88: Seth Godin on Making a Ruckus, Being Bold & Knowing When to Quit

Seth Godin is a marketer, entrepreneur, and best-selling author. He's one of my favorite public speakers and an inspiring figure in the marketing world. I have talked about him a lot on the podcast.

Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in 1998. Seth worked as VP Direct Marketing at Yahoo until 2000, whcih is when his career pivoted in the direction of authoring books, public speaking and and blogging.

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Seth Godin speaks in depth about the iizard brain which is something that holds us back in reaching our goals and is an irrational part of our human behavior. Have you ever wanted to accomplish something but there's a voice of anxiety telling us to go slow or be careful? That is the lizard brain, which is a pre-historic lump that is responsible for rage, fear and our reproductive drive. And now it gets in the way of us shipping our work, products or ideas.

Seth Godin explained to me that this happens when we say we want one thing, then we do another. Like when we say they want to be successful but then sabotage a job interview. Or we say that we want our product to come to market, but we sandbag their shipping schedule. Or we want to be thin, but never work out. He quotes Steven Pressfield, who calls this process the resistance. "The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door." It's something we all face.

And if you have not read Seth Godin's The Dip, Linchpin or Purple Cow, I recommend that you stop listening and buy them from Amazon.com.  The Dip is a favorite book of mine that helped me move on from a job that I wanted to quit. I eventually was laid off from this job, which turned out to be one of the best career moves of my life. 

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Quotes about The Dip from Seth Godin:

"The only way to become the best at one thing is to quit something else. And the thesis of the book is that we live in a culture where supposedly quitting is a bad thing. But people quit stuff all the time.”

“You need to figure out if you quit or stick,” but you also need to know that the Dip is “a temporary setback that can be overcome with persistence.”

We also talk about how Brad Feld invested in Seth's startup, and how Seth's company published Derek Sivers' book Anything You Want.

Seth Godin's The Dip: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/

Seth Godin's Book List: http://sethgodin.com/sg/books.asp

Seth Godin's Blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

By Seth Godin's books on Amazon, click here.