92 Seth Godin Quotes On Life, Business & Success

Seth Godin said that a lot of things, but he said that the most important thing is to find the intersection where one idea and a different idea meet and if you understand that the conversation, the intersection, the meeting between that two different ideas is the most important thing. And that is the meeting between the two of you. So that is the most important thing.

Seth Godin is an American entrepreneur, investor and speaker that likes to talk about marketing.

Godin’s books include First Food, The Top 100 Course, The Top 100, The Top 100 Recipes, The Top 100 Chefs, The Top 50 Companies That Innovate, and the new The Top 100 Chefs of the World.

There a few things I would like to say here. The first is that he was doing what I am doing now. He was using the Internet to market his books. He was also using the Internet to quit his job and start something new. I am doing the same, but I can’t make as much money with the Internet, since I am not a publisher.

His latest book will help readers deal with life when you are at the front end of the line.

Seth Godin has written a comprehensive and insightful collection of 90+ quotes. Here he talks about success, business, marketing and life.

92 Seth Godin Quotes

Seth Godin encourages you and your team to use a rigorous, data-driven approach to be more successful in your work.

2. Be genuine. Be remarkable. Be worth connecting with.
I’m not a fan of the word remarkable. It has a negative connotation. You’re more likely to be remembered if you’re real and if you do things that matter.

Seth Godin states that it’s not what we are, or what we do, but what we can become.
As much as we sometimes like to focus on what we have, and what we can’t do, it’s really about that which we can become at our best.

When you are uncomfortable, you often create change. The organization will then reward you. When you are in the comfortable zone, your role is not as clear and you can be easily pushed out, so the organization will not reward you.

People who are trying to sell products or services are very quick to say that their product or service “shares the values” of the user. If you don’t share those values, you’re not relevant.

When the world is changing, the best thing to do is
be your best, not someone else’s best.

If you can’t state your position in seven words, you don’t have a position.

As it turns out, it’s not easy to be a good marketer in the marketplace. The trick is not to fit in, but to stand out (get heard).

Most of us make rules like those above because it’s easier to make those rules than it is to follow them. However, the real reason our rules exist are to protect us and make things easier.

10th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

Marketing is about spreading messages and spreading messages is the single most important output of our civilization.

To build trust in your team, you should encourage your team members to speak up. Once they have proven they are trustworthy, you should encourage them to be honest with your leadership. If they are trustworthy, they will be trustworthy at work so you need to keep that environment for the team.

“Quitting is not the same as failing.” It’s okay to fail. If you fail to achieve something, that means you probably never will. The trick is to fail a little and to learn from it (often much more than you’d expect) so you can succeed on other things next time.

Advertising is necessary. We are all in a battle for attention. I am not saying advertising campaigns shouldn’t exist. They can be very effective and provide lots of value for a product. But that’s not what I mean. You need to innovate when you advertise.

The easiest thing to do if you are having trouble with a difficult issue in a meeting is to react, to follow the majority, to avoid the confrontation. The second easiest thing to do is to respond, to stay calm, to avoid a fight. But the hardest thing to do is to begin the conversation, to start the meeting, to give a good opening statement.

I’ve noticed that many people think that, once you have a website, the product is what makes your company valuable. But it’s not. What makes your company valuable is the story you tell about your product.

There are two great ways in which we can make progress as a community of human beings. First, we can choose to not go all the way to our destinations. But we must start somewhere. There is no harm in starting out. And the sooner we begin, the sooner we will complete our journeys. Secondly, we make progress when we learn, because learning is a process of discovery and discovery is the lifeblood of progress. As Seth says, knowledge of the past is necessary to understand the future.

If we have the conviction that something we believe is true, then that’s what we will live as truth.

When you’re successful, you don’t have to be “smart”, you can just do what you know is right and good.
When you’re not successful, you have to be “smart”, because the people who aren’t smart are the ones that are making decisions.

There’s also the “I’m really smart and I can do better” justification.

It is important to target the audience. Find a particular audience and frame your story in a way that it focuses on those needs.

20th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

I’m always willing to have lousy and lame ideas, but there’s a difference between being willing to have the ideas and putting myself under pressure to have the ideas.

If you want to be a social media expert (and I’ve seen quite a few of those lately), focus on the person. Give them a reason to care. Be relevant. Be specific. Don’t just write a generic post and expect to get results.

Your company is doing it wrong. Don’t change the way you do things by asking your employees. Ask for forgiveness; you’ll get it if you want to.

