Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2018. The figures of 18 bestsellers and more than 7,000 blog posts are from 2018 and have since grown. Squidoo, mentioned as the platform that cemented his reputation, closed in 2014, and its content moved to HubPages.
Seth Godin is hard to define, but we will give it a try. He is the author of 18 bestsellers, a successful entrepreneur and one of the oldest and most influential bloggers in the world of marketing. On his blog he has written more than 7,000 posts, and on top of that come the pieces he writes for other outlets. Today we are going to pull out some of his most valuable business lessons and his best advice for your career.
Among Seth Godin’s standout books, which I highly recommend, are:
- Purple Cow
- Tribes
- Poke the Box
Godin is also one of the fiercest critics of today’s education system. He does not say the system is broken, but that the system young people come out of today was built for times gone by. So it simply needs updating for the present.
Why you shouldn’t do as you’re told
Godin told Foundr that he sees the education system as a way of creating obedient people, one that tends to punish those who have something to contribute to changing or improving the world.
He recalls that one of his teachers once told him he was the bane of her existence and would never amount to anything with that attitude.
In the end, he says, he grew up to be an avid reader and turned things around.
Seth Godin had his first real business at 16. While at university, he co-founded the largest student-run business ever in the United States. He admits he never asked himself “How do I make money doing something?” but rather “How can I find enough resources to build a project that interests me?” He would carry this way of thinking with him from then on. Godin is a great believer in pursuing indirect goals.
In other words, he does not think that if you want to make a lot of money you should set yourself the goal of making a lot of money. In this sense, he was one of the pioneers in changing this point of view within business marketing.
Seth Godin’s theory of how today’s education system was born
Godin believes we were programmed long ago to obey and not to stand out too much. He explains that the first public school in the United States was started by Horace Mann in Massachusetts, in response to industry’s need for obedient workers.
In his words, roughly: they could not find enough people willing to stand or sit in a dark factory for 10 or 12 hours a day and do what they were told, so they invented public school to train people to be obedient. The school you went to was optimised to program you for the productive environment of a factory.
See also: Business lessons every entrepreneur should follow (2018)
Since we are conditioned from school onwards to be part of an obedient mass, many people already have the routine built in: eight hours at school, followed later by another eight or ten hours in a factory.
What should we really teach children?
Seth Godin says children should not be taught to be obedient within a system that no longer works. Today people need to know that they can succeed without a job and without a boss.
As Godin puts it, children should not be taught to be normal. From an early age, they should be taught two things:
- How to solve problems
- How to lead
Focus on what makes you different, on how you differ from everyone else. Be weird. Do the work that matters.
Godin on doing the work
He says he has not had a job since 1999, referring to his time as Yahoo’s vice president of direct marketing, and that before that he had not had one since 1986. For him, focusing on doing the work rather than having a job is a key part of being an entrepreneur.
You could say the key to Godin’s success comes from his determination not to have a job or to please a boss. Godin began to shake up the world of marketing when he founded Yoyodyne in 1995, a company he ended up selling to Yahoo for 30 million in 1998.
It was after creating the Squidoo platform that he consolidated his reputation as an innovative entrepreneur in marketing.
How do you achieve success, according to Seth Godin?
In a podcast interview, Godin said that life comes down to two things:
- First, the lottery of how we are born.
- Second, the choices we make based on the culture around us.
We cannot change how we are born, but we can change our environment, rebel against our culture and make different choices.
Godin in his own words
Here is his account, paraphrased from the interview:
I made some decisions along the way that seemed unwise at the time. I ignored the criticism and persisted.
When I left business school, everyone went to work for a consulting firm or a big tech company. I went to work for an educational software company in Boston that nobody had heard of, on a salary of $31,000. That was a quarter of what my classmates were earning. It was a bad decision.
Then that changed my life, and two years later I quit the job to get married and moved to New York with no real plan for how I was going to make a living. That didn’t look like a good decision to many people at the time either.
Then I started an internet company in 1991, when nobody even had an email address. Sometimes, when you are ahead of the curve, you are simply wrong, and that has happened to me quite a lot. But you don’t have to be right very often to be glad you did it.
… I failed a lot, so I was experimenting a lot the whole time. But I was also right a few times.
On passion and timing
It is true that we live in one of the best times ever to do what we love and to shape our projects on our own. If you want to sing, all you have to do is sing, upload your videos to YouTube or SoundCloud, and people will hear your music.
You can self-publish your own book. You no longer need publishers the way you used to. Just click “publish” and your book is out there.
You can do anything you set your mind to, but timing is also everything, and your passion will not always pay off the way you would like. It is also other people who have to say that you have talent. And sometimes the simple truth is that you don’t have talent.
In Godin’s words
Again paraphrasing Godin:
Suppose you consider yourself a brilliant pianist.
It could be that you are not as good as you thought, and it could also be that you are a magnificent pianist but there are already too many famous pianists. Even if you were very good at the piano, if the world is full of good pianists, your goals in that case would not be reasonable.
Why did I write the best-selling marketing book of its time?
He continues:
The truth is that when I wrote Purple Cow, there were not many marketing books competing with me. I chose a subject and a moment where I had a good chance of winning. Of course, on marketing I had a lot to say that other writers were not saying. Luck, randomness, strategy? Perhaps a bit of each.
Seth Godin’s 5 essential steps to succeeding as an entrepreneur
These are some of the lessons Seth Godin offers entrepreneurs.
1. Stop being a wannabe entrepreneur and become an entrepreneur
The idea is to start small, but to start. Start right now. Make something people will pay you $5 for. Put out a business idea that people respond to. This is the most important step. Simply start.
2. Find out who you can teach
The act of teaching someone something you know makes you significantly smarter. Just find someone who needs your help and help them.
3. Write every day
It doesn’t matter whether anyone reads it. It doesn’t matter whether you put your real name on the blog or not, but write every day. The act of writing about something you believe in, something you have thought about, knowing you have to do it again tomorrow, will make you better at everything you do.
4. Be hungry
Your passion doesn’t matter and your idea doesn’t matter. Those are myths that hold us back. You don’t need to be passionate about your idea, and your idea doesn’t need to be good. What you need is hunger. Hunger to learn, hunger to do, hunger to create.
5. Forget about perfection
Nothing you look at is perfect. No electronic device, no hotel, no service. Nothing is perfect. Everything can be improved. So you are better off creating an imperfect product and putting it in the customer’s hands than chasing perfection in a product that never reaches the customer.
And what do people do when they act as entrepreneurs?
- They make decisions.
- They invest in activities and assets that are not certain.
- They persuade others to support a mission whose outcome is not guaranteed.
- This is the most amorphous, the hardest to pin down and therefore the juiciest: they embrace (rather than run away from) the work of doing things that might not work. As far as I can tell, that’s it. Everything else you can hire for.
See also: 11 reflections on money from Seth Godin
Featured image: Yaffa, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
