Seth Godin 🌔's Recent LinkedIn Posts

CONFUSED ABOUT DONATIONS A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team? Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause? Does calling it a “donation” make it more valuable or less valuable to us? Fundraisers can fall into the trap of believing that they’re asking for a favor or begging for a donation. But human beings, like all creatures, exchange time, money or risk in exchange for something. When that exchange is insufficient to cause action, we don’t do it. The anonymous donor gets something. They get something priceless, memorable and worthwhile: peace of mind. The public donor, whether it’s the neighbor buying a raffle ticket for the scout fundraiser or the bigwig on the board of a museum, they get something as well. The status and connection they buy is a bargain, worth more than it costs. In fact, if it wasn’t worth more than it costs, they wouldn’t buy it. The fundraiser isn’t asking for a favor. They’re offering an opportunity.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

“CHEAPER NOT TO CARE” This is the slogan of so many industrial behemoths and existing bureaucracies. It’s in quotation marks for a reason: it’s not true. Not in the long run, not even in the medium run. One way to highlight the hollowness of this edict is to say it out loud. For a while, it might make the stock price go up. But it doesn’t last. It never does.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

THE UNCANNY VALLEY It used to be an obscure oddity, now we all need to understand it. 18 years ago, I posted this image: …and I still can’t get it out of my head. Sorry. Why do we have such a creeped-out reaction to images that aren’t quite right? A robot that looks too much like a person, or a song that we can somehow tell has an AI voice. The creepiness predates AI, and was first named in a paper by Mori fifty years ago. But it’s so visceral that it almost certainly originated along with our fear of snakes and other evolutionary safeguards. There are probably two things going on. First, there’s a corpse alert. Corpses are dangerous, and something that’s alive/not alive is a warning sign. Same thing with zombies. Second, imposter alert. Imposters are even more dangerous than predators, and we honed our imposter-detection skills a long time ago. And now, everyone has AI available to them, and many of us are churning out experiences that border on the uncanny valley. Not many people care about an automated drum track on a pop single, but we get uncomfortable when the lead singer isn’t quite human. We don’t mind when a website figures out our zip code for us, but when a bot apologizes for a late shipment, it means less than nothing. We’re okay with animation, but not with an educational video that combines beautifully shot real footage with an animated human that’s almost but not quite real… While it’s possible to get used to snakes, and, perhaps, to corpses, I’m not sure that the general population is in any hurry to get used to either, or to the uncanny valley. It’s likely that AI quality will increase fast enough that many of the most egregious valley moments will stop happening. But none of that will help with the expectation chasm. When you install an AI admin, or use AI for customer service or therapy, we will always end up with a valley sooner or later. The solution is simple but takes effort: don’t fake it. Celebrate your genre, make a promise and keep it. Not in the way we need to label the ingredients in food, but simply to avoid the surprise realization, to protect your customers from the ick. Triggering an evolutionary survival mechanism is rarely good for your career. “I confused and alienated people as I worked to save money trying to get them to think this was a person” is not much of a mission statement. Our job is to find problems and solve them, not to hustle our way with shortcuts that feel creepy. Three videos for today: The talking dog and AI. Hank Green on the essential Mola sunfish metaphor. Talking with Jon and Becky about We are For Good and the work of non-profits .         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

TIGHT ROPE STANDING It’s much easier to walk a tight rope than it is to simply stand in place. Forward momentum creates stability.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

SITTING IN ZIMBO You’re at the Zoom meeting, on time, and no one is there. Are you the ghost or is everyone else? We needed a word for this existential minor dread, and now we have one. Coordination is hard. PS the Ides of March are overrated as a threat. It’s the chronic conditions that really get us in the end.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

NUMBERS AND THE HUMAN/COMPUTER INTERFACE If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error. When we first started using serial numbers (the Roman Legion did this thousands of years ago, and the British Board of Ordnance required it by law in the 1700s), it made perfect sense. Issue the next number on the list and move on. But numbers alone are difficult for humans to error check and handle. So we use computers to help. The problem lies in the pesky humans who are still part of the chain. So, here’s a simple hack. It’s unlikely to catch on worldwide, but I think it’s fascinating enough to consider… If you had a list of 150 three letter words, all selected to be easy to say, spell and discern, you could use them to replace numbers in a productive and useful way. So, big bob zap car cat is five words next to each other. There are 75 billion combinations of five words, which means that it replaces a number like 4839450381 with room to spare. For ATMs that are four or five digits, you only need three words. Think about that the next time you need to tell a customer service person your order number or serial number, or share a wifi password. Let the computer do the work.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

