Seth Godin Book Pdf

[Violette Taps]

Nowadd to it. Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring and motivated. Generous, empathic and consistent. A deep listener, with patience. What happens to your organization when someone like that joins your team?

How do we build people-centric organizations while also accepting the fact that two thirds of our managers (presumably well paid, well trained and integral to our success) are so uncomfortable doing an essential part of their job that they admitted it to a stranger?

In a recent survey, the Graduate Management Admission Council reported that although MBAs were strong in analytical aptitude, quantitative expertise and information-gathering ability, they were sorely lacking in other critical areas that employers find equally attractive: strategic thinking, written and oral communication, leadership and adaptability. Are these mutually exclusive? Must we trade one for the other?

The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one another. Not to manage, belittle, intimidate or control. Simply to seek to be understood and to do the work to understand.

Excerpted from The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams by Seth Godin, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright Seth Godin 2023.

Seth Godin is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people thinkabout work. His books have been translated into 38 languages. Godin writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world, and his TED talks are among the most popular of all time. He is the founder of the altMBA, the social media pioneer Squidoo, and Yoyodyne, one of the first internet companies. Find out more at seths.blog.

The passage above comes from The Dip, a book that washugely influential to me during my time at The Home Depot. It's a short littlebook about when to persevere and when to quit, and how to know the difference.As you'll hear in our show, The Dip remains every bit as relevant todayas when it was first published.

But that's not all we'll discuss. Seth shares exciting news abouthis new venture, GOODBIDS, which aims to flip the script on charity auctions.You'll hear how it's unique approach helps great causes raise funds far moreeffectively.

Seth offers a ton of other great insights and observationsthroughout our conversation. He'll explain the throughline that connects all ofhis books and businesses, and he'll talk about the importance of leaving thingsbetter than we find them.

SETHGODIN: Oh, it goes back to you.

First, for all the stuff in my house that I bought at your store, but secondly,because of the way you are showing up in the world, you don't have to do this.

You're more than a hundred episodes in over and over and over again, turning onlights so you don't hear it from your listeners often enough.

Thank you, Frank, for doing the work.

FRANKBLAKE: Thank you, Seth.

So I want to start with a thank you to you because you wrote a book in 2007. Soit was roughly around the same time I was starting as CEO of Home Depot and thebook was titled The Dip, and it's an absolutely terrific book.

It's hugely helpful. It helped me enormously.

And rather than my going on about a description on it, maybe just start turningit over to you.

What was the prompt behind the book and the key lessons you wanted to convey?

SETHGODIN: So I don't think many people listening to this still wear a tutu andtake ballet lessons or maybe even do karate, but you did when you were a kid.

You quit those things and you quit them with honor because it freed up time todo the thing you wanted to do next.

And it turned out no one had ever written a book about quitting before.

And it felt to me like talking about it, staring it straight in the face andbeing clear that there are things we should quit and there are reasons weshould persist, and we need to know the difference between the two.

Itunlocks our ability to stop hiding.

It gives us the chance to be the contribution we want to be because we get tosay, "I'm not a failure because I quit. I'm not a failure because I'm notlistening to Vince Lombardi. I'm actually a success because I care enough aboutsomething else to go do it."

And the flip side of that is too often we sign up for projects that seem likewe're going to get a lot of applause for them, but as soon as they get hard, wequit.

And that's a mistake that getting through the dip, getting through the hardpart gets you to the other side.

And I think you demonstrated that as the CEO.

FRANKBLAKE: Before we got on air, I told Seth that I used a chart of his over andover when I would talk to folks at Home Depot and outside Home Depot.

I'm sure the question I got is the same question I'm sure you got.

Well, how do you know what you're supposed to quit and what you're supposed tocontinue on through?

SETHGODIN: Right. So the book's really short, and I didn't answer that part onpurpose because it turns out there isn't an obvious answer.

That is the art of this thing.

There is a shortcut and the shortcut is - has anyone ever made it through thisdip before?

And when you're taking organic chemistry in med school, it's really, reallyhard.

