The Wisdom Of Seth

One of my heroes is Seth Godin, an American author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker.

Seth’s idealogy in business speaks volumes on integrity and smart ideas. He has published over 19 best-selling books. One of my all-time favourites is Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable.

It goes a little like this:

“You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice. The old checklist of P’s used by marketers – Pricing, Promotion, Publicity – aren’t working anymore. The golden age of advertising is over. It’s time to add a new P – the Purple Cow.”

Intrigued? You should be!

Seth’s Book available here

Seth has kept a blog every day for over a decade and has spent most of his life as a professional writer and believes books are a great way to dig deep into a concept. We couldn’t agree more.

His podcast Akimbo is next level, and Seth doesn’t hold back when sharing information, a rarity in today’s hoard mentality. The Akimbo name means a bend in the river or the bend in an archer’s bow. For Godin, he says it has become a symbol for strength, a posture of possibility, the idea that when we stand tall, arms bent, looking right at it, we can make a difference. The podcast is about culture and how it can be changed to make a difference. Quite poignant in the world right now don’t you think? Not just in marketing and advertising!

A keen philanthropist, Godin has helped hundreds of NFP’s reach fundraising goals and has raised many dollars for organizations like Charity Water.

Reuban’s Fall of Icarus Available here

Some wisdom from the maven of marketing;

“I have never met someone who isn’t spiritual, if we define spiritual as somehow seeking humanity within themselves, somehow seeking a way to build something bigger than themselves.” (click for Link reference)

“Getting hooked on an endless scroll of media inputs is not the same as being informed. There’s long been a business model of urgent news (“man bites dog!”), but now it’s been leveraged, amplified and optimized to suck people in for hours at a time. And division is much easier to sell than progress.”

Seth’s book available here

The Avocado Principles:

If you wait until you really want an avocado, the market won’t have any ripe ones. You need to buy them in advance.
If you eat an avocado that’s not quite ripe, you won’t enjoy it. AND, you won’t have a chance to enjoy it tomorrow, when it would have been perfect if you had only waited.
If you live your life based on instant gratification and little planning, you’ll either never have a good avocado or you’ll pay more than you should to someone else who planned ahead.
Buy more avocados than you think you need, because the hassles are always greater than the cost, so you might as well invest.
And since you have so many, share them when they’re ripe. What goes around comes around.

All of these truths lead to the real insight, the metaphor that’s just waiting to be lived in all ways: If you get ahead of the cycle, waiting until the first one is ripe and then always replenishing before you need one, you can live an entire life eating ripe avocados. On the other hand, if impatience and poor planning gets you behind the cycle, you’ll be just as likely to waste every one you ever eat.

Plant your tree before you need the shade. – Seth’s Blog

His analogy he has given in TEDtalks- I quote:

My parable here is you’re driving down the road, and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you’ve seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who’s going to stop and pull over and say “Oh look, a cow.” Nobody. But if the cow was purple, you’d notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you’d get bored with those too. The thing that’s going to decide what gets talked about, what get’s done, what gets changed, what gets purchased what gets built us: is it remarkable? And remarkable is a really cool word because we think it means neat, but it also means making a remark about ( TED, 2007- Seth Godin)

This is the beauty of Seth Godin; his algorithmic insight for business in the modern world. So much of his business and marketing knowledge is a direct segway into an almost anthropological opus for living.