The book is a great tool to help people find purpose and direction in their life. People are searching for ways to lead a meaningful life today. Your book will help you to identify how you can start building your dreams.

What we expect to be important will become important to us.

Failure is not an option. Therefore, there’s nothing to celebrate. But if you fail, there’s nothing to fear.

If you create something that people will value enough to pay for, you won’t have to spend money on advertising to make it go viral.

Everyone wants to be heard and appreciated. You cannot please everyone by giving everyone what they want (even if it is good for you in the long run). You need to listen to other people, and figure out what you really want. Then, you need to make sure you put yourself out there.

In the real world, social media is one of several ways to create a large, dedicated group. But it’s not a magic wand that will transform your business or your life. It won’t help you build a following for your business or an audience for your ideas.

If we keep ourselves busy with activities that provide us with “perfect acceptance”, we’ll never be able to do anything that matters. When we free ourselves from the need for perfect acceptance, the stuff that we’re doing is gonna get done. If we want to be able to launch the work that matters, we have to free ourselves from the need for perfection.

The problem with perfection is that you never, ever, ever achieve it.

30th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

It’s important to be safe. Safety is important. Sometimes it is risky to play safe. It’s important to be safe and sometimes it’s risky to play safe.

Choose which ones are really important and focus on them. If you don’t have good habits you’re not going to get as much done as if you do have good habits.

Successful people are the ones who are
breaking the rules
They know the rules, but they do not obey them.

I’m sure you all remember Seth Godin’s famous quote, “the good news is that values accrue to those who show up, those that make a difference.” This is a beautiful idea and a great reminder to all of us as entrepreneurs to be present, to be accountable, to be a part of something that matters.

Seth Godin said that in order to make you a better version of yourself, you need to be better than other people at what you don’t know.

Credit is the point. The point is to get to a position where you’re able to make the change you’re after. If you don’t have credit, then you can’t ask. But you can still make that change.

We should pay attention to our surroundings. Focus on what is important.

This is the only time this is used to mean “pay attention” in the entire book.

When you have good ideas, it’s because you have ideas that you have to filter through a lot of bad ideas. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones which are the hardest to generate.

If everything was free, you would do whatever you wanted. You could do your own thing with no restrictions, or you could work for someone else. If you wanted to make sure that you can get a good job, you would need to be able to pass a job interview.

There are many ways to tap a thousand times on a thousand trees and get nowhere.
There are many ways to tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

The same can be applied to the verb “teach”. I can teach you how to write a paper. I can teach you how to program. I can teach you how to design a website. I can teach you how to play the guitar. But there is only one correct way to teach. And if you aren’t sure how to teach, I can guide you.

40th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

You should spend the limited energy of your life doing what you love and that you’re good at.
You should spend the rest of your time loving the people that surround you, making the people around you happy so that they will love you.
You should ignore everyone else.

Courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what we see and to own what we say.

Â Finding customers for your products means that you’re just selling to people, and not to the people. We should sell what our customers want.

You need to believe in yourself, in your friends, in your colleagues and most of all, you need to believe in your ability to influence the future.

If you are worried about something, it might be a good thing to do.

If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place for a long time.

You should focus on the things in life that are important to you and not worry about things that are not important to you. Sometimes you have to give up some things that you love to make your schedule more flexible.

If you know that you should exercise more then it’s easy to do when you are not getting on the treadmill. You are not actually executing what you just know.

I often think about how to solve problems.
Some of problems I can solve.
These problems are easy to solve.
I can solve these problems by using my brain.
I sometimes try to solve some big problems.
I make a plan and try to make a lot of effort.
I usually make mistakes in solving problems.
I have to learn from my mistake and try again.

49th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

It is worth it, especially to keep you motivated to keep going.

There will be a lot of new startups that are trying to make their products stand out from others by adding a lot of fancy features. But the problem is that these startups usually don’t really have anything remarkable about their offerings. Just adding the features will not give them a new product. However, if companies actually create something that is simply amazing, then even if they have a bad product, people will notice it and remember it.

The greatest achievement is to be the most conspicuous person at the dinner table.

Marketers need to stop focusing on the old world of marketing and start thinking about the new world of marketing.

What you have to learn from competing is the fact that you will need to set your own path and invent your own method. You don’t have to take the path the competition is following and copying it, as it might be too narrow.

The most effective way to communicate is to present something in the most relevant way that people will understand.

Criticism doesn’t lead to failure, it leads to success. It is the first step to learn something new. You learn new lessons from criticism. You learn to improve on your ability, which will lead to success.

Shrinking down your ideas until they become great doesn’t work. Instead, focus on creating something that’s truly great.

