Quotes from Seth Godin

Just imagine how much you'd get done if you stopped actively sabotaging your own work.

Excellence isn't about working extra hard to do what you're told. It's about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.

The first rule of doing work that matters: Go to work on a regular basis.

Our best work can't possibly appeal to the average masses, only our average work can. Finding the humility to happily walk away from those that don't get it unlocks our ability to do great work.

There are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic. Other tool is passion.

The thing about information is that information is more valuable when people know it. There's an exception for business information and super timely information, but in all other cases, ideas that spread win.

A big part of doing your work is defending your time and your attention so you can do your work.

As you've probably discovered, great work makes us uncomfortable.

Too often, the person who wrecks our work is us.

Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it's a lot easier to launch work that matters.

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice.

If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.

If you treat your employees like mushrooms (keep them in the dark and regularly throw crap on them), it's entirely likely you will get precisely the work you deserve in return.

So much easier to aim for the smallest possible audience, not the largest, to build long-term value among a trusted, delighted tribe, to create work that matters and stands the test of time.

In the long run, doing work that's important leads to more happiness than doing work that's merely profitable.

The Cul-de-Sac ( French for "dead end" ) ... is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes

If you are wiling to do something that might not work, you are closer to being an artist.

For most modern marketers, quantity isn't the point. What matters is to matter. Lives changed. Work that made an actual difference. Connection.

Most people have bosses who hire them to fill a slot in the work chart and to do what they are told. And most people who are doing what they are told feel safe; it feels reliable.

The job is not the work.

Every voice doesn't matter--only the voices that move your idea forward, that make it better, that make you better, that make it more likely you will ship work that benefits your tribe.

Art is when we do work that matters in a creative way, in a way that touches (people) and changes them for the better.

Art is what we're doing when we do our best work.

Laptop computers dramatically increased the time people spend doing work. (The internet dramatically decreased it, so we're even).