Welcome back to the deep dive. I want you to
do a mental exercise with me for a second. Picture
the business section of a bookstore. OK. Or,
you know, maybe just scroll through the business
and money category on Amazon. What do you see?
A sea of sameness. A lot of guys in suits with
their arms crossed. Yes. A lot of titles promising
you can, you know, get rich in four hours or
something. Exactly. It's a wall of navy blue
and corporate headshots. But then. There's this
one cover that always stands out. It's usually
stark white, maybe a weird cartoon on it, or
just a really bold sans serif title and the author
photo. It's not a guy in a suit. It's a bald
guy with funky, colorful glasses who looks less
like a CEO and more like, I don't know, a wildly
successful art teacher. That is a terrifyingly
accurate description of Seth Godin. Today, we
are opening up the file on Seth Godin. And I
think for a lot of people listening, they're
going to nod and say, yeah, the marketing guy,
the purple cow guy. And look, they wouldn't be
wrong. Right. That's the brand. But looking through
this stack of research, the biography, the early
ventures, the forgotten books, I realized that
labeling him just a marketing guy is actually
kind of lazy. It is. It misses about 90 % of
the architecture underneath. I completely agree.
If you stop at marketing, you're missing the
actual story. Because the Seth Godin story isn't
really about advertising. No. It's about the
Internet. It's about, you know, how human beings
behave when you suddenly give them infinite connection
and an infinite choice. And that's our mission
today. We are going to peel back the layers.
We aren't just going to list his bestsellers.
We're going to try to figure out how a guy who
started out as a hardcore computer scientist,
I mean, literally writing code, ended up becoming
this sort of philosopher king for the creative
class. And along the way, we have to talk about
some truly weird stuff. We really do. We have
to talk about the fact that he sold a company
to Yahoo for nearly $30 million. Yes. But we
also have to talk about the fact that he wrote
a book called The Smiley Dictionary. I am still
not convinced that isn't a prank. But we have
the receipts and the source material. I've seen
the cover. It is very real. And honestly, it
might be one of the most important things he
ever wrote. If you look at it through the right
lens, it tells you everything about where his
head was at in the early 90s. So, OK, we have
a massive bibliography. We have the dot com boom
and bust. And we have this whole philosophy of
work that has influenced millions. Where do we
even begin to make sense of all this? You have
to start with the hardware. I mean, before the
software, before the philosophy, there's the
hardware. And for Godin, that starts in college.
Okay. If you were to look at his transcript from
Tufts University, you'd see a double major that
honestly shouldn't make sense together. It's
just, it's jarring. Right. Usually you see things
that pair nicely, like economics and political
science or biology and chemistry. Exactly. Sensible
pairings. Godin did computer science and philosophy.
That sounds like the setup to a joke. A coder
and a philosopher walk into a bar. It does. But
think about that combination for a second. It
is the absolute key to unlocking his entire worldview.
How so? Well, computer science is about systems.
It's binary. It's logic. If this, then that.
It's the rigid architecture of how things work.
It's structural. It's the ones and zeros. OK,
so he has the logic. He understands fundamentally
how the machine operates. Exactly. He speaks
the language of the digital world. But then you
have philosophy. And that's the why. Right. That's
ethics, epistemology, human behavior. It's the
messy gray stuff that you can't just solve with
an algorithm. So from day one, from his college
years, Godin is looking at the world and specifically
the emerging digital world through these two
lenses simultaneously. That's a really good point.
He understands how the machine is built, but
he's obsessed with how humans are going to live
inside it. You know, that makes so much sense
because a lot of the other tech giants we talk
about, you know, the Zuckerbergs or the Gates
of the world, they are so heavy on the CS side.
They build the tool, but they sometimes seem
genuinely surprised by how people end up using
it or misusing it. Godin seems to have anticipated
the human element from the very jump. Precisely.
That dual major is the foundation. He understands
the tech, but he explains it through philosophy.
He sees the network, but he's interested in the
people on the network. And he didn't just stop
there, did he? He went on to business school.