Seth Godin believes that everyone should learn to be a shipping person. He said that an idea-shipper is someone who brings their ideas/ideas into execution. Someone who has ideas but does not like ideas, is not an idea-shipper. He said that ideas ship themselves. An idea-shipper only has to ship the ideas he has.

One needs a lot of time to become a superstar, and it requires a lot of hard work.

Seth Godin said that one must have an understanding of differentiation in order to be successful.

60th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

When you are “the other,” you are not part of the crowd. You’re part of a different crowd. When you make something new, you force other people to change their minds.

When I’m working on something that I’m proud of, I always think about what Seth said and I’m thinking about it right now.

Religion is really only about the rules. Faith is demonstrated by what we do when we know the rules.

There is an old saying, the best gift you can give to somebody is the gift of your most humble self. And the best way to give yourself to somebody is to be so damn generous you feel like you can’t keep it for yourself.

Some managers and bosses don’t want innovation, because they’re just not willing to work with it. They prefer to work with obedient workers who just do what they’re told. They seek compliance and so they don’t want innovation or non-compliance. We work with the disobedient few for innovation, but today innovation is our only option.

We should never give a second thought to things that are meaningless, because this just means that they don’t mean enough to us for us to want to remember them.

If you want to be a successful business owner, first try to figure out what the least you can do, and do that.

Advertising is to the internet as the internet is to advertising.

Many business owners are overly defensive about their current methods, rather than developing new and improved systems and processes.

You may have thought of starting as a chore or maybe even think it’s a negative activity. But guess what? Starting is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. Once you start something, you’ll become unstoppable.

70th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

You have to make the existing state of affairs a little bit better, or make it a little bit different. This can be done either by removing the barriers to the status quo or by creating a new reality that’s better than the one we have now.

Leaders do what they want to do. They think through the problems and choose the best path. They get others to follow by communicating the things they do that are important.

72. Today, most marketing doesn’t notice, track, or interact with people until they are customers.

It’s OK if you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re learning how to swim, don’t worry about it.

Yes you do, but not your decisions. The decisions are made by you. “It’s a choice you get to make every day.”

You can also change the text of the Paraphrase module to use the original text (from the module input).

This is one of the most important business models that I have ever heard. It’s also one that has been with me for the last five years.

It has been so consistent that when I heard in early 2019 how this was changing, I was surprised.

When fear creeps in, you have to be aware of it, don’t give it power over you, and overcome it.

When you’re writing, you are writing about ideas. You should never write about what you know, but you should write about ideas that you don’t know.

… we shouldn’t set out to build only for people in your audience. Building products for people is great, but building products that serve the masses is no longer enough.

Seth Godin defines anxiety as, in advance, failure.

80th of 92 Seth Godin Quotes

If you are deliberately creating a future that you think will feel safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely to be true.

If you are trying to do the impossible you will never succeed in the end. You have to be willing to fail but not in order for you to succeed.

A lot of startups make the mistake of having a company without a product and trying to sell their way to success.

Efficiency in marketing is not about lowering prices. It’s about finding ways to make your products or services more valuable to your target audience than they might be otherwise.

Clusters have a common underlying structure or theme. Your job as a marketing person is to find as many clusters as possible in your market and sell products and services that can fit into those clusters (i.e. the themes).

A book with an important message in today’s complex world of constant change and uncertainty is often easier to understand – and learn from – if it is written in a more plain-spoken and informal way. That’s why Seth Godin has made an outstanding contribution to our success in the field of digital marketing and content marketing.

If you wait to do something, it will be harder to do it.

I’m not sure if it’s less, but it’s definitely less than we might spend doing nothing.

This is why I recommend sharing. It’s a game I enjoy. If you want me to follow you, I’ll likely follow you. But if you want me to follow you because you’re telling me to, I’ll do it in a heartbeat. It’s like the difference between an incentive and a regulation.

Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Remember that it doesn’t have to be bad. It doesn’t even have to be dangerous. Sometimes you’ve got to be wrong because it’s the only way you can find the right answer.

You will never become successful trying to hide your personality – don’t try to fit in, stand out. You’ll be seen as a fake and people won’t work with you. If you want to stand out, be yourself and shine. People will notice when you try.

We have been brainwashed into believing that it is better to have a job than be unemployed.

When you build something, you have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.

Summary

Seth Godin, a prolific writer who can explain the best, will always have a following. His wisdom is truly timeless. Don’t forget to share this collection of the world’s leading marketing and business quotes on Twitter and LinkedIn.