Seth Godin's Blog

If you’re going to build a conference, a newsletter, a podcast, an AI service or even a tennis tournament, please pause before you decide to be ad supported. (Ads are not the same as sponsorship).

When you work for advertisers, you’re focused on short-term interactions with people who relentlessly measure all the things you and your actual users don’t care about.

When we choose our customers, we choose our future. Advertisers are fickle and self-absorbed customers. They’re happy to demand more of the things your users don’t want, and will do so until your users leave, and then they’ll abandon you.

Sure, it might take longer to find the users who are willing to also be paying customers, but the short-term thrill of selling an ad contract might be a trap.

Build something your users are willing to pay for. Then you can focus all your energy on what they want and offer it to them. When your users are your customers, every decision is easier.

          

…might not be the same as making an impact.

Making a point doesn’t take very long and it can be gratifying in the moment. Making an impact happens over time, and rarely brings the same sort of short-term glee.

          

Everyone is always doing their best.

Given their situation, priorities, and awareness (the circumstances), people make choices.

If we want to change how others respond, we need to change their circumstances and how they see their options.

          

Often, the things we want the most aren’t directly related to the things we need.

In fact, they might be very similar to things we already have.

Wants are fueled by stories, and stories come from culture and connection and marketing, not from our actual physical or spiritual needs.

          

Don’t play games you can’t win.

If the deck is stacked against you, a smart option is to go to a different table and play with a different deck.

The dominant system wants you to wait to get picked. It indoctrinates people, again and again, in accepting its hegemony and insight and wisdom, so that we judge ourselves instead of the system.

If the system were fair and wise, this would be fine. But it might not be.

If you’re waiting to get picked by a famous college or a big company or the music industry, you might end up waiting a very long time. Of course, that’s what schooling taught you to do. The lessons run deep.

There’s often an alternative, one that walks away from the insulation, comfort and deniability the system offers.

You can build your own system.

There’s a long history of musicians, from traveling folk singers to the Grateful Dead, building their own followings and walking away from MTV and the radio.

There are plenty of examples of committed students who took a gap year (or two or six) and built something that mattered.

Non-profit leaders who refuse to succumb to galas or mass appeal can build projects of significance with a surprisingly small base of supporters.

Entrepreneurs and freelancers who deliver value instead of looking for a job. Not for everyone, but for someone.

You’re probably not going to end up with a million followers by adhering to the rules of the algorithm. But that’s okay, because you don’t need a million followers to make a difference.

          

One sort of delusion is believing that we’re smart and skilled simply because we got lucky. This perpetuates a cycle of bad decisions that just happened to lead to good outcomes, and causes people to confuse their wins with hard-earned skill.

Often, when someone successful in one field (where they compounded an early lead) moves into another one, they seem arrogant and unwilling to learn and experiment. They were confused about what led to their previous success.

The other sort of delusion works in the other direction. If we’ve done the reading and shown up to do the work, if we’ve built skills and muscles but haven’t succeeded yet, it’s easy to be hindered by self-doubt that might not be valid or useful. Acknowledging the luck we haven’t received yet can open the door to better decisions and more persistence.

Luck is unevenly distributed, unpredictable and unfair. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be luck.

          

Here’s a quick tactical riff about how we name things.

It’s worth considering that:

Sometimes there’s more than one thing we need to highlight
And putting those things in a list is a way to indicate that
but numbering the list implies a priority that might not be relevant or true

If you’ve got four initiatives going on, numbering or even lettering them can’t help but communicate a priority to others.

Considering flavoring them instead.

When there’s an orange, a blue and a pink project, we can see that they’re separate and all important. It’s silly but it works.

But how to make sure we don’t skip one when calling the roll? Can we give people an easy way to remember all the flavors without leaving any out?

Here are a few to get you started:

Batman and Robin

Snap, Crackle and Pop

John, Paul, George and Ringo

Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen

or Monday through Sunday.

You get the idea.

On the other hand, if you’ve written a series of books or created a pedagogy that needs to go in order, please number them. It’s useful scaffolding that adds insight for those that you’re teaching.

