The Best of Seth Godin

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…

What’s a car for? Transportation. With reliability. Status. A transaction with the bank. A transaction with the dealer. Your relationship with the neighbors. A statement about your style and …

They’re easy to confuse. An event happens at date certain, then it’s over, nothing more to be done. A journey might include an event, but it’s bigger than that, and ongoing. A wed…

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?»

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…

But first, let’s understand some words… Bitcoin is not the blockchain. If the blockchain is a printing press, Bitcoin is a kind of paper money. There are countless things that one can do with a pri…

«The reason the blockchain matters is that it is an agent of change. Just like the transistor and yes, the printing press, when an agent of change shows up, it often leads to shifts that we probably didn’t expect.»

Like most traps, they’re mysterious and then appealing and then it’s too late. An NFT is digital treasure chest, a status symbol and an apparent item of value. Like a Pokemon card, or a…

Someone’s not going to get it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t funny to you. It simply means that culture works because, for a moment, a group of people share a history, an understand…

Is popular the same as good? Is popular possible? Is popular your goal? There are tens of thousands of humans spending their days trying to be popular on Instagram, buying outfits, wearing hats and…

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 …

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 …

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.»

More than ten, actually. Millions of books will be published this year and for good reason. People rarely regret the effort. Everyone has their own, but here are some of the reasons to get you star…

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…

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 …

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…

Engineering problems are difficult, but they have a right answer. People problems, by their nature, are on a spectrum, a distribution of possible forward paths. But they’re complicated. A sit…

In most pyramids, the top gets all the attention, but it’s the foundation that truly matters. Marketing is no exception. The base of the pyramid, the most important layer, is INTENTION. What …