THAT’S WHAT STUDIES ARE FOR “Are you sure it’s going to work?” That’s the wrong question to consider when proposing a study. It’s also not helpful to say, “It’s unlikely to solve the problem.” All the likely approaches have already been tried. The useful steps are: Is there a problem worth solving? Is the expense of this test reasonable? Will the study cause significant damage? Of all the things we can test, is this a sensible one to try next? Our fear of failure is real. It’s often so significant that we’d rather live with a problem than face the possibility that our new approach might be wrong. If the problem is worth solving, it’s probably worth the effort and risk that the next unproven test will require. [In this podcast , Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein talks with some patients and a doctor about his novel approach to Parkinson’s disease. Participants in the conversation bring up the conventional wisdom he’s challenging and share reasons why his theory probably won’t work. But none of the critics has a better alternative. The cost of the test is relatively low, and the stakes of the problem are quite high. There’s no clear answer. This is precisely what a study is for.] What will it cost to test your solution to our problem? Okay, begin.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

THE GAP BETWEEN “I” AND “NO ONE” This is where empathy lies, and it’s an easy chasm to fall into. “I can’t imagine eating durian ice cream,” is not the same as “no one likes durian ice cream.” We fail as marketers, editors and project managers when we can’t find the empathy to bridge the gap. It’s a lovely shortcut to make things for yourself, to imagine that you are the client, the reader or the customer. But most of the time, you’re not. “It’s not for me, but it might be for you.”         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

HENRY FORD KNEW HOW TO DRIVE He also understood the process of organizing a plant to build a car. Scott Belsky knows how to use Photoshop and remembers what it was like to run a small business. And Sarah Jones knows exactly what is required to be on stage, alone, in a crowded theater. The world keeps changing (faster than ever) and leading our team (and our career) requires us to do things we didn’t used to know how to do. In essence, the CEO of every organization, of every size, is more incompetent than ever before. It’s not enough to know how to use the product and have empathy for your customers. Are you making decisions about AI, supply chains, vendor management, the sales pipeline or employee health? It’s hard to wing it if you haven’t flown before, and now most of what CEOs do (even for companies of one or two people) has little to do with the actual product or service on offer. One alternative is to freak out, bury your head and hope for the best. The other is to use the system to learn about the system. Instead of winging it, find the time to learn enough to make good decisions and to understand the tools well enough to benefit from hiring people to use them. Because that’s what CEOs make. They make decisions.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

IMAGINATION IS WORK We spend most of the time we’re in school extinguishing imagination. “Will this be on the test?” is a much more common question than “What if?” We’ve been trained to do tasks in a factory. Imagination is a skill and it takes effort. It’s not useful to say, “I’m not imaginative.” It’s more accurate to realize that we might not care enough to get good at it, or to put in the effort it takes. As tasks continue to be automated, the hard work of imagination is worth investing effort in.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

OVER THE TOP Unreasonable commitment is unreasonable. It happens before there’s a guarantee it will work. It’s out of proportion to what others think is standard. Unreasonable commitment is dedication, persistence, care, energy, connection and investment that doesn’t seem to make sense. You can’t do this in everything, and you probably can’t do it all the time. That’s why it’s unreasonable to expect. I’ve been fortunate enough to do hundreds of podcasts . The hosts are even kinder and more professional than you’d imagine, showing up for months or years with virtually no listeners. They do it because they care. But only one podcast host had me in tears before we began recording. Last September, I spent the day with Mel Robbins and her team of more than a dozen professionals. We recorded for four hours, two episodes worth, and then they quietly spent six months editing the work. Mel’s even more Mel-like in person. She’s fully present, committed and yes, over the top. Our conversation led to my new book and course , and it also reminded me that better is possible. Not just for the person in front of the camera, but for everyone on the team, for the guests and for the people listening. Neil Pasricha wrote about Mel a decade ago. Before last year’s bestseller or the Golden Globe nomination or the podcast hit its stride. It’s a choice. Unreasonable commitment doesn’t seem like a good plan until after it works.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

CAN YOU MAKE IT WORSE? Is there something you can do right now that would impede progress, degrade quality or simply mess up the current situation? Is there a way you could shift perceptions to make people more distraught, less hopeful or even panicked? If it’s so easy to accomplish worse, why do we persist in believing we don’t have the power to make things better?         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

A KITCHEN METAPHOR Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make? Some people don’t care if it’s delicious, as long as it’s interesting. Some don’t need it to be interesting, but it needs to start on time. Others define delicious differently than you do. One couple doesn’t care at all about the effort you put into it. A few don’t care if you’ve worked hard to create a spectacular meal, they’ll notice that the kitchen is a mess. One person is really concerned that the food match their dietary needs. And many are paying attention to the sustainability and cost of what you prepared. Some are uncomfortable if you put in too much of effort. The lesson is simple: empathy matters and empathy is hard. The more diverse the group’s interests, the more you’ll need to let them know in advance where you’re heading. Get clear about what it’s for before you start doing the work.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

