Seth Godin People Quotations [Page 2]

Personalizatio n wasn't supposed to be a cleverly veiled way to chase prospects around the web, showing them the same spammy ad for the same lame stuff as everyone else sees. No, it is a chance to differentiate at a human scale, to use behavior as the most important clue about what people want and more important, what they need.

What I learned: Shun nonbelievers. Ignore critics. Do your best for people who want to dance with you.

It’s okay. Let your ego push you to be the initiator. But tell your ego that the best way to get something shipped is to let other people take the credit. The real win for you (and your ego) is seeing something get shipped, not in getting the credit when it does.

Here's conventional wisdom: Success makes you happy. Happiness permits you to be generous. In fact, it actually works like this: Generosity makes you happy. Happy people are more likely to be successful.

Marketing isn't done by computers, it's done by people. And people who sense opportunity and have the confidence to be remarkable will always defeat defensive actions by people who have given up.

The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.

If you're remarkable it's likely that some people won't like you.

Entertainment has seduced us into believing that we have a chance to live the life they live in the movies. Even the people in the movies don't live that life. It doesn't take 135 minutes to make a life, it takes almost a century. Everything doesn't depend on what happens in the next ninety seconds. Ever.

Here's the fascinating part, call it the golden shoulder: We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there's a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don't know who they are.

The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That's one reason why the web is so fascinating-it's a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people.

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed.

The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends.

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

Treat different people differently. Anything else is a compromise.

What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.

Teaching young people to sell is a priceless gift.

Or, if I take that same auditorium and I make it much bigger and put more space between seats, it'll be quieter because it's much harder when you're not in physical contact with people to spread a virus from person-to-person, right? There are all sorts of patterns that we see in epidemiology that help us understand why something spreads.

I hope I'm better looking than Yoda, but - I'm really interested in people who have something to say, a change they want to make and can't figure out why they can't make it spread.

So by giving people a tool that they can share and benefit from, it's a form of media that isn't controlled by Rupert Murdoch or the guys at Viacom. It is a form of media that is earned every single time it spreads.

What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. They would ignore the geeks, and - God forbid - the laggards. It was all about going for the center. I don't think that's the strategy we want to use anymore.

You have to pay the price to be in the right place at the right time often enough that people tend to see you as the regular kind.

I feel like I'm treating people as I'd like to be treated.

Making an average pitch to average people, or having an average gala for average people isn't going to scale anymore. You've got to find the people who care. Those people are worth all of your time.

Great boss is challenging people in the right way. Leading, not managing. Supporting them by giving them both a platform they can count on and expectations they can stretch for.