3.5 Ideas from Seth Godin — On Strategy, Mindset and Empathy
3 min readOct 30, 2024
“You have more power than you want to admit, and less than you think you might. Each of us has a chance to lean in and make a difference, but none of us is in charge.” — Seth Godin
Seth Godin is the author of 22 best-selling books that have been translated into 35 languages.
Seth’s daily blog is one of the most read blogs in the world.
Seth writes about marketing, creativity, how ideas spread, and the post-industrial revolution.
Seth and I discuss his latest book, “This Is Strategy.”
3.5 Ideas from Seth Godin:
1) How Did You Decide to Write A Book on Strategy?
- “I would say two things: The first is that when people come to me for marketing advice, what I found is what they really wanted was strategy advice. I just kept telling people the same thing over and over again.”
- “The second is a lot of people are feeling like they’re missing hope. That they don’t know how to make things better in their work, in their community. The reason is we’ve been indoctrinated into thinking we can’t do anything.”
- “Strategy is the hard work of making better plans, doing something today to make tomorrow better, whether that’s getting a freelance gig or making an impact in the community and I wanted to share those ideas.”
2) You Write, “To have a good strategy, you need empathy.” How Does Empathy Make Strategy Better?
- “So the thing about war is the other side doesn’t have much of a choice. You are doing something to them. For the rest of us, we are voluntarily engaging in what we do.
- You can’t force someone to come to your gym or your restaurant. They have to want to come. So telling people why we are right, isn’t as useful as creating the conditions for them to feel like they are right.
- “The work is to have the empathy to realize others don’t know what we know or want what we want, and that’s okay. Then we need to go to where they are, to offer them to create the condition for them to make a choice.”
3) How Can We Avoid “The Race to the Bottom” and Still Remain Competitive?
- “Low price is the last refuge of someone who doesn’t have a strategy. It’s the coward’s way out. Just lower your price. You cannot name a successful scaled entity that is the cheapest one.”
- “Even Walmart isn’t the cheapest one. They use price as part of their strategy, but they’re not the cheapest. So when you find yourself leaning into, ‘I’ll just have to lower my prices’, that is a signal that you should be focusing on something else.”
3.5) If You Could Have Everyone Take ONE LESSON Away, What Would That Lesson Be?
- “You have more power than you want to admit. And less than you think you might. Each of us has a chance to lean in and make a difference, but none of us is in charge.”
🔗 Connect with Seth Godin:
- Blog: seths.blog
- Strategy Book bonuses: seths.blog/tis
- Built Not Born Episode #127 — Creativity, Overcoming Fear & Saving the Planet
- Built Not Born Episode #100 — The Song of Significance
