Seth Godin's Blog, page 314

Apparent risk and actual risk

There are people who I will never encounter in a restaurant.

That's because when these people go out for dinner, they go to chain restaurants. These are the tourists in New York who seek out the familiar Olive Garden instead of walking down the street to Pure.

That's fine. It's a personal choice.

But it got me thinking about the difference between apparent and actual risk, and how that choice affects just about everything we do.

The concierge at a fancy hotel spends her time...

Traction and friction

A big car on a wet frozen lake goes nowhere. No traction, no motion.

A small bug working its way across a gravel driveway takes forever. Too much friction, too little motion.

If you're stuck, it's probably because one of these two challenges.

There's not enough traction online. Too many choices, too few boundaries. It's easy to get stuck because there's nothing to push off of, no box to think outside of.

There's too much friction in stuck industries. The walls have been expanded for so long, you ...

When will the world make fun of you?

Tom's Shoes continues to make a difference, combining an innovative business model with brilliant storytelling.

Which leads to parodies, of course, which Tom's loves. Spread the word, share the story. If it's worth telling, it's worth parodying. When will we be able to parody what you do?

The last one is the real deal, of course. PS if you know a brilliant internet marketer who wants to join up, have them drop Blake a line at Ecommercejobs@tomsshoes.com. He's looking.

...

The three elements of full employment

You will never be out of work if you can demonstrably offer one of the following:

Sales

Additive effort

Initiation

Sales speaks for itself. If you can sell enough to cover what you cost and then some, there will always be someone waiting to hire you.

Additive effort is distinguished from bureaucracy or feel-good showing up. Additive effort generates productivity far greater than the overhead you add to the organization. If your skills make the assembly line go twice as fast, or the...

"What do you need me to do?"

This is a question that defines the person asking it. It is very different from, "here's what you might need..."

If you ask people for the next task on the list, if you allow them to define the thing they are buying from you, you have abdicated responsibility. Your work product becomes dependent on the insight and guts of the person giving you an assignment. This is especially dangerous for consultants and freelancers, because the answer might be, "nothing." Or it might be a paying gig that's ...

The tacky techie conundrum

[click picture to enlarge:]

Our Culture (high and popular) is usually created by people who are happy with the systems the world has given them. Magazine editors don't spend a lot of time wishing for better technology. Opera singers focus more on their singing than on microphone technologies. Novelists proudly use typewriters.

Sure, there are exceptions like Les Paul (who developed the electric guitar) and Mitch Miller (who invented reverb) but these exceptions prove the rule: often, culture i...

Promiscuous dispersal of your email address

I just went through the hassle of trying to get some B2B firms the details needed to give me an informed quote on a project.

I visited eight sites. Six of them hide their email address. They use forms of one sort of another. One firm refused to accept more than 500 characters in the "how can we help you" box, while three of them wanted to know what state I was in, etc.

Email contact is like a first date. If you show up with a clipboard and a questionnaire, it's not going to go well, I'm...

Crowded at the top

In the 260 weeks from 1966 to 1970, there were only thirteen musical acts responsible for every  #1 song on the Billboard charts.

In the 260 weeks that accounted for the first half of the 1970s, it was 26. (hat tip to John Marks for the stat).

Sometimes, we define a golden age in a market as a time of stability, when one or a few giants capture all of our attention. AT&T telephones, Superman comics, Beatles records, IBM computers, The New York Times... and now Google. Choices are easy, the...

Less than zero

The long tail is real, but sometimes the longest parts reach underwater. When there's enough choices, it means that some things will never get picked.

Charles Blow reports in the NY Times that:

"A study last year conducted by members of PRS for

Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13

million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single

buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs.

That's less than one percent of the songs."

Sinusitus relief

30,000,000 people suffer from sinusitis, making it the most popular (!) disease in the US. I've had it off and on for years.

After much research, I'd like to share three tips:

This book is the single best one on the topic. It's smart and practical.

You might buy a nasal irrigator and use it twice a day. It's super weird, and it costs $100, and it works. Really.

And you could (I know, it's horrible) drink two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar every day.

This post is totally off topic, but if I...