Seth Godin Quotes

Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.

To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.

Donald Trump, as a businessman, he's not much of a builder and he's not much of dealmaker and he certainly isn't very good at making expenses line up with income. But he is a marketing genius. He must have seen an empty market niche that no one but him filled.

Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"

Shareholder value theory - the destructive idea that companies should be run solely for the benefit of shareholders - has led to financialized businesses that do not invest in the areas that will lead to future growth or the invention of useful new products.

I seriously consider television to be the people's medium. Like the idea of seeing your parents naked or having somebody go down on you and worrying about whether you smell, or worrying about whether your body is weird or what goes across the face of a person who's supposed to be experiencing pleasure but isn't - those are things I'd love to normalize on TV.

Ideas, even million-dollar ones, are most vulnerable in their infancy; don't share them with too many people. However, don't hide your plan from people who can help you move it forward.

Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.

Ideas are like everything else. They've got to be marketed.

You must be very patient, very persistent. The world isn't going to shower gold coins on you just because you have a good idea. You're going to have to work like crazy to bring that idea to the attention of people. They're not going to buy it unless they know about it.

The idea of being on television is to wear your T-shirt so people see it and maybe buy it.

You can make an idea spread for good but you can also make an idea spread for bad and the power to make an idea spread, memetics, you know which now people talk about memes.

The person who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition. There is no mystery in business success. If you do each day's task successfully, and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about, and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.

You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look.

There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.

You want an idea that not many other people are working on, and it's okay if it doesn't sound big at first.

I can turn an idea into a business before you know it's going to be important. My first step will blow by you.

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.

If you want to promote anything, all the work that you put into it is basically promoting the idea of it so that people will go for it. And if they don't go for it, you can't institute it. You can't do it.

There is still a fundamental misunderstanding, when it comes to observing that when someone is black and someone is white, then that difference is enough to warrant the idea that they shouldn't be together. We are so much more alike in nature than we are different, and my ambition with the roles I choose to do is to break down that prejudice, by showing how much I - as a man - am just a man.

Businesses are terrified. They have no idea what I'm going to do next.

I was always curious why certain marketing worked and some marketing did not.

By all means, fire the customers who aren't worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you've just started the firing process.