Seth Godin has spent over 20 years telling people to go make art!
Here’s the secret: He isn’t talking about painting. Seth is talking about unleashing your creativity, your art, the essence of you, upon the world. This can mean to add empathy and humanness to customer care or patient care. This can mean not just managing a project but connecting the team.
An artist is someone who shows up to do what Godin calls the “Emotional Labor”. [Godin writes about it HERE and THERE. A third party explains the concept HERE.]
Seth Godin has been one of the gurus of Marketing starting with Permission Marketing (1999) and Ideavirus (2000). He has added other perspectives over the years with books like Tribes, All Marketers are Liars, Meatball Sundae and Purple Cow. All of his marketing teachings culminating in This is Marketing.
He has explained book marketing to authors repeatedly over the years. Many of the books he produced over the last 20 years have a unique packaging. Several of his books are self-published! He gave away the Ideavirus. He used Kickstarter for The Icarus Deception, which also debuted This Mighty Work, an 800+ page book that weighed 20 pounds! Purple Cow came in a milk carton. Free Prize Inside came in a cereal box. Your Turn was printed magazine style, albeit a 160-page full color collection of essays to help you step up and take your turn. Each book is a memento, not just something to read.
At the same time, Seth has provided a compass for Freelancers as we moved into the Connection Economy. Pieces of that compass are in his books: The Linchpin, The Icarus Deception, Poke the Box , We are All Weird! and It’s Your Turn! For people worried about the economy, he wrote The Song of Significance.
As a freelancer or a W2 employee, how will you survive in the AI economy? Read any of his books for Freelancers. Linchpin discusses how to be significant in the workplace by being a connector, by being a coordinator, by being indispensable. You can get an idea what he means in this talk (at the 42 minute mark or in this podcast at 10:45).
Worried that AI will take your job? It is time to be Unique, Remarkable, Indispensable. AI can do mediocre tasks in a mediocre way. So stop doing that!
In Icarus, Seth is a cheerleader, but he does not provide a step-by-step plan. Seth never provides a map, but he will layout the motivation and the strategy. His books will give you something to think about.
In 2010, Seth partnered with Amazon on the Domino Project to publish manifestos like Poke the Box and Steve Pressfield’s Do the Work. Seth didn’t just make a manifesto, he published case studies like Tales of the Revolution, which is a collection of profiles of people poking the box. This was to make the concept concrete – a vital marketing rule. In The Big Moo he told stories about purple cows – people being remarkable or unique.
Reviewers often state that his books are repetitive. He is selling an idea in every book and the best way to teach a new concept is to be a little repetitive, explaining, showcasing or creating a picture in a few different ways, since not everyone will get the concept from a single way or example.
Godin is a very precise and concise writer. His goal has always been to share a perspective in order to help others share their gift with the world. (Ship their Art!)
The world is in a era of Change. Everything in our world, from marketing to technology to distribution to the capital markets, is moving at a faster pace than ever. In his book, Survival is Not Enough, Seth discusses embracing that change. “The result is a wide-ranging and eclectic menu of useful ideas that just about anyone looking to enhance their career, job satisfaction, and their company’s prospects would do well to consider.” – [comment from Harry C. Edwards].
Before AI in the form of public LLMs came upon the seem two years ago, freelancers were already facing a crowded market. Thousands of people worldwide were vying for projects on Fiverr and Upwork. Seth was already directing freelancers in ways to get work that matters. That extends to today, where freelancers must compete against AI for gigs in the Gig Economy. [Hint: it’s about creating work that makes them want you.]
Linchpin as one reviewer wrote, “The premise of the book (The Linchpin) is this: the old rules of work are crumbling and the new rulebook has not yet been written. It’s your challenge, then, to create your own rules when it comes to your career – and to do so in a way that’s both fulfilling to you as an individual, and in a way that creates a real gift to the world.”
As technology outpaces the ability for workers and businesses to assimilate it, Linchpins can enter the scene to make the complicated and complex simple. That is at the heart of what a service provider is: take the technology out of the way of the business!
The world is Changing fast! Be a Linchpin.