FOLLOW-THROUGH How does the ball know? In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through. But the ball is long gone before that happens. So, what’s the point? It turns out that the ball can tell that you intend to have a serious follow-through. A weak or non-existent follow-through requires that you start slowing down before your racquet ever gets to the ball. The metaphor should be pretty clear. If you show up for the audition, your first TEDx talk, your early blog posts, the job interview or your start up hoping to see what happens (“I’ll commit if I get picked”) we can tell. On the other hand, when it’s clear that you’re going to keep on showing up, it’s an invitation to get aboard now. Follow-through doesn’t always work. But it always works better than the alternative.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

“IT’S FASTER TO JUST DO IT MYSELF” Here’s a simple rubric for outsourcing: If you’re never going to need to do this again, and it’s easier to do it than to instruct someone else to do it, by all means, do it yourself. If doing it yourself will give you joy or satisfaction that is greater than the productivity boost you’ll get from leverage or better tools, by please do it yourself. But if you’re going to do it more than once, and the customer can’t tell if you did it yourself or not, perhaps you should have someone else do it or build the tools to get it done more efficiently. Next time will happen sooner than you expect. Better to invest a bit more now than to spend for that shortcut again and again.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

GREEN FLAGS We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around. Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags. We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you’re more likely to find them.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

THE HATS You wear a hat, you’re not a hat. State nouns are verbs that we talk about like they are nouns. Hurry, panic, frenzy, rage, funk, stupor, daze, fog, rut, bind, pickle, fix, slump, tailspin, tizzy. Notice that they’re almost all negative… You’re in a hurry. Really? I get that you’re hurrying. There might be good reasons for this. But the hurry hat isn’t what you are, it’s what you’re doing. We can own our agency and our choices, not announce (to ourselves or the world) that we’re trapped in a container, unable to escape. Until we start saying, “I’m in a joy” perhaps we should find the grace to choose what sort of verb we’d prefer. The essential thing about a hat is that it’s easy to take off.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

IF THEY KNEW… Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don’t know, and who aren’t particularly good at decision making. Others do their best work when the customer knows what’s up and is making an informed choice. Are you closing the sale or opening it? If your prospects knew everything you know, would they choose you? When marketers sign up for the iterative process of education and sophistication, our path is clear. And if we sign up to confuse and manipulate, that path is clear as well.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

THE KNOT: MY UPCOMING NEW BOOK (AND A COURSE THAT’S ALREADY HERE) The Knot , Problems Can Be Solved , will be available in September. And this week, I’m launching a video course that covers the ideas in the book. You can find the course, and how to get it at no extra cost, here . We’re surrounded by problems. Problems create the arc of our days, and solving them creates value for ourselves and for others. There are big problems, the ones that are on a grand stage, and local problems, related to our career, our peers or our projects. If it’s a problem, it can be solved. The best reason for me to publish a book is to help inspire conversations and the momentum that leads to change. Books give us an excuse to engage, and they create a portable bundle of ideas that are easy to share. Several hundred people have already read and listened to the book, and the conversations it’s creating (and the stuck that’s disappearing) is thrilling to see. In talking with folks over the last year and a half, the same theme returns–the frustration of being stuck. We see our world changing and feel the tension, but it’s easy to lose sight of what we can do and how we can show up to make an impact. Without a doubt, there are situations everywhere. Situations are uncomfortable and unhappy, but they have no solution. We can’t do anything about a situation, so our best course of action is to acknowledge it and get back to work on the problems we can solve instead. Gravity is a situation, getting to the moon and back is a problem. My approach to bringing this book to the world is to give booksellers the confidence they need to support it by enrolling as many pre-orders as I can. By creating digital interactions and courses, I’m giving readers a chance to engage with the ideas now, and then receive the book/audiobook when it ships in September. I appreciate your trust, and I hope you find the book and the course useful.         https://lnkd.in/evEPmeDC [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

POPULAR (AND GOOD) Popular is easy to measure. Good, not so much. Setting out to make something popular requires only a focus on the crowd and on the moment. Most pop music is popular simply because that’s what it was built to do. Good work can be good without being popular. And so the two goals aren’t easily aligned. It helps to begin by becoming comfortable with what good feels like to you. Because conflating it with popular is a trap.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

CONSIDERING INFINITY Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism. Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one. The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding did (plus a little more). The status ratchet is real, and it’s easy to be seduced by it. “Compared to what” is a fundamental component of marketing. One reason this works is that a little progress gets you positive feedback, which makes you eager to find a little more, a cycle that doesn’t end. Infinity, all the way up. And, for those seeking social change, the opposite is worth noting: When asking for penance, self-control and good behavior, infinity is not a useful tool. When someone shows up and tries to do better, “that’s not good enough,” is not a particularly useful motivator. The useful process begins by earning enrollment in the journey toward better, but it’s not amplified by our criticism of each action being imperfect. Go-up infinity is about ‘more.’ But too often, social-good infinity is about ‘pure’. And pure is difficult to embrace, because anything less than pure feels like failure.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

