Seth Godin Quotes

People I know who succeed don't mind working. Those who are competent seem to like doing things well -- not stopping because they haven't accomplished what they wanted to on the first go-round. They're willing to do it twenty times, if necessary. There's an illusion that the good people can easily do something, and it's not necessarily true. They're just determined to do it right. I was impressed by hearing one of the women at Radcliffe talk about writing a poem, how many revisions a single poem sometimes has to go through -- fifty or sixty revisions to come out with a poem sixteen lines long.

And here is the lesson I learned in the army. If you want to do a thing badly, you have to work at it as though you want to do it well.

The only constant I can find is hard work.

The secret of success lies in that old word, 'Drudgery,' in doing one thing long after it ceases to be amusing; and it is 'this one thing I do' that gathers me together from my chaos, that concentrates me from possibilities to powers, and turns powers into achievements.

Anybody can do bad work, but not everybody does good work.

You don't achieve success by "taking it easy" or "working on it later." You achieve it thru persistence and hard work.

It's amazing how far you will get by just staying with something long enough. Most people give up too early.

Any job worth doing is worth doing well. But to be able to do that, you have to do it over and over again.

The common denominator for success is work.

If you put in the work, put in the time, put in the effort, you're going to reap the benefits.

One day work is hard, and another day it is easy; but if I had waited for inspiration I am afraid I should have done nothing. The miner does not sit at the top of the shaft waiting for the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. One must go deep down, and work out every vein carefully.

Diligence, above all, is the mother of good luck.

I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.

There is no shortcut to achievement.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

I take pride knowing that I hustle, day in and day out.

Diligence is not easy, but we can't reach our goals without it.

There are many people who can do big things, but there are very few people who will do the small things.

Discipline helps you finish a job, and finishing is what separates excellent work from average work.

It's important to work hard - there's no short cut around that.

One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience.

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.

If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

It is said that good things come to those who wait. I believe that good things come to those who work.

It doesn't take talent to work hard.