It's hard on purpose, not because you need organic chemistry to do most formsof medicine, but because it's to separate the people who can do the work fromthe ones who can't.

And you know that people get through it. And on the other side there aredoctors.

So when the hard part shows up, we need to celebrate and say, "Oh, this isthe dip. Other people have been through it before."

On the other hand, you are delusional if you think that you're going to be ableto assemble a hundred NFTs and become a billionaire.

That's never happened before, it's never going to happen.

Maybe someone will be a pioneer and win that lottery, but it's not going to beyou.

So understanding that there's history here I think is the first step.

FRANKBLAKE: It was important to me, but I love the quote in the book that,"Successful people don't just ride out the dip, they lean into it."

Would you explain that a little bit?

SETHGODIN: So if you run the marathon, people often stop at mile 20 and otherpeople finish all 26 miles.

What's the difference? Both people are tired, right?

No one finishes a marathon, run well, and isn't tired.

The difference is when you get tired at mile 20, it either takes over or youfigure out where to put the tired.

And that act of saying, "I'm supposed to be tired at mile 20, that means Idid what I was supposed to do in this race. Thank you, now I can finish,"is different than simply suffering.

And so if you go to the gym in March when we're recording this, it's a lotemptier than it was in February.

And that's because a lot of people who join gyms after the holidays do it forthree or four weeks, then it gets hard.

And when it gets hard is when people quit. But that's exactly the moment whenwe need to not quit.

FRANKBLAKE: So I have huge admiration for people like yourself who can put bigthoughts into comprehensible commentary.

And I'm curious how much of it comes from your own experience or observingothers?

And in the case of The Dip, is this something that you go, "I had to fightthrough that 20th mile and this is what I learned," or "I saw a lotof people who fought through the 20th mile"?

SETHGODIN: Well, I guess I have two parts to my answer.

The first part is I write like I talk, and it makes it much easier to write ifyou do that.

So we need to learn to get better at talking.

And what I've built my career around is noticing things, noticing things thathappen to me, noticing things that happen to others, and then talking aboutthem.

And if I say it out loud and it sounds cogent, then I just have to write itdown.

And toooften we forget to say it out loud.

And so if I see something I don't understand, if there's a business in New YorkCity that sells a certain kind of pizza slice, and I walked by at one o'clockin the afternoon and there were 18 people waiting in line.

And how could that be? No other pizza place, isn't it?

And so I inquired and I looked at it and I thought about it and then I figuredit out.

That's not worth a blog post because the answer was sort of banal.

But the point is we are all noticers. We've been noticers since we were twoyears old, one years old.

What are you noticing? Say it out loud and then write it down.

FRANKBLAKE: So there's a self-description that you provided somewhere.

There are so many quotes from you from the internet, it's hard to know where,but there's a great self-description where you say that you're a teacher andyou do projects, which is a great description.

But what's the throughline or what do you see as the throughline for all of thethings that you've been doing and looking at and commenting, if there is one?

SETHGODIN: I think there is.

I think that some people would call me a marketer, but I don't because I waslucky enough to be in the right place to redefine marketing when the world ofmarketing was changing.

But it's not because I want to be a marketer because I want to be in service ofa certain kind of change.

And I won the parent lottery. I won the birthday lottery.

I was born with an enormous amount of opportunity and both my parents werephilanthropists and Thanksgiving would be a dozen refugees at our house fordinner.

And Ijust came to the conclusion that the object of the game is not to win as muchas you possibly can and then die, that this whole idea that we have to addanother zero and that Milton Friedman had a point I think is ridiculous.

That what we're here to do is to be generative and to create possibility, toleave things better than we found them and to be missed if we're not doing whatwe do.

And so all of the arc of my work is basically saying, "Here's this thing,how can we use it to make things better?"

And sometimes people will misuse my words and build things to tear things down,and that bothers me a lot.

Sometimes I build software projects where the goal is to help charities raisemoney or to connect people.

They're all about the same thing though, which is we only got one planet, weonly have a finite amount of time, what are we doing to make things better?

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