FREEDOM OF FOCUS Tonight, when you’re off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read? I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek philosophy from the library or scroll your feeds. We have time (surprisingly called “free”) and we allocate it to focus our attention on something. While it might seem like a free choice, well-paid people and powerful forces are working to shift our focus. Many systems are built to manipulate us into focusing on things that benefit them, not us. If you’ve ever felt lousy after doomscrolling, you might question how free your free time actually is. It takes effort to regain our freedom of focus. We can take this one step further. We not only make choices about the media we consume, we also make choices about our internal focus. Until you got to this sentence, I’m guessing you weren’t spending much time thinking about your high school graduation. We don’t need research to show us that the internal narratives we focus on shift our attitude and soon become our reality. We’ve all experienced it. Soon after we stop the broken record, things get better. Perhaps it’s not a free choice, though. Perhaps the stories we relentlessly focus on are simply the byproduct of our brain’s chemical reactions, a reaction to the world inside us and around us. And yet… many people have learned to shift the stories they rehearse. The first step: change the external focus. Change the people we interact with, the media we consume, the attention we offer. Not all at once, but as a habit, a persistent practice of being mindful about the triggers and amplifiers we consume. If you’re not happy with what your attention is bringing you, you can change it. Aristotle said that we become what we do, but before we do, we focus. And the freedom and responsibility of that focus belong to us.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

VISIBLE MEASURES When an organization is known for speed and quality, it’s likely that if times get tough, quality will suffer before speed does. That’s because customers notice speed right away, but it takes a while to come to a conclusion about quality. If a musician or politician is known for showmanship and wise insights, the showmanship will probably outlast the wisdom. When we measure and compare the easily visible, we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

THE HOLLOW ORANGE It’s tempting but useless. The skin is unblemished and the perfect color. It’s well displayed, promoted widely and on sale. But there’s nothing inside. It’s not worth eating and certainly not worth sharing. This is the streaming series with great lighting and talented actors, based on a beloved novel, but it’s empty and we fade after one or two episodes. This is the book with a polished author photo, pre-written blurbs and plenty of footnotes, created by a ghostwriter and edited by committee. And it’s almost any content created by AI without care or oversight. The solution to hollow oranges isn’t more of them.         [This is a repost of my blog. The most up to date version is found there every morning. It's at seths dot blog]

SMALL CHANGES TO BIG SYSTEMS A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It’s easy to think not much has changed. But book publishing isn’t about printing, and it’s a useful metaphor for the systems changes we’re seeing all around us. The book publishing system was based on scarcity. A successful bookstore was perfect. It had exactly the right number of books — more wouldn’t fit, and fewer wouldn’t pay the rent. The only way for a book publisher to get a new book into the stores was to get the bookseller to take an old book out. As a result of this chokepoint, distribution became the focus. Publishers came to see bookstores, not readers, as their customers—which is why there are few ads for books, or toll-free numbers to call. There were plenty of authors, so publishers selected which ones got a distribution investment. And their timing and launch strategies all revolved around the bookstores. Bookstores have to make smart choices. Months in advance, they choose which new books to take on (and which to leave behind.) If they were wrong, if a new book they don’t carry has an audience, then they lose sales because readers go elsewhere. The small change? Get rid of the scarcity of shelf space. Amazon never removes a book to make room for a new book. They have all the books. The publishers’ existing strategies make little sense when the scarcity of shelf space goes away. One industry term is the “lay down” which describes how many books a major publisher needs to print and distribute to get good nationwide coverage at launch. For books that hope to be bestsellers, that number was 25,000 copies or so… a book from a well-known author would have that many copies in the world before a single copy was sold. Today, for many books like this, the laydown is 250 . 1% of what it used to be. This is why the industry is shifting so much attention to pre-orders. The online world not only eradicated space (you can buy things from anywhere, so shelves don’t matter), it also shifted time. You can indicate interest by buying things long before they’re distributed. Bookstores don’t stock a new book unless they see it’s already been selling online. Another example: Pop music. Through a happy accident, the typical record store was exactly big enough to hold all the music that the typical listener might ever hear on the radio. The radio as a sampling medium was about the same size as the physical distribution medium of the store. You didn’t hear hula music on the radio and you couldn’t buy it at Tower Records. First, we blew up the store. The internet meant that any song you wanted, you could download for free if you cared enough, or listen to it on YouTube (if you only cared a little.) Then, we blew up the radio station. The internet meant that the sampling medium went from DJ-curated to streaming-on-demand. And we demanded. Change the distribution, change the medium. continues at seths.blog