          

When we fall behind, it’s tempting to hustle to catch up.

When the competition heats up, it’s imperative we hustle to get ahead.

Hustle is a particular kind of shortcut. Hustle is pushing the boundaries of cultural expectation, creating pressure and discomfort to make a sale. Hustle pushes us to cut corners, cut the line and cut down trust.

And it quickly becomes the new normal. Hustling is a race to the bottom, and our competitors lean and hustle in response… which means that we’re now under pressure to hustle more than we think is appropriate, driven by the same forces that led us to hustle in the first place.

The alternative is to lean into better. To find the space and the guts to do breakthrough work, work that others are afraid to do. Instead of causing discomfort and cutting, we’re building something worth following and talking about.

Of course it’s not easy, that’s why it works.

PS A breath of fresh air, Dr. Natalie Nixon’s new book is out.

          

Education is distinct from learning. Organized education is a form of indoctrination and certification. Sometimes it leads to learning, but not always.

You can win at education by figuring out what’s on the test (or what the boss wants) and parroting it back. In fact, that’s the easiest way to do so.

Learning is an argument, a conversation designed to change minds. Learning happens long after we leave organized schooling, and it requires emotional enrollment. We’re more likely to learn when we bring a desire to be transformed and to leave our previous assumptions behind.

Amplified by social media, there’s a rising tide of arguments that purport to be learning that actually lead nowhere. That’s because the participants are seeking to score points and gain attention, not to enroll in a mutual process of transformation and learning.

What does goodwill look like?

Be prepared (or better yet, eager) to change your mind.

All claims should be verifiable.

All assertions should be falsifiable.

Do the reading.

Show your work.

Reveal your actual agenda.

Understand the systems and mechanics at work, don’t simply quote them.

Assume goodwill on the part of others.

Don’t judge an argument by how comfortable its conclusion feels.

Question your own expertise. “I don’t know” is a complete sentence.

Engage with the strongest version of opposing views.

Embrace that “not yet” is different from “never.”

Celebrate your errors and welcome correction gracefully.

Ask helpful questions that support an alternative view before deciding.

Agree on the rules in advance and then honor them.

Focus on understanding before seeking to be understood.

Identify the ideas you are attached to and temporarily set them aside.

Change your mind. That’s why you’re here.

[More riffs on learning as many of us go back to school.]

          

AI and LLMs pose a particularly visceral threat to the typing class. Writers, editors, poets, freelancers, marketing copywriters and others are voicing reasonable (and unreasonable) objections to the pace and impact of tools like Claude, Kimi and ChatGPT.

I think we have two choices, particularly poignant on US Labor Day…

The first is to walk away from the tools. You’re probably not going to persuade your competitors and your clients to have as much animosity for AI automation as you do, and time spent ranting about it is time wasted. But, you can walk away. There’s a long history of creative professionals refusing to use the technology of the moment and thriving.

If you’re going to walk away, the path is clear. Your work has to become more unpredictable, more human and more nuanced. It has to cost more and be worth more. It turns out that the pace of your production isn’t as important as its impact. Writing a hand-built Linkedin post that gets 200 comments isn’t a productive path in a world where anyone can do that. If we’re going to put ourselves on the hook, we need to really be on the hook.

Remember the mall photographers who took slightly better than mediocre photos of kids at Sears? They’re gone now, because we can take slightly better than mediocre photos at home.

The other option is to dance. Outsource all relevant tasks to an AI to put yourself on the hook for judgment, taste and decision-making instead. Give yourself a promotion, becoming the arbiter and the publisher, not the ink-stained wretch. Dramatically increase your pace and your output, and create work that scares you.

This requires re-investing the time you used to spend on tasks. Focus on mastering the tools, bringing more insight to their use than others. Refuse to publish mediocre work.

It’s tempting to fear AI slop, because it’s here and it’s going to get worse. But there’s human slop all over the internet, and it’s getting worse as well.

Whether you dance or walk away, the goal is the same: create real value for the people who need it. Do work that matters for people who care.

If we’re going to make a difference, we’ll need to bring labor to the work. The emotional labor of judgment, insight and risk.