Author: Seth Godin

The minimum viable product is a powerful way to find out if your solution is going to find a market. Bean-to-bar chocolate in the US didn’t happen because someone raised millions of dollars, built a factory and got shelf space at the A&P. It happened because John Scharffenberger made a small batch of chocolate by…

Engineering is the powerful practice of being able to deliver artifacts that do what they’re supposed to. Bridges that don’t fall down, software that runs, IV lines that don’t get infected. But if we want to create something, it helps to know what it’s for. That simple question, “what’s it for?” is essential to ask…

Steve Pressfield defines Resistance as the inertia, stories and excuses we manage to create to avoid powerful or creative work. Writer’s block, procrastination, overconfidence, or a belief in un-delivered talent are all symptoms of resistance. Knowing that it has a name helps us dance with it. We can’t make it go away (the more important…

I used to drive 200 miles to Boston once a week or so. After a few trips on the highway, my subconscious figured out that getting behind a few trucks for the entire ride enabled me to spend four hours without using much conscious effort on driving. Every day, we make decisions. These require effort,…

An echo chamber is created by a marketer to assemble a group of people who are insulated from conventional discourse. It can happen to sports and music fans, to investors, to companies that have confidence in their view of the world, or to social or political gatherings. We support an echo chamber when we can…

My colleague Ava Morris is running her Song of Significance Workshop on Friday, October 6. It’s powerful, effective and personal. It runs worldwide, in Zoom, and it’s completely interactive–every participant participates. This will be the third session… the first two got rave reviews, and some folks even returned to do it again. It’s two hours…

I’ve been working hard on my juggling (actual juggling, not metaphorical juggling). The secret, as I wrote about in The Practice is the throwing, not the catching. If you get the throws right, the catches are easy. The way to focus on the throws is simple but culturally difficult: Errant throws don’t earn a lunge.…

We often develop slang or codewords to keep the others from understanding what we’re saying. Here’s an example (thanks BK) of the lengths that some are going to be able to talk about Chinese politics. Of course, if you come up with a concealed enough code, the people you’re talking to won’t have a clue…

In computer science, Big-O notation is a way of talking about what happens to a solution method when the inputs start to increase. For example, sorting numbers is an easy problem when there are only five or six, but when you have to sort 5,000, a totally different algorithm is needed. Business models have this…

Fabled author Ursula Le Guin had a sign over her desk: Not a bad place to begin.