He did. He went on to earn an MBA from the Stanford
Graduate School of Business. So now he has the
academic trifecta, code, thought, and commerce.
A triple threat. So he graduates. We're talking
mid-'80s now. The personal computer revolution
is just starting to heat up. He gets a job at
a software publisher, a company called Spinnaker.
But he doesn't stay long. No. And this is where
we see the first real flash of the entrepreneur
gene. It's 1986. He leaves Spinnaker. And he
takes $20 ,000 of his savings. Wow. Which, by
the way, in 1986 is a significant chunk of change.
That's a serious bet on yourself. I mean, for
a young guy in his mid -20s, that's probably
everything he had. It likely was a huge risk.
And with that money, he founds Seth Godin Productions.
Which sounds so massive and impressive. Like,
he's got a soundstage in Hollywood and a fleet
of production trucks. The reality is... much
grittier. He's in New York City. He is operating
out of a studio apartment. I just love this image.
You know, the garage startup is the classic Silicon
Valley cliche. Right. But the studio apartment
startup is the New York version. You can just
picture him, you know, boxes of books everywhere,
maybe a radiator hissing in the corner, eating
takeout from a carton, trying to build an empire
in 400 square feet. And the business he built.
wasn't software. It wasn't consulting. It was
something called book paddaging. OK, I have to
admit, when I saw that term in the notes, I had
to double check what it meant. Most people do.
I assumed it meant he was literally, you know,
putting books into boxes for shipping. A lot
of people think that, but it's actually this
fascinating sort of hidden layer of the publishing
industry. Explain it to me. OK, think of a movie
producer. The producer comes up with the concept,
hires the scriptwriter, hires the director, casts
the actors, shoots the film, and then sells the
finished movie to a studio like Warner Brothers
to distribute. Okay, so the studio just puts
their logo on it and puts it in theaters. They're
the distribution channel. Exactly. A book packager
does the exact same thing, but for books. They
come up with an idea and say... A complete guide
to house plants. Right. They hire a writer to
write it, an illustrator to draw the plants,
a designer to lay out the pages. They create
the entire digital file, the package, and then
they sell that finished asset to a big publisher
like Penguin or Random House. And the publisher
just handles the printing and getting it into
Barnes & Noble. That's it. They take on the manufacturing
and distribution risk. Godin's company was the
creative engine. So he's an idea factory. He's
not sitting there waiting for ink. to strike
to write the great American novel yeah he's spotting
a market niche assembling a team and shipping
a product shipping that is the operative word
This period, working out of that apartment, must
have taught him that creativity isn't about being
a tortured artist waiting for the muse to strike.
It's a job. It's a job. It's a practice. It's
about production. It's about deadlines. It's
about getting the work out the door. That mentality,
that shipping is a skill in and of itself, becomes
a huge pillar of his philosophy later on in his
career. Okay, so he's in the apartment. He's
packaging books, making a living. But the internet
is coming. The wave is building. The mid -90s
are approaching. And this leads us to what I
think is his first major mainstream success,
although at the time it was still pretty niche.
Let's talk about Yo -Yo Dine. Yo -Yo Dine. Now,
for the film buffs out there, for the real nerds,
that name might ring a bell. Well, absolutely.
That's from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Across the Eighth Dimension. Correct. The fictional
defense contractor. Which just tells me so much
about him. It tells me Godin isn't just a suit.
He's a sci -fi nerd. Yeah. He's got that cult
classic appreciation. It's a little bit of a
wink. It signals he's part of the culture, you
know? He gets it. He founded YoYo Dine in 1995
with a guy named Mark Hurst. And the concept
was, for 1995, absolutely revolutionary. Set
the scene for us. What was online marketing in
1995? Online marketing in 1995 basically meant
a banner ad, a static image that you... hopefully,
maybe, clicked on. The digital billboard era.
