Seth Godin's Blog, page 291

Quid pro quo (santa math)

Walk up to the falafel stand and hand the guy $3. He hands you a falafel, no onions.

This for that.

Something for something.

The time between surrendering the money and getting the sandwich is tiny. You gave him something, you got something. It's simple.

Now, stretch it out a bit. You order dinner in a restaurant. They treat you nicely, the room is beautiful, you enjoy the evening, then you pay the bill. This, pause, pause, pause, that.

Go to law school. Pay a lot of money. Spend a lot of time...

Empty your library

If you've read one of my books, thanks. I write them to be read, so without you, it would be a pointless exercise.

I'm asking a favor: Would you give your copy (or lend, I'm fine either way) of Linchpin away?

Go find someone you care about, hand them the book and insist they read it. I'd consider that a gift of the first order, and I hope they will too.

In fact, don't just do it with Linchpin, do it with all the books that have changed you, regardless of author or age. They're not earning...

Deniability

How much of the time you invest in a project is spent preparing excuses, creating insurance, seeking deniability and covering your ass just in case things go poorly in the end?

At some point, that effort becomes so great you never actually ship anything, which of course is the best protection against failure of all.

Who judges your work?

Here's the mistake we make in high school:

We let anyone, just anyone, judge our work (and by extension, judge us.)

Sue, the airheaded but long-legged girl in Spanish class gets the right to judge our appearance.

Bill, the bitter former-poet English teacher gets the power to tell us if we're good at writing.

And on and on.

The cheerleaders are deputized as the Supreme Court of social popularity, and the gym teacher forever has dibs on whether or not we're macho enough to make it in the world...

8 things I wish everyone knew about email

Change your settings so that email from you has a name, your name, not a blank or some unusual characters, in the from field. (ask a geek or IT person for help if you don't know how).

Change your settings so that the bottom of every email includes a signature (often called a sig) that includes your name and your organization.

Change your settings so that when you reply to a note, the note you're replying to is included below what you write (this is called quoting).

Don't hit reply all...

The April Linchpin Session

Here's a 45 minute-long live recording of a master class session I did last week in New York. No slides, no script, just a riff.

Download LinchpinSessionSethGodinApril

Some people have recommended that I start selling these recordings in the iTunes store. For now, I think it's more interesting to share them for free, to encourage you to share them and to see if we can change anyone along the way. Feel free to post in other places to cut down on the bandwidth bottleneck.

Enjoy.

Sad Tim

At the post office the other day, a guy wearing a beautiful handmade scarf finishes his transaction and starts away from the counter.

A small nail holding the molding apparently isn't hammered in all the way. It catches the scarf, pulls the threads and ruins the scarf. The man turns to the counter, looks at the postal worker who took his money and says, "There's a loose nail here, it just ruined my scarf."

Tim, the postal worker, beaten down, tired, given up, stands behind the counter and...

"I quilt"

When you've had enough, can't tolerate your job any longer and are ready to quit, perhaps you could try one last thing.

Quilt instead.

You've got nothing to lose, right? I mean, you're going to quit anyway, so what's the worst that could happen to you?

So quilt. Spend hours every day integrating the people you work with into a cohesive group. Weave in your customers as well. Take every scrap, even the people you don't like, and sew them together. Spend far less time than you should on the...

How to buy a house

Actually, how to think about buying a house.

You don't see a lot of ads trying to sell you on spending too much money on a house. It's more subtle than that. The marketing is all around us, and has been for years. The enormous social pressure and the expectations that come with it lead to misunderstandings and confusion. Here's my advice to someone in the market:

In an era where house prices rise reliably (which was 1963 to 2007), it was almost impossible to overpay for a house. It was an...

Giving away a magician's secrets

Steve Cohen makes more than a million dollars a year doing magic tricks.

I will now tell you the secrets of this magic:

He sells to a very specific group of people, people who are both willing to hear what he has to say and able to pay what he wants to charge them.

He tells a story to this group, a story that matches their worldview. He doesn't try to teach non-customers a lesson or persuade them that they are wrong or don't know enough about his art. Instead, he makes it easy for his happy...