The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

by Seth Godin

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.

Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.

In order to get as far as she’s gotten, she’s quit countless other pursuits.

The rewards are heavily skewed, so much so that it’s typical for #1 to get ten times the benefit of #10, and a hundred times the benefit of #100.

It’s called Zipf’s law, and it applies to résumés and college application rates and best-selling records and everything in between. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.

With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.

most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top.

Faced with infinity, people panic.

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

In a free market, we reward the exceptional.

The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.

The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.

For a quarter of a century, he needed to suck it up, keep his head down, and do what he was told. He needed to hit his numbers, work longer hours than everyone else, and kiss up to his boss of the moment. Day in and day out, year after year.

a dead end is keeping you from doing something else.

The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.

The Cul-de-Sac and the Cliff Are the Curves That Lead to Failure If you find yourself facing either of these two curves, you need to quit. Not soon, but right now. The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves soon enough.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.

The reason we’re here is to solve the hard problems.

It’s not enough to survive your way through this Dip. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is.

And yet the real success goes to those who obsess.

rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.

It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality and quit.

People who train successfully pay their dues for the first minute or two and then get all the benefits at the very end. Unsuccessful trainers pay exactly the same dues but stop a few seconds too early.

If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.

Being better than 98 percent of the competition used to be fine. In the world of Google, though, it’s useless.

all of your competition is just a click away,

Those struggling artists at the local craft fair are struggling because they don’t have the guts or the wherewithal to take their work to the next level.

In almost every field, the competitor that’s first with a big, aggressive sales force has a huge advantage.

Because day to day, it’s easier to stick with something that we’re used to, that doesn’t make too many waves, that doesn’t hurt.

If you can get through the Dip, if you can keep going when the system is expecting you to stop, you will achieve extraordinary results.

Don’t play the game if you realize you can’t be the best in the world.

Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

While starting up is thrilling, it’s not until you get through the Dip that your efforts pay off.

Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.

You may be sure that your product is the best in the world, but no one outside a tiny group cares at all. You’re busy pushing your new idea wherever it can go. Meanwhile, most consumers could care less about your idea or those fancy high-heeled shoes or some cutting-edge type of glue. Instead, they wait. They wait for something to be standardized, tested, inexpensive, and ready for prime time.

The bulk of the market, any market, is made up of those folks in the middle of the bell curve, the ones who want to buy something proven and valued.

When the pain gets so bad that you’re ready to quit, you’ve set yourself up as someone with nothing to lose. And someone with nothing to lose has quite a bit of power. You can go for broke. Challenge authority. Attempt unattempted alternatives. Lean into a problem; lean so far that you might just lean right through it.

Quitting Is Not the Same as Failing

Failing happens when you give up, when there are no other options, or when you quit so often that you’ve used up all your time and resources.

Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else.

“Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.”

So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.”

A job is just a tactic, a way to get to what you really want.

When you hear about an author who got turned down thirty times before signing with a publisher or of an overnight sensation who paid her dues for a decade in coffee shops, you’re seeing how persistence pays off across a market.

Decide before the race the conditions that will cause you to stop and drop out.

it’s the pressure right around full that has the most impact.