That's a perfect way to put it. You go to a website,
maybe Netscape Navigator, and there's a flashing
rectangle at the top that says, click here for
soda. And you just, you know, train your eyes
to ignore it. Banner blindness. Banner blindness
was born then. Godin looked at that and said,
this is boring. This is annoying. This doesn't
work. He understood that on the internet, the
user has the mouse. They have the control. If
you annoy them, they leave. It's one click. So
what did Yo -Yo Dine do differently? Instead
of just showing you an ad, Yo -Yo Dine used contests,
online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies
to its users. Wait, so instead of just showing
me an ad for a new car, they'd made me play some
kind of game to win a prize. Exactly. And to
play the game, you had to interact with the brand.
You had to learn about the car's features to
answer a question. It was engaging. It was fun.
And most importantly, it required the user's
active participation and consent. Ah, consent.
That's the key word. This is the seed of what
he would later codify and name permission marketing.
He wasn't interrupting you while you were trying
to do something else. He was inviting you to
play. And clearly, people wanted to play. And
investors want it in. Yeah. Because the numbers
here are pretty staggering for the mid -90s.
They are. In August 1996, a venture capital firm
called Flatiron Partners invested $4 million
in Yo -Yo Dine. $4 million. Right. In 1996 money,
that is serious, serious capital. That's, we
believe this is the future money. It was a huge
vote of confidence. And that was for a 20 % stake
in the company. So the valuation was already
at $20 million. Wow. But the real payoff came
just two years later. years later in 1998 the
dot -com bubble is inflating excitement is at
a feeble pitch and yoyodyne gets acquired by
one of the giants by yahoo for how much $29 .6
million. Wow. So in just a few years, he goes
from the studio apartment book packager to selling
a company for nearly $30 million to one of the
titans of the early internet. And part of the
deal, which is crucial, was that he became Yahoo
vice president of direct marketing. That is a
massive shift. I mean, just culturally. Going
from being your own boss, naming your company
after a quirky sci -fi movie, to being a VP at
Yahoo. In the late 90s. That's corporate. That's
the big leagues. It is. And it gave him a huge
platform and, you know, a front row seat to the
explosion of the commercial web. But what's so
interesting is that while all this high level
corporate maneuvering is happening, he's still
writing. He's still that guy from the book packaging
days. He can't stop shipping. He can't. And this
brings us to a part of his career that I think
is often overlooked, but is absolutely hilarious
and so, so insightful. Are we talking about the
pen name? Because I was hoping we would. We are
talking about the pen name. Yeah. Did you know
Seth Godin published books under the name FX9?
FX9. It sounds like a droid from Star Wars. Yeah.
Or maybe a secret agent. What is that about?
It's so strange. And you have to wonder. Why
the pseudonym? Was it to publish more volume
without, you know, diluting the Seth Godin brand?
Was he just having fun with it? I don't know
the answer, but the books he wrote during this
how -to era in the early 90s are just fascinating
cultural artifacts. Okay, I have the list here,
and I just have to read some of these titles
out loud because they perfectly capture that
moment in time when the internet was this scary,
confusing new thing for most people. Please do.
First up, The Smiley Dictionary. Published in
1993. 1993. Let that sink in. There are no emojis.
There are no smartphones. We are talking about
typing a colon and a close parenthesis to make
a happy face. And he wrote a whole book about
it. A dictionary. A guide to emoticons. That
is incredible. I imagine it was literally just
pages of assy art. Here is how you type a rose.
Here is a winking face. It was an anthropology
textbook for the earliest days of internet culture.
It really was. And then we have... Oh, this one
is gold. Email addresses of the rich and famous,
published in 1994. You can imagine how useful
that book is today. Right. I mean, in a world
where we are so obsessed with privacy and spam
filters and data protection, the very idea of
publishing a book listing the personal email
addresses of celebrities is just wild. It's unthinkable
now. But I guess back in 94, if you had an email
address, you were sort of an early adopter. You
kind of wanted people to write to you. Exactly.
It was a much smaller community. It was a novelty.
If you had Bill Gates's email address, there
was a non -zero chance he might actually read
your email. It speaks to the sort of innocence
of that time. And there's more. Point and click
internet. Get online in less than an hour. And
the video renter's bible. You see the theme here.
