The Best of Seth Godin

There have always been two sides: Hiring people to do tasks and jobs, or hoping to be hired to do those tasks and jobs. The difference now is that it’s increasingly difficult to find a good j…

Neither AI nor ads. The problem started with search, and was weaponized by Amazon. Display ads go back at least 100 years. A century ago, the idea was simple: Show up in a place where people are of…

“May your cup runneth over…” This begs the question: how big a cup? The logistics of vessel size determine how much money we need to raise, how big a team we need, how many custom…

Sports analogies often let us down. A colleague was explaining how measurement was difficult in many organizations, unlike a basketball game, where the time, the score and the stats are clear and o…

When we look in the mirror, who do we see? [A note I sent to a young friend.] The person we see when we look in the mirror is the person we become, the person we fight to defend and persist with. I…

You have more than a billion choices online. With just a few clicks, you could be just about anywhere. Thanks for reading this today. What did you have for lunch yesterday? Of all the lunches in al…

The way we think about our priorities makes a huge difference. Leaders of every stripe make one thing more than any other: decisions. In any environment with constraints (which is, actually, any en…

This question is a trap. It’s based on scarcity and entitlement, and most of all, the world isn’t listening. When more and more people focus on this question, it simply pushes us apart.…

This is not a promise to be made lightly. It’s not, “I’ve got your back until it becomes difficult or inconvenient for me.” It puts us on the hook, without exception. This i…

Not as a way to make big dollars (blogging didn’t do that either). But as a way to share your ideas, to lead your community, to earn trust. Podcasting is a proven technology that is still in …

Digital abundance creates a new problem. Most of our lives are filled with “or” decisions. You can have this or that. You can save money for the big party or you can go out for lunch. Y…

Why are we more likely to get tasks done than to take on new initiatives? Checking something off a to-do list requires far less emotional energy than adding something to the list was in the first p…

A project is a promise. It’s about coordinating unknowable future events to deliver something of value. Showing up on time for a meeting is a project (airlines! traffic! weather!) and so is b…

The art of project management includes the dance between velocity and possibility. If you describe the outcome with specificity and remove as many variables as possible, you’ll get the work d…

In just about every group, people decide in advance how they’ll show up when it comes to learning, to winning and to responding to opportunities. They’re wearing a hat with a label, and…

If you get a 99% quality haircut or a 99% close-to-perfect meal, it’s better than good. On the other hand, if the scrub nurse only does a 99% job of disinfecting the tools in the operating ro…

The world is going to change, and resilience is our best response. It’s not about building things that always turn out the way we expect. Bulletproof is too expensive, too rigid and requires …

It’s difficult to get adults to wear bicycle helmets. (I wrote about this on the blog 16 years ago). The reason has nothing to do with comfort or safety. It has to do with signals. Semiotics …

This is the dilemma that every game designer, form creator and teacher faces. Writing an instruction manual, doing a survey, creating a map–they’re all difficult tasks because of the tr…

When AI is smart enough to write an essay, then what happens? GPT3 is back in the news, because, as expected, it’s getting better and better. Using a simple chat interface, you can easily ask…

«If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.»

If you and I play a game of cards, the winner will largely be decided by luck. Get good cards and you come out ahead. If you and I play 100 games of backgammon, the better player will win, because …

Marshall Sahlins and others showed that early hunter gatherer societies generally didn’t work very hard. Two or three hours a day were spent gathering food, and the rest of the time was for s…

My bookshelves are filled with books I’ve read once. But there are others that I come back to again and again. I hand them out like Halloween candy to colleagues, and often, they end up payin…

Momentum activities like public speaking, board sports and leadership all share an attribute with riding a bicycle: It gets easier when you get good at it. The first error we often make is believin…