Admittedly, I’m a fan of Seth Godin. Of course, most marketers are. The interesting thing about Seth and the dozen or so books he’s written is that each and every one follows a similar style:
- Identify the paradigm
- Demonstrate why and how it’s broken
- Present an alternative
- Challenge you to either accept or reject his thinking
But the last piece of the puzzle is what you do with it. If you reject it, it’s up to you to set out to prove you’re right; to demonstrate through your own successes that his view might be myopic. Of course, if you accept his thinking– which nearly always means that you’ll expect more from yourself– well, then, you have the challenge of actually going out and doing something new, something different, and often something terribly risky in order to demonstrate your faith in the new World According to Godin. There’s no pass. There’s no easy way out. You either do or you don’t, and then the work begins.
He recently released a brief manifesto (freely available) titled “Brainwashed” that deals with the way that we’ve all been trained to be trainable. How the ‘system’ has been working to make us cogs in the machine because the machine needed as many cogs as it could get. It’s probably no surprise to you that the machine ain’t what it used to be, but the system is still spitting out as many cogs as it can, much to the detriment of our economy, our future, us all.
So, what to do? Godin offers some salient and cogent advice: reinvent yourself. Here’s how.