Right. These titles seem funny and dated now.
But if we connect this to the bigger picture,
they show us exactly what Godin's role was. He
was a translator. Explain that. In the early
90s, the digital world was inaccessible to 99
% of people. It was clunky. It was text based.
It was scary. You needed a guide. You needed
someone to hold your hand and say, OK, here is
how you make a smiley face or here is how you
send an electronic mail. So before he was teaching
people business strategy, he was just teaching
literacy. Digital literacy. Precisely. He was
bridging that huge gap between the confusing
new web and the average consumer. And that skill,
that ability to take something complex and make
it simple, accessible, and human, that is the
through line to all of his more famous, more
philosophical work later on. Which brings us
perfectly to the marketing philosopher era. This
is the Seth Godin most people know, the guy who
writes these short, punchy books that completely
change how you see your work. And we have to
start with the big one, the one that really defined
his post -Yahoo career, permission marketing.
Published in 1999. And the subtitle is key here,
turning strangers into friends and friends. into
customers. This is a direct reaction to his work
at YoYo Dime, wasn't it? It was the theory behind
the practice. It was the codification of it.
He was looking around at the state of advertising
and he saw that the dominant model for a century
had been what he called Interruption marketing.
Right. You're watching your favorite TV show.
We interrupt it with a commercial. You're reading
an article in a magazine. We interrupt it with
a full page ad. You're driving down the highway.
We interrupt your view with a billboard. The
whole model is based on grabbing attention you
didn't offer. Exactly. Stealing attention. Godin
argued that in a digital world where the consumer
has the remote control, the mouse, the back button.
Attention is scarce. You can't just steal it
anymore. You have to earn it. You need permission.
You need permission to talk to people. You offer
them something of value, a newsletter, a contest,
useful information in exchange for the privilege
of their attention over time. It seems so obvious
now. This is the entire foundation of. Email
newsletters, subscription models, YouTube channels.
The entire creator economy runs on this principle.
But in 1999, that was a radical shift. It was.
He was basically predicting the death of the
mass market TV ad model and the rise of the direct
-to -consumer relationship. He saw that the power
was shifting from the broadcaster to the person
holding the mouse. And then he just keeps building
on these ideas. A few years later, 2003, he drops
Purple Cow. Transform your business by being
remarkable. I love the central metaphor of this.
It's so simple and sticky. The idea is that if
you're driving down the road and you see a cow,
it's fine. It's a cow. You see 10 cows, 100 cows.
You stop noticing them. They're boring. Yeah.
But if you saw a purple cow. You would stop the
car. You would get out. You would take a picture.
You would tell all your friends about the purple
cow you saw. You would post it on Instagram.
You would. Yeah. And his point was that in a
world of infinite choice, good is no longer good
enough. Good is the brown cow. It blends in.
To succeed in a crowded market, you have to be
remarkable. Literally. Worth making a remark
about. I want to push on this one a bit. Because
on the surface, it sounds a little, I don't know,
simplistic. Be different. Okay, thanks, Seth.
But there's more to it than just be weird. Right.
It's not just about dying the cow purple. Oh,
absolutely. It's not about being weird for weird
sake. It's about the underlying economics of
a crowded marketplace. Godin argues that in a
digital world, consumers have infinite choices.
If you want to buy a toaster, you can go on Amazon
and find 5000 different toasters in 10 seconds.
Right. In that environment, if your toaster is
just very good, nobody cares. Very good is the
default. It's the brown cow. It blends in with
all the other very good toasters. But if you
build a toaster that, I don't know, perfectly
imprints the day's weather forecast onto the
bread. It has a purple cow. You might not sell
a billion of them, but the people who buy it,
the people who want weather toast, will tell
everyone they know. Exactly. Hey, look at my
weather toast. The marketing is built into the
product, not slapped on afterwards with advertising.
The remarkability of the product itself is what
drives the growth. That's the core distinction.
