Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults. Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs. Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages. One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from “you” to “me” to “us” to “the corporation”.
Seth Godin on Mass Marketing
28 August 2008
11 August 2008
I don’t think luck alone gets you into Harvard Law School or a clerkship at the Supreme Court. I don’t think luck gets someone to buy your car (the best in its class and a great value) instead of the lame alternative.
I’ve been astonishingly lucky with many elements of my career. Mostly because solid singles turned into doubles or the occasional homer. I figure most of the failures are my fault and many of the successes were really good breaks. But I can’t imagine how lonely and depressing it would be to view myself as nothing but a pinball, batted around by forces over which I have no influence.
Seth Godin on Luck
27 July 2008
If you want to do something worth doing, you’ll need two things: passion and architecture. The tools will take care of themselves. (Knowledge of tools matters, of course, but it pales in comparison to the other two.) Sure, picking the wrong tools will really cripple your launch. Picking the wrong software (or the wrong hammer) is a hassle. But nothing great gets built just because you have the right tools.
Seth Godin on Tools
18 July 2008
In order to have a bestseller, you must reach the unreachable. Most of the people who buy a bestselling book buy no other book that month, or even that year. The very nature of the top of the list is that you’re reaching not just the frequent purchasers and the passionate, but those that only show up for the hits.
Seth Godin on Bestsellers
7 July 2008
SEO rewards Wikipedia, and well it should. Most searchers who end up there are pretty happy with that result. But as we get further and further into Googleworld, who decides what’s worthy? There’s no right answer, of course. But “no answer” isn’t an answer either.
Seth Godin on Wikipedia
14 June 2008
I think for most people, most of the time, we care a lot more about the effect and use of a product or service and less about who made it and why. We chose Converse because they get us a date, and we don’t change brands just cause Nike owns them now.
Seth Godin on Product Brands
22 May 2008
Gardening books don’t push you to actually do something. Cookbooks don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell you on why making a roast chicken isn’t as risky as you might think. The stakes are a lot higher when it comes to business. Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career…
Seth Godin on Business
26 April 2008
This is a truth of the Internet: When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces.
Seth Godin on Traffic
8 April 2008
This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users… everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they’re way more likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer.
That’s an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of web user.
Seth Godin on Firefox Users
16 March 2008
Change (and the fortunes that go with it) is almost always made during the down part of the cycle. It might not be fun, but it’s exciting. (Where do you think Google came from?)
Seth Godin on Economy