasu is the Hokkien word for "the fear of being left behind" or not getting enough.

Your most generous and insightful work needs help finding the people it's meant to serve. And your most successful work will spread because you designed it to.

The business model should be such that the employees needed possess the lowest possible level of skill necessary to fulfill the functions for which each is intended.

This desire for external approval and authority directly undermines your ability to trust yourself, because you've handed this trust over to an institution instead. Now, more and more of us are seeing that it's a fraud. The institutions have no magical powers, as they're regularly proved wrong in their ability to select, to mold, and to amplify human beings who care enough to make change happen.

Amazon.com took the idea of a man inside the computer and created a service with the same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site, and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the work.

It doesn't make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key. It's easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

It's hard to get blocked when you are moving, even if you're not moving in the direction you had in mind that morning

Becoming a linchpin is a stepwise process, a path in which you develop the attributes that make you indispensable. You can train yourself to matter. The first step is the most difficult, the step where you acknowledge that this is a skill, and like all skills, you can (and will) get better at it. Every day, if you focus on the gifts, art, and connections that characterize the linchpin, you'll become a little more indispensable.

Choose the people who want what you're offering.

Any idea withheld is an idea taken away. It's selfish to hold back when there's a chance you have something to offer.

Any excuse will do

Now, though, the proletariat owns the means of production. Now, the workers are self-organized online.

Everyone who creates feels resistance, everyone that is seriously involved in inventing original work feels the fear, that's not the question. The question is where do you put the fear.

Hugh MacLeod: "The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest.

It's easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

Most criticism shared in the internet age is useless, or worse, harmful. It's useless because it often personalizes the criticism to be about the creator, not the work. And it's useless because most critics are unskilled and ungenerous.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

If everyone tries to lead all the time, not much happens.

For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient.

Everyone has a problem, a desire, and a narrative. Who will you seek to serve?

The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone. It will lead to compromises and generalizations. Begin instead with the smallest viable market. What's the minimum number of people you would need to influence to make it worth the effort?

the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce.

The smallest viable market is the focus that, ironically and delightfully, leads to your growth.

Settling is no fun. It's a malignant habit, a slippery slope that takes you to mediocrity.