And then in 2007, he releases what I think is
one of his most personal and challenging books,
The Dip. A little book that teaches you when
to quit and when to stick. This one was a huge
bestseller, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street
Journal. This one always resonated with me because
it flies in the face of everything we're taught
from kindergarten. Winners never quit and quitters
never win. And Godin just calls that out as total
nonsense. He argues that winners actually quit
all the time. Really? All the time. They quit
the wrong thing so they can free up their resources
to focus on the right things. Strategic quitting
is a superpower. But the trick is knowing when
to quit. What is the dip he talks about? OK,
so the dip is that long, grueling slog between
starting something new and mastering it. You
start learning to play the guitar. It's fun for
the first week. Then it gets really hard. Your
fingers hurt. You can't make the chords sound
right. You suck. That's the dip. And that's where
most people give up. That's where almost everyone
quits, Godin says. If the prize at the end is
worth it. If you really want to be a rock star
or a fluent Spanish speaker or a great programmer,
you have to push through the dip. Because the
dip is the very barrier to entry that keeps everyone
else out. Scarcity is created by the dip. But
what if you're just in a dead end? You're working
hard but not getting anywhere. That's what he
calls a cul -de -sac. It looks like you're moving,
but you're just going in circles. You're at a
job with no upward mobility, for example. No
matter how hard you work, you're not going to
get to a different destination. So what's the
advice? His advice is ruthless. Quit the cul
-de -sacs immediately and unapologetically. The
moment you realize you're in one, get out. But
never, ever quit in the dip just because it's
hard. Quit because the destination isn't worth
the journey, not because the journey itself is
difficult. That distinction is crucial. It's
strategic quitting versus reactive emotional
quitting. It brings critical thinking to the
whole concept of perseverance. It's not about
blind grit. It's about smart grit. We also have
Tribes, which came out in 2008. The subtitle
is We Need You to Lead Us. This feels like it
predates the whole influencer era, but it's talking
about exactly that. It is. It's incredibly prescient.
He identified that the Internet had completely
demolished the traditional barriers to leadership.
What do you mean? Well, you used to need a factory
or a union or a political party or a TV network
to lead people. You needed institutional power.
He said now you just need a blog. You need a
Twitter account. You can gather a tribe of like
minded people around an idea. be vintage typewriters,
vegan cooking, libertarian politics, whatever.
The internet allows anyone to find the others.
Exactly. And a tribe needs a leader. It needs
someone to connect them and give them a direction.
That, he argues, is the big opportunity of our
time. But with that opportunity comes a lot of
responsibility, which he talks about in his 2010
book, Linchpin. Yes. Are you indispensable? This
is where the philosophy gets very personal. He's
not talking to the CEO anymore. He's talking
to the employee. And what's the message? He's
saying, look, the industrial economy is dying.
The whole system was built on you being a compliant
cog in a machine. If your job is just to follow
the instructions in the manual, you are going
to be replaced. By a cheaper cog somewhere else
or by a computer program. Which is terrifyingly
relevant in the age of AI, more than ever before.
So what's the solution? how do you avoid becoming
obsolete his solution is to become a lynchpin
A linchpin is the person who holds it all together.
You have to bring what he calls emotional labor
and art to your work. Art in an office job. Art
in the sense of doing the things that aren't
in the manual. Showing initiative, connecting
with customers on a human level, solving a problem
no one asked you to solve. That human connection,
that unique contribution is the only thing that's
truly scarce and valuable. Be the person they
can't write a manual for. That's it, exactly.
And I have to mention one more title from this
era just because it's so provocative. All marketers
are liars. Laughs. Yes, that one definitely gets
a reaction. That was from 2005. It sounds so
cynical. Then you read the subtitle. The power
of telling authentic stories in a low -trust
world. So he's not actually saying you should
lie. No, no, quite the opposite. He's playing
with the word lie. What he means is that all
marketers, and really all of us, tell stories.
