Seth Godin Quotes

“systems problems are almost never fixed by the people who are in charge of the system. They are fixed by the people who are part of the system.”

“The easiest way to sell a solution is if people know they have a problem.”

“Conversations change the culture and conversations change us.”

“Credentials matter when they are relevant to the work we seek to do.”

“Burnout is a function of wanting two things to happen at the same time and when they don't we get stressed.”

“...leaders have to get way more comfortable with the failure of other people. Not the failure of creativity or the failure of decision making. The failure of outcomes.”

“People will change their behavior if they know what you want to teach them.”

“The center of any market is average.”

“That management is about power and authority. Leadership is about giving people the chance to show up and go do something important that might not work.”

“A good decision has nothing to do with a good outcome. A good decision simply means that if a bunch of other well informed smart people looked at what was in front of you, looked at the choices that were available to you, they would have done the same thing.”

“...that holding on tightly to what we've got is at the heart of so many bad decisions.”

“If it’s not helping us believe, then it’s not properly designed.”

“The broader you seek to make your offering, the more likely you are to run into people who don’t care, don’t get the joke or are simply not open to being satisfied.”

“What it means to assemble a group. What it means to see a problem. What it means to say we're going to do something creative is it means we're going to do something we can't prove is the right answer. We're going to do something that might not work. And that's why we need to do it together.”

“If someone tried to build an institution like college today, there’s no way it would be structured the way it is now. If you think about the rituals of most of these industries, they don’t make sense.”

“Trust can enable action but trust can't cause action…but it's also true that action causes trust…To create action, we as marketers have to bring tension to the table and our work is in bringing that tension to the table in a way that's welcome, in a way that's ethical, in a way that's effective.”

“Perfectionism and mediocrity are both the same thing. And what they are are places to hide.”

“Seeking reassurance is distracting you from doing a better job of what you set out to do in the first place.”

“It’s possible that you no longer need to get better at your craft. That your craft is just fine.
It’s possible that you need to be braver instead.”

“You can treat your customers like they don’t have a choice, but in the long run, customers always have a choice.”

“Mandatory education makes no sense. Nobody ever learned anything against their will. Sooner or later it becomes voluntary.”

“If you say you're making a product for everyone, you're making a product for no one.”

“Grades are an illusion. Passion and insight are reality.”

“Emotional labor isn't expensive. Emotional labor is simply difficult.”

“Every committee or organization has at least one well-meaning person who is pushing to make things more average. ”

“Schools like teaching compliance. They're pretty good at it.”