Seth Godin Best Quotes & Sayings

Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers. — Seth Godin

The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. — Seth Godin

It's not about you, it's about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it ... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action-that's the main reason it's a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more. — Seth Godin

Everyone picks the best one when given a choice. — Seth Godin

My best advice: win little battles. Get in the habit of winning, of shipping, of having customers that can't live without you. Once you've demonstrated you know how to do the art, then go after the windmills. — Seth Godin

The best creative solutions don't come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented ... They come from inventing new questions! — Seth Godin

We're going to spend our entire future living in tomorrow-investing now, when it's difficult, is the single best moment. — Seth Godin

This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that? — Seth Godin

Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold is being purchased, because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need. — Seth Godin

That's the goal, isn't it? For every crack to be filled with your ideas and innovations and creativity? The only way to achieve this, though, is to be prepared for many of them to fail, to land on pavement, to be perfect yet cease to grow. We can cry about these failures, but that will lead us to hold back on the next idea. Or we can celebrate them, realizing that it's proof that we're being promiscuous in our shipping, putting the best work we can into the world, regardless of whether this particular idea actually works. When was the last time you set out to be promiscuous in your failures? — Seth Godin

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. — Seth Godin

When you are leading a tribe, a tribe that you belong to, the benefits increase, the work gets easier, and the results are more obvious. That's the best reason to overcome the fear. — Seth Godin

You and your organization have the power to change everything. To create remarkable products and services. To over deliver. To be the best in the world. How dare you squander that resource by spreading it too thin. How dare you settle for mediocre just because you're busy coping with too many things on your agenda, racing against the clock to get it all done. — Seth Godin

You are far more likely to do your best work if you are willing to delight a few as opposed to soothe the masses. — Seth Godin

Don't wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.
This is precisely why you're stuck. Starting without seeing the end is difficult, so we often wait until we see the end, scanning relentlessly for the right way, the best way and the perfect way.
The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.
Step by step, page by page, interaction by interaction. As you start moving, you can't help but improve, can't help but incrementally find yourself getting back toward your north star.
You might not end up with perfect, but it's significantly more valuable than being stuck.
Don't just start. Continue. Ship. Repeat. — Seth Godin

We run our schools like factories. We line kids up in straight rows, put them in batches (called grades), and work very hard to make sure there are no defective parts. Nobody standing out, falling behind, running ahead, making a ruckus. Playing it safe. Following the rules. Those seem like the best ways to avoid failure. — Seth Godin

Repeating easy tasks again and again gets you not very far. Attacking only steep cliffs where no progress is made isn't particularly effective either. No, the best path is an endless series of difficult (but achievable) hills. — Seth Godin

I think the most productive thing to do during times of change is to be your best self, not the best version of someone else. — Seth Godin

Reality is the best reassurance of all. — Seth Godin

Real gifts don't demand reciprocation (at least not direct reciprocation), and the best kinds of gifts are gifts of art. — Seth Godin

Yes, I think it's okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It's okay to say to them, You're not going where I need to go, and there's no way I'm going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I'm heading off. I'm betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me. — Seth Godin

It's not reckless, because when we leap, when we dive in, when we begin, only begin, we bring our true nature to the project, we make it personal and urgent. And it's not abandon, not in the sense that we've abandoned our senses or our responsibility. In fact, abandoning the fear of fear that is holding us back is the single best way not to abandon the work, the pure execution of the work. Later, there's time to backpedal and water down. But right now, reckless please. — Seth Godin

Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find underused resources and to spot patterns. — Seth Godin

Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all. — Seth Godin

Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer. — Seth Godin

Will you succeed because you are more well-rounded than others? Because you fit in better than everyone else? Bloody unlikely. We succeed when we are trusted to be the best at what we do. — Seth Godin

The epidemic So many people are frozen in the face of uncertainty and paralyzed at the thought of shipping work that matters that one might think that the fear is hardwired into us. It is. Scientists can identify precisely where your lizard brain lives. This is your prehistoric early brain, the same brain that's in the lizard or the deer. Filled with fear, intent on reproduction. Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it. — Seth Godin

If you're working with a spreadsheet or a thread of correspondence or a set of data, I'm not sure you're doing your best work if you're doing it on an iPhone. — Seth Godin

School is at its best when it gives students the expectation that they will not only
dream big, but dream dreams that they can work on every day until they accomplish
them-not because they were chosen by a black-box process, but because
they worked hard enough to reach them. — Seth Godin

It's okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does. — Seth Godin

Starting means you're going to finish. If it doesn't ship, you've failed. You haven't poked the box if the box doesn't realize it's been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don't ship, you actually haven't started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it's merely a hobby. — Seth Godin

The secret of getting on the shortlist is doing your best work fearlessly for a long time before you get on the list. — Seth Godin

The best way to overcome your fear of creativity, brainstorming, intelligent risk-taking, or navigating a tricky situation might be to sprint. — Seth Godin

Art is what we're doing when we do our best work. — Seth Godin

Mostly, the best way to be the next Mark Zuckerberg is to make difficult choices. — Seth Godin

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. — Seth Godin

Treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. - SETH GODIN — Jeff Goins

Our best work can't possibly appeal to the average masses, only our average work can. Finding the humility to happily walk away from those that don't get it unlocks our ability to do great work. — Seth Godin

Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in a conversation-rich world. — Seth Godin

Forgive yourself for not being the richest, the thinnest, the tallest, the one with the best hair. Forgive yourself for not being the most successful, the cutest or the one with the fastest time. Forgive yourself for not winning every round. Forgive yourself for being afraid. But don't let yourself off the hook, never forgive yourself, for not caring or not trying. — Seth Godin

So now, having learned from machines, organizations are applying the same logic to people. Letting people in the organization use their best judgment turns out to be faster and cheaper - but only if you hire the right people and reward them for having the right attitude. — Seth Godin

You Are Not Your Career.
Your ability to follow instructions is not the secret to your success.
You are hiding your best work, your best insight, and your best self from us every day.
We know how much you care, and it's a shame that the system works overtime to push you away from the people and the projects you care about.
The world does not owe you a living, but just when you needed it, it has opened the door
for you to make a difference.
It's too bad that so much time has been wasted, but it would be unforgivable to wait any longer.
You have the ability to contribute so much. We need you, now. — Seth Godin

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the thirst place. — Seth Godin

If you're not the best in the world at what you do, then you have to get better. — Seth Godin

What I learned: Shun nonbelievers. Ignore critics. Do your best for people who want to dance with you. — Seth Godin

Faith in yourself, in your friends, in your colleagues and most of all, faith in your ability to impact our future is the best strategy I know. — Seth Godin

The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later. — Seth Godin

When exactly were we brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job? — Seth Godin

When you work under the cloud of anxiety, the best strategy is to play it safe, because if (when!) it fails, you'll be blameless. — Seth Godin

Isn't the drawing board the place where all the best work happens? It's not a bad thing to go back there. It's the entire point. — Seth Godin

The best way to be missed when you're gone,
Is to stand for something when you're here — Seth Godin

The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You're just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often). This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best (perhaps only) strategy for growth. — Seth Godin

In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn't necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it. — Seth Godin

The best favors are worth doing for the doing, not because we'll ever get paid back appropriately. — Seth Godin

It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are also the ones who are doing the best work, making the greatest impact, and changing the most. — Seth Godin

The people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don't know. — Seth Godin