And a story, by its very definition, is a fabrication
of sorts. It's a narrative. When you buy a pair
of Nike shoes, you aren't just buying rubber
and foam and canvas. You are buying the story
that you are an athlete. The story of just do
it. That story is a lie. In the sense there's
a fabrication, a narrative overlay on a physical
object. Right. But it becomes true for the consumer
if it helps them achieve their goals, if it makes
them feel the way they want to feel. The lie
is the story we tell ourselves. But, and this
is the key, if that story isn't authentic, if
it's an actual deception, like the shoes fall
apart after one run, the story fails, and you
lose trust forever, it's about the power of narrative,
not the utility of deceit. It's just amazing
how he turns these concepts out. He's not just
reporting on the state of business, he's giving
us a new vocabulary to talk about it. The dip,
purple cow, permission marketing, linchpin. He's
naming the phenomena that we all experience at
work. That is his true genius, I think. He gives
language to these abstract feelings and anxieties
we have about our careers and our creative work.
He makes the intangible tangible. But he didn't
just write books during this period. He kept
building things. We talked about Yo -Yo Dine,
but that wasn't the end of his startup career.
In 2006, he launches Squidoo. Squidoo. This is
a real blast from the past for anyone who was
online in the mid -2000s. A real Web 2 .0 classic.
I remember Squidoo. It was this platform where
you could make a page about... Well, about anything,
really. They called them lenses. You would build
a lens on a specific topic you were passionate
about. Say, growing heirloom tomatoes or a guide
to vintage guitars. It was sort of like Wikipedia,
but opinionated and run by just one person. It
had a personality. Exactly. It was user -generated
content before that was a huge buzzword. And
the business model was that the creator of the
lens would share in the revenue from any ads
or affiliate links on that page. It sounds a
lot like the creator economy we talk about today
with platforms like Substack or Patreon. But
this was way, way earlier. It was a clear precursor.
He was way ahead of the curve on that. And it
was hugely successful for a time. By July of
2008, Squidoo was one of the 500 most visited
sites in the world. Top 500 globally. That is
massive scale. That's not a niche project. Not
at all. It was a major player. And eventually,
in 2014, he sold it to a competitor, Huppages.
But if you track the... of his career, you see
this fascinating shift. What's the shift? Yo
-Yo Dine was doing marketing for big companies.
The books were teaching marketing concepts to
individuals. Squidoo was enabling millions of
people to do their own marketing. So it's a democratization
of the ideas. Exactly. And that trajectory continues
because his next big moves were explicitly and
directly educational. Right. In 2015, he founds
the Alt -MBA. Which is not a traditional university
degree. Don't let the name fool you. No, it's
a four -week, very intense online workshop. It's
cohort -based. It's peer -to -peer. It's designed
to fundamentally change how you think and see
the world, not just give you a credential to
put on your resume. And around the same time,
he also launched his podcast, Akimbo. So he moved
from building tech companies to building people.
Is that a fair way to put it? That's a beautiful
way to put it. I think that's exactly right.
He moved from building software to trying to
upgrade people's mindware, if you will. I like
that. He seems less interested in the technology
itself now and more interested in the human operating
system. He wants to help people overcome the
fear, the resistance, that voice in their head
that stops them from shipping their work. And
the establishment, the world, has certainly recognized
him for this work. We look to the awards list
in the source material. It's not short. Not at
all. This isn't just some guy with a popular
blog. He was inducted into the American Marketing
Association's Marketing Hall of Fame in 2018.
Which is like the Cooperstown of advertising.
It's the highest honor. It is. Time magazine
named his blog one of the 25 best blogs of 2009.
Forbes gave him Business Book of the Year back
in 2004 for a book called Free Prize Inside.
And in 2018, he won the Jack Covert Award for
his overall contribution to the business book
industry. So he's got the hardware to back up
the theories. He's respected by his peers at
the highest level. But despite all this, the
millions from the Yahoo sale, the Hall of Fame
induction, the global bestsellers, when we looked
at the personal life section of the dossier,
it was surprisingly... Well, normal. It really
paints a picture of a very grounded life. He's
been married to his wife, Helene, for a long
time. They have two adult sons, and he lives
in a town called Hastings -on -Hudson, New York.
