The Best of Seth Godin

We spend almost no time teaching toddlers about freedom. Instead, the lessons we teach (and learn) for our entire lives are about responsibility. It’s easy to teach freedom, but important to …

For a decade, Cliffs Notes were the bestselling section of the bookstore. They were a simple way for any high school student to get insight, examples and answers about the books they were assigned …

It can be difficult. Explaining atoms or molecules, or decision making, or what you do at your job… The reason that it’s difficult is that in order to explain something, we need to real…

Vitally important, rarely taught, easily messed up. In order to go onto the next thing, which we all do (unless you’re still wearing pajamas with feet and taking ballet lessons), we need to w…

Amazon took in more than $30 billion in ad revenue last year, money spent to elevate some products over others in the hierarchy of attention. It’s probably true that someone shopping on Amazo…

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…

Decisions and crises and moments of significant effort and risk can be stressful. But the challenge of a stressful day is rarely directly related to today, it’s about tomorrow or years from n…

«Which means that pushing your way through some critical choices now will probably pay off in far more good days later. How many good days later does hard decision work today earn us?»

[There’s a lesson here for all marketers—legacy brands have clouded our understanding of what marketing can do today…] US prohibition ended in 1933. After that, there was a gold rush th…

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…

We’re often reminded that the best way to get what we want is to help other people get what they want. That opening the door for others makes it more likely that others will open the door for…

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…

Debt is a financial miracle. If you buy a property for 20% down, with the bank financing the rest, and it goes up in value by just 10%, your profit is 50%. (I’ll wait while you do the math.) …

Ever since there have been taxes, people have been against paying them. If we define a tax as a “non-productive burden on our activities,” then it makes sense. And a payment doesn’…

It is, by far, the fastest-growing social network in history, growing more than 20% in about a week. And yet it didn’t stutter much. How can this be? It’s a network in the real internet…

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 …

Put this one next to Dunning Kruger, which shows that people of low ability traditionally overrate how talented they are. The Massie Effect is the tendency of people who support good causes to beli…

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…

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 …

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…

History is filled with examples of people who made errors in judgment. The executives at Decca that turned down the Beatles, the CEO at Digital who said that no one would ever need to have a comput…

The traveling circus didn’t have to appeal to everyone. They rode into town with the elephants, the bearded lady and the Tasmanian Devil, and the people who came, came. Once the folks who wan…