Seth Godin Quotes that Will Make You Think

“The opposite of remarkable is very good.” – Seth Godin

This is my collection of Seth Godin quotes. They’ll make you think and ponder as you wonder around from one idea to the next.

Seth’s sweet spot is marketing but his quotes easily span business, change, greatness, innovation, leadership, mediocrity, and strategy.

Seth’s quotes teach us that the individual is a powerful force, that multiplies when we dare to be different, take action, test our ideas, stay true to our authentic self, tell inspiring stories, make things meaningful, and lead tribes of like minds and shared values.

Perhaps the most important lesson we learn from Seth Godin is this: Think and do great things. And do the tough stuff, because it’s worth it.

Enjoy.

Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes

Here are my top 10 favorite quotes by Seth Godin:

“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.” — Seth Godin
“Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.” — Seth Godin
“Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what?” — Seth Godin
“Go ahead, do something impossible. “ — Seth Godin
“Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.” — Seth Godin
“If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?” — Seth Godin
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” — Seth Godin
“Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.” — Seth Godin
“Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “ — Seth Godin
“You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “ — Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Business

“The market and the consumer and idea trump the system.”
— Seth Godin

“Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.”
— Seth Godin

“As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring.”
— Seth Godin

“Choose your customers, choose your future.”
— Seth Godin

“Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.”
— Seth Godin

“Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential; otherwise you’re just a middleman. “
— Seth Godin

“Fire the committee.
No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people.
Not one.
This is a deal breaker.”
— Seth Godin

“Give up control and give it away … The more you give your idea away, the more your company is going to be worth. “
— Seth Godin

“In a world of free, everyone can play.”
— Seth Godin

“Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven’t done well. It’s that simple.”
— Seth Godin

“Once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.”
— Seth Godin

“One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. “
— Seth Godin

“The application process changes the list of who applies. Your applicants reflect your methods.”
— Seth Godin

“The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Change

“Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new. “
— Seth Godin

“Change almost never fails because it’s too early.
It almost always fails because it’s too late.”
— Seth Godin

“Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
— Seth Godin

“If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.”
— Seth Godin

“Knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.”
— Seth Godin

“Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.”
— Seth Godin

“No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things”
— Seth Godin

“Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Choice

“It’s better to make a decision, even the wrong one, than to be in limbo.”
— Seth Godin

“If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.”
— Seth Godin

“Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.”
— Seth Godin

“If there’s time for an emergency, why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning? “
— Seth Godin

“If you could do tomorrow over again, would you? “
— Seth Godin

“If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else.“
— Seth Godin

“Just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.”
— Seth Godin

“Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.“
— Seth Godin

“We notice what we choose to notice.”
— Seth Godin

“Who gets to decide what you want?”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Failure and Risk

“Playing safe is very risky. “ — Seth Godin

“If failure is not an option, then neither is success.” — Seth Godin

“The opposite of remarkable is very good.”
— Seth Godin

“If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. “
— Seth Godin

“Try is the opposite of hiding.”
— Seth Godin

“Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection.
Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, drive through the other barrier.
And after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.”
— Seth Godin

“The job isn’t to catch up to the status quo; the job is to invent the status quo.”
— Seth Godin

“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
— Seth Godin

“Nobody says “Yeah, I’d like to set myself up for some serious criticism!” And yet the only way to be remarkable is to do just that.”
— Seth Godin

“We’ve greatly exaggerated the risk of sinking, without celebrating the value of swimming.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Greatness

“Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.”
— Seth Godin

“Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific.”
— Seth Godin

“Becoming a superstar takes about 10,000 hours of hard work.”
— Seth Godin

“Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record. “
— Seth Godin

“Go ahead, do something impossible.”
— Seth Godin

“If there isn’t a good reason, go home. If there is, then do something … loud, now, and memorable.”
— Seth Godin

“Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.”
— Seth Godin

“Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all. “
— Seth Godin

“When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter.”
— Seth Godin

“When the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days or a lifetime, you matter.”
— Seth Godin

“When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.”
— Seth Godin

“When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter.”
— Seth Godin

“You are not your resume, you are your work. “
— Seth Godin

“You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Ideas

“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.”
— Seth Godin

“Big ideas are little ideas that no-one killed too soon.“
— Seth Godin

“Ideas in secret die.
They need light and air or they starve to death.“
— Seth Godin

“No organization ever created an innovation.
People innovate, not companies.”
— Seth Godin

“There’s no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it. “
— Seth Godin

“You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Leadership / Management

“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “
— Seth Godin

“If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader. “
— Seth Godin

“Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.”
— Seth Godin

“Leadership on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.”
— Seth Godin

“’Teamwork’ is the word that bosses use when they actually mean ‘Do what I say’”
— Seth Godin

“The easiest thing is to react.
The second easiest thing is to respond.
But the hardest thing is to initiate. – When people ask you to tell them what to do, resist.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Marketing

“Everyone is not your customer. “
— Seth Godin

“Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic.
Marketing is about far more than that.”
— Seth Godin

“Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value. “
— Seth Godin

“But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about. “
— Seth Godin

“Good marketers measure. “
— Seth Godin

“Good marketers tell stories.“
— Seth Godin

“If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living.“
— Seth Godin

“If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million? “
— Seth Godin

“If you’re a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer.
You’re deadwood.“
— Seth Godin

“Low price is a great way to sell a commodity.
That’s not marketing though, that’s efficiency.”
— Seth Godin

“Market-driven design builds the success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.”
— Seth Godin

“Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.”
— Seth Godin

“Marketing management is now tribal leadership.“
— Seth Godin

“Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power.“
— Seth Godin

“People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often believe what their friends tell them.
They always believe what they tell themselves. “
— Seth Godin

“People rarely buy what they need.
They buy what they want.”
— Seth Godin

“Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts. “
— Seth Godin

“Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission–which is emotional connection.”
— Seth Godin

“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. “
— Seth Godin

“The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. “
— Seth Godin

“The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about. “
— Seth Godin

“Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “ — Seth Godin

“You can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time.
You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Mediocrity / Status Quo

“Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.”
— Seth Godin

“’Good enough’ stopped being good enough a long time ago. so why not be great? “
— Seth Godin

“If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.”
— Seth Godin

“It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.”
— Seth Godin

“It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.”
— Seth Godin

“In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.”
— Seth Godin

“Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters.”
— Seth Godin

“Successful people are the ones who are breaking the rules. “
— Seth Godin

“The reason they want you to fit in… is that once you do, then they can ignore you.
— Seth Godin

“The status quo is leaving the building, and quickly.”
— Seth Godin

“You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless. “
— Seth Godin

“You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Passion

“Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.”
— Seth Godin

“If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it.”
— Seth Godin

“If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true? “
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Relationships

“A long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.”
— Seth Godin

“Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.) Ignore everyone else.”
— Seth Godin

“You can be right or you can have empathy. You can’t do both.”
— Seth Godin

Seth Godin Quotes on Strategy

“Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve. “
— Seth Godin

“Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend.“
— Seth Godin

“The scalable, profitable strategy is to change the game, not to become the most average.”
— Seth Godin

Quotes Collection
Great Lessons from Seth Godin
Great Lessons from the Dip
Great Lessons from the Bootstrapper’s Bible
Change Quotes to Help You Embrace Change
Confidence Quotes to Find Your Courage
Dreaming Big Quotes
Innovation Quotes to Help You Think Different
Inspirational Quotes to Light Your Fire
Motivational Quotes to Inspire Your Greatness
Thinking Quotes to Help You Think Better
Work as Self Expression Quotes