Seth Godin Quotes

What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.

Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.

You can't have good ideas unless you're willing to generate a lot of bad ones.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

If you're trying to invent something new, you're going to reach a lot of discouraging points, and most people give up.

To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

Sometimes the best ideas will come in the least inspiring places.

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

The answer to the question "where do good ideas come from" is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Don't be afraid to stumble. Any inventor will tell you that you don't follow a plan far before you strike a snag. If, out of 100 ideas you get one that works, it's enough.

It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

That is the trouble with many inventors; they lack patience. They lack the willingness to work a thing out slowly and clearly and sharply in their mind, so that they can actually "feel it work." They want to try their first idea right off; and the result is they use up lots of money and lots of good material, only to find eventually that they are working in the wrong direction. We all make mistakes, and it is better to make them before we begin.

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

Part of being in a band, being a painter, or starting a nonprofit is that you're going to make horrible mistakes and look like a total idiot, but you're never going to create that thing that really connects with people if you don't fail over and over and over again.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

Don't worry about mistakes. Making things out of mistakes, that's creativity.

Trust your intuition and be resilient. If you have real breakout ideas, even your friends will laugh at you secretly until you can prove their viability.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.