Which is a lovely... quiet suburb just north
of New York City. It's not Silicon Valley. It's
not a penthouse in Manhattan. It's a place where
people commute and raise families. It kind of
fits his philosophy, doesn't it? How so? He talks
about doing work that matters, about being authentic,
about connecting with your specific tribe. It
doesn't require living in the epicenter of the
hype cycle. In fact, being slightly removed from
it probably helps him see the big picture more
clearly. That makes a lot of sense. He's watching
the chaos of the market from the quiet of Hastings
on Hudson and sending out these daily dispatches
on his blog to help the rest of us make sense
of it all. Exactly. He's an observer, not just
a participant. So let's try to summarize this
entire deep dive. We started with a guy fresh
out of college with this weird double major in
a studio apartment with 20 grand packaging books.
Right. He creates a groundbreaking online marketing
firm named after a cult sci -fi movie, sells
it to Yahoo for millions, and becomes a VP. Then
quits that. Then quits that and pivots to writing
these incredibly influential books, creating
a massive user -generated content platform, and
ultimately evolves into a teacher and a philosopher
of modern work. It is a career defined by one
word, adaptation. He didn't just stay the yo
-yo dine guy. He didn't just stay the permission
marketing guy. He kept following the thread of
how do humans connect in a digital age? from
the early web to the modern creator economy.
He never stood still. So for you, the listener,
what are the big takeaways here? If I'm looking
at this entire stack of sources, all these books
and ventures, what should I walk away with and
apply to my own life? I think there are three
fundamental challenges that Godin leaves us with
in his work. First, what I call the purple cow
challenge. Okay. Look at your current project,
your job, your side hustle, your art. Is it remarkable
or are you just trying to be a slightly better,
slightly cheaper version of the competition?
Because if you're a brown cow, you're invisible.
That's a tough question to ask yourself. It is.
The second is the dip calculation. Be brutally
honest with yourself. Are you in a dip that you
need to power through to achieve mastery and
get the reward on the other side? Or are you
in a cul -de -sac where you're just wasting your
energy going in circles? If it's a cul -de -sac.
Get out. Quitting the wrong thing is a victory
because it frees you up to find a better dip
to invest in. Okay, that's two. And the third?
Ship. Ship. Just ship. We talked about his book
Packaging Days. He didn't wait for permission.
He didn't wait for the perfect muse or the perfect
conditions. He built the package and he shipped
it. In 2020, he wrote a book called The Practice,
which is all about this. And what's the core
idea? That creativity isn't a magical event.
It's a practice. It's a choice. It's an act of
assertion. And it doesn't count if it just stays
in your notebook or on your hard drive. You have
to put it into the world, even if, especially
if it might fail. That's the scary part, isn't
it? Shipping means you might get criticized.
People might not like it. And Godin would say,
good. That means you've done something worth
criticizing. That means you made a mark. The
opposite of remarkable isn't bad. It's ignored.
I want to leave the listener with one final image.
I found a book title in his bibliography from
2013 that I think is the perfect question to
end on. The book is called What You're Gonna
Do With That Duck. He really is the king of strange
titles. He is. And it's such a weird question.
But the metaphor in the book is this. You have
this duck. You have this asset, this opportunity.
You have this access to the Internet, to free
tools, to potential audiences that your ancestors
couldn't have even dreamed of. You have the duck.
The question is the title. Exactly. Are you going
to let it just sit there? Are you just going
to collect information, read blogs, listen to
deep dives like this one? Or are you going to
do something with it? We are. Absolutely drowning
in opportunity and information. But we are starving
for real connection and meaningful work. Godin's
whole career is a masterclass in using the tools
of our time to actually make that connection.
So that's the deep dive. Don't just be a brown
cow. Don't get stuck in the cul -de -sac. And
for the love of everything, ship your work. Find
your duck and do something with it. Thanks for
listening. I'll catch you on the next one.