Opinion
Godin: The New York Times bestseller list is an easily gamed fiction
“Bestsellers are a figment to the New York Times imagination. It's an easily gamed system that has no bearing on reality.”
Opinion
Godin: Launching platforms solely to interview famous guests is 'bogus'
“The new guest blogging is Start something online and then try to interview, ah, Andrew or Seth or Tim because then you'll get some of their, ah, attention. That's bogus. I mean, what we need are people who have something to say on their own as opposed to peopl…”
Insight
Godin: Standardized schooling was designed to train factory workers
“You sit in school in a straight row, number two pencil, filling out the little circles, no stray marks. What's that about? It's about training you to work in the factory.”
Opinion
Godin: Traditional MBA organization-building models are completely worthless
“That the model of how you build an organization used to be quite mechanized. I have an MBA. They taught it to me. And it's worthless. None of the steps are true anymore.”
Insight
Godin: The more publishers dislike a book's packaging, the better it sells
“The more agita I cause my publisher, the better the book's going to do. Right? Both the way the book is written, the way the book is packaged, and the way the book is marketed, the more they hate it, the better the book's going to do.”
Insight
Godin: Customers pay for rough edges, not smoothed-out conformity
“Rough edges are what we pay for.”
Insight
Godin: Modern workers get paid for emotional rather than physical labor
“My argument is that physical labor is not so good anymore. You can't make a living, really, with physical labor. So we get paid for emotional labor. Get paid for digging deep and doing work that maybe we don't feel like.”
Insight
Godin: In a digital economy, power comes from accumulating respect and attention
“And on the internet, a world of digital goods, where accumulating more stuff isn't worth very much because it's all bits. Guess what the most valuable thing to accumulate is? Respect. Attention. People who think they owe you something. This idea of people open…”
Insight
Godin: Trying to conquer fear and resistance is a distracting mistake
“Well Steve and I disagree with this about the resistance, but I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem. That trying to make the fear and the lizard brain go away is what distracts us and takes all of our time and ener…”
Insight
Godin: A creator's next project must be scarier than the last
“The goal of the next thing, it has to be scarier than the last thing, or else we've wasted our platform.”
Insight
Godin: Late category entrants fail instantly if they mimic existing incumbents
“Now, if you were the first into the category, that would be a dumb thing to do. But if you're the 20th into the category, and you look like the other guys, it's already over.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Godin started over 100 businesses and faced bankruptcy for six years
“I started more than a hundred businesses before I had one. That really worked. I was three weeks away from bankruptcy for six years in a row.”
Insight
Godin: Momentum and Reserves Allow Entrepreneurs to Fail More Quietly
“The difference is once you get going, you have enough reserve that you can fail more quietly Because you can test market. You can put things into a different space.”
Insight
Godin: A company's lowest-paid employees are effectively its marketing team
“What we've discovered is the lowest paid people in the company are your marketing team now. You have all these airlines, and all these ads, and all these runways, and all these buildings, and it all comes down to one, 18 dollar an hour junior person who decide…”
Disclosure
Godin: Refuses to start any project without total commitment to finish
“I refuse to start something unless I'm prepared to finish it. Now by start, I don't mean brainstorm it. I don't mean prototype it. I mean, after that, there's a day. And on that day, it's, is this good enough to be a book? Is this good enough to be a website? …”
Disclosure
Godin avoids television, meetings, Twitter, and Facebook to reclaim his time
“Because if you don't watch TV, and you don't go on Twitter, and you don't go on Facebook, and you don't go to meetings, which I don't, there's a lot of time.”
Disclosure
Godin commits to never monetizing his personal blog with advertising
“I would never run ads on my blog. How stupid would that be to pimp out my audience for a hundred bucks?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Godin: Shepard Fairey earns over $1M yearly by distributing free art
“How did Shepard Fairey make it so that he's making over a million dollars a year? What's his strategy exactly? Right? His strategy is posters everywhere, free art everywhere, here, go, take it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Godin: Untrained worker wages remained completely flat from 1960 to 2009
“In my presentation last week, I showed a chart. Hourly wage adjusted for inflation from 1960 to present. For untrained workers, you know, burger flippers. 1960, they made 15 dollars an hour. Now, they make 15 dollars an hour. Zero change in 49 years.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Godin: Squidoo Reached Top 100 on Quantcast Without Venture Capital
“If you look at Squidoo's traffic, sure, we're number a hundred on the Quantcast chart now, but for the first year, it was pretty quiet. And for the second year, it was quiet, but we were losing money, and we're not venture funded.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Godin: Squidoo runs with six people who are better than him
“And that's the secret of Skidoo, by the way. Six people, all of them are better at what they do than I am, so I don't bother them.”
Disclosure
Godin: Permission Marketing website cost $450, near his highest book marketing spend
“The permission marketing website costs 450 dollars, and that was at the high side of what I've spent to market a book.”
Assertion Partly supported
Godin: Isaac Asimov wrote 400 books working 6 to 10 a.m. daily
“What did Isaac Asimov do? He wrote 400 books in his career. Right? 40 times as many as me. How did he do it? Every morning he woke up at six o'clock, and he wrote till 10 a.m., and then he was done.”
Seth Godin