Some interesting ideas from Why the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe with Seth Godin

Tenets from his book Icarus Deception:

  • Play to your audience. (Your tribe)
  • The change is between “how can we do it faster and cheaper?” to “how do we become artists?”
  • Instead of asking for a road map, ask for a compass. Instead of asking for directions, give directions.
  • Comfort zone vs the safety zone.
  • If what you did today wasn’t hard, then you probably didn’t create enough value and you didn’t expose yourself to enough risk and fear.
  • We are too focussed on how to avoid critisism and not focussed enough on how we can make a difference.
  • No one can make something for everyone. “It’s not for you”.
  • We want to get picked (given permission) - pick yourself instead. Just start.
  • The first ten. Give your work to ten people. If your work is good and they are the right ten people, they will send it on to ten more people each and so on until you get a thousand true fans.
  • You need to be ten cents more trusted than ten cents cheaper.
  • What are you going to do between now and six months from now so that people will radically pay more attention to you and trust you?
  • You need to look for new products for your customers instead of new customers for your products.
  • Choose your customers wisely - they will dictate what you will do all day and the products and services you will offer and what kind of life you will lead.
  • You pick your customers depending on if they are open to being lead in the direction you want to take them.
I dont’ want new readers. I want to take care of the readers I’ve got.
  • We need a lot more hubris, a lot less obedience and a lot more awareness that this revolution has been handed to use.
How can I take people who have trusted me and take them further than they are comfortable with? Not a lot further but enough so that both of us feel that we are going somewhere.
They are not being rejected. A jerk is being rejected. They are not actually even present. They are just putting up this fasçade.
It does hurt to ask because I won’t view you the same way next time. It hurts to ask because you didn’t take the time to earn the privilege to ask. It hurts to ask because if you’d gotten a ‘Yes’ from me this time it would have been easier to get a ‘Yes’ from me next time.
The right kind of ‘No’ is not a ‘No’. It’s a “I learned what doesn’t work” or “It’s a ‘No’ for now”. What it meant to me was that the person I had described my project to either was the wrong person or given their world view didn’t hear what I was saying, the way I was saying it - because I could prove these were good ideas.
  • They didn’t reject you. They rejected your story. They rejected the way they believed your story.