Seth Godin's Blog, page 289

Will you miss them if they leave? (Call for linchpins)

If you know someone who does great work, who brings passion and humanity with them instead of leaving it at the door of the factory, I'd like to help you celebrate them. Read on for three ways you can do that--fast and free.

Here are the three options, from most involved to least.

1. If you live in New York City or can get here easily
The folks at Vook want to talk to you. Vook creates augmented ebooks with video on the iPad, iPhone and other platforms. They had terrific success translating

Sentences, paragraphs and chapters

It's laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.

Sometimes, you're lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph is dull, or out of place.

But finding people to rearrange the chapters, to criticize the very arc of what you're building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy--that's insanely valuable and rare.

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous...

Are you an elite?

In the developing world, there's often a sharp dividing line between the elites and everyone else. The elites have money and/or an advanced education. It's not unusual to go to the poorest places on earth and find a small

cadre of people who aren't poor at all. Sometimes, this is an unearned position, one that's inherited or acquired in ways that take advantage of others. Regardless, you can't just announce you're an elite and become one.

In more and more societies, though (including my...

Surfing is the new career

Three months ago I wrote about farming and hunting. It seems, though, that the growth industry of our generation is surfing.

Talk to surfers and they'll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for that blissful moment that combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment.

This makes for a great sport (for some people, anyway) but until recently, it wasn't...

Where do you find good ideas?

Do you often find ideas that change everything in a windowless conference room, with bottled water on the side table and a circle of critics and skeptics wearing suits looking at you as the clock ticks down to the 60 minutes allocated for this meeting?

If not, then why do you keep looking for them there?

The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught. And y...

Becoming a bus company

We all have a vision of the typical bus company, slowly moving people from place to place, going through the motions and showing a lot of fatigue.

Some of the elements that make an organization feel like a bus company:

Aging equipment in need of a functional and design refresh

Tired staff, punching the time clock

By the book mentality, with no room for humanity or initiative

Treating all customers the same (poorly) and knowing (and caring) little or nothing about them

Acting like a...

Mentoring, platforms and taking a leap

How much support does someone need (or get, or deserve, you pick) before they ship their art?

The fearful lizard brain demands reassurance and coaching and even a push before it is quiet enough to permit us to do the difficult work our economy demands, before it will allow us to create art that changes others.

So it's logical to wonder how to build systems that encourage legions of people to find that reassurance, and it's encouraging to imagine that we could build a school or a coaching...

Micro magazines and a future of media

Does anyone read Time or Newsweek (being sold to anyone who will take them) any more? And when they disappear, who will really miss them?

The problem is that they are both slow and general. The world, on the other hand, is fast and specific.

Is there a business here?

While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that's awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me. They...

Consumer debt is not your friend

Here's a simple MBA lesson: borrow money to buy things that go up in value. Borrow money if it improves your productivity and makes you more money. Leverage multiplies the power of your business because with leverage, every dollar you make in profit is multiplied.

That's very different from the consumer version of this lesson: borrow money to buy things that go down in value. This is wrongheaded, short-term and irrational.

A few decades ago, mass marketers had a problem: American consumers had...

All the news that fits

After years of reading newspapers, I've never seen a paper that said, "sorry, not much happened yesterday, so today's paper is shorter than usual." In fact, the length of the paper is virtually always driven by the number of ads, not by the amount of news (wars, elections and disasters are the exception). Editors are told how many pages of stories they can run by the publisher, who bases it on ads sold.

The web, of course, doesn't have the problem of paying for paper, so the length of a...