Kathy Sierra Day 3: Getting Seth Godin
If there’s something annoying about Seth Godin, it’s that he’s so truthful. Even when he wears that nose.
But before I go on to discuss Seth, let’s get our bearings.
Kathy Sierra Week
It’s Kathy Sierra Week here at the Alpha Mind Blog. The idea is that, while Kathy isn’t blogging (a situation I hope is temporary), the rest of us can express our appreciation for what she’s done for us so far. I’ve identified a number of ways Kathy’s Blog has improved my thinking, my blogging, even my attitude, and I’m writing a post a day about it. Today’s post is about Seth.
Can Everybody Rule?
How many people can be the best in the world? Sounds kinda silly, but the answer is not “one, dummy.” And this fact is at the heart of what Kathy helped me understand about Seth.
I don’t want to overdramatize. I don’t want to let on that Kathy turned me into a Seth Godin fan (I already was), or even caused a very radical shift in my attitude toward Seth. But while the shift wasn’t radical, it was important.
To begin with, my problem with Seth happens to be pretty well laid out in this exchange between Seth and me here on TAM. (An exchange in which I was perhaps a bit snarkier than I wanted to be.)
For the point I’ll be making today, the key words in my reply to Seth’s comment are:
Life’s choices do not consist only of supremacy and mediocrity. The distance between good and best is greater than that between mediocre and good, and yet good is good.
What Seth’s Been Up To
What was I responding to? For those of you who aren’t Godin fans, you’ll need to follow the link from my above-quoted post to the one of Seth’s that I was writing about. And if you still don’t get it, you need to read more of the recent stuff on Seth’s blog. But in case you haven’t time, I’ll just give a quick summary of Seth’s latest currents of thought.
In a nutshell, what Seth is telling us these days is that none of us should settle for anything less than being the best in the world. No lesser goal is worthy. And we should drop anything we’re doing that keeps us from pursuing the one righteous goal. This is the thrust of his forthcoming book, The Dip.
My reaction to this idea, when I first heard it… well, I put it most strongly on Lucy Kellaway’s forum at the Financial Times:
….honestly, I’ve begun to think that the most brilliant people in the blogosphere positively enjoy having the rest of us think that if we’re not equally clever, we’ve no reason to live.
This was still pretty much how I felt when I started my systematic reading of “Creating Passionate Users” a couple of weeks back.
Not Everybody Can Rule, But Kathy Says Let Them Anyway
And there, as I read, was Kathy Sierra telling designers of everything and anything, “Help Your Users Rule!” And she told them this over and over. It became one of her most important mantras (although she never put it in just the words I used. In fact she put it in about a hundred slightly different ways.)
And on my umpteenth reading of this mantra, the thought hit me:
How many users can really rule?
How many users of how many software applications can rule?
How many producers of how many software applications can rule by doing what Kathy suggests?
How many producers of how many other kinds of products can rule?
How many kinds of products are there? Not to mention services? Not to mention roles we can all play that aren’t defined by “product” or “service”?
And finally it all came together for me. Seth isn’t an elitist for whom only a very very few are worthy to survive. Because Seth knows (and I’d seen it all through his other writings even if I hadn’t grasped it) that…
There are a gazillion things, a gazillion truly different and differentiated thing, a gazillion things of genuine value, to be the best in the world at.
And that has made all the difference.
If you tried to create a contest to determine the greatest software developer in the world, where would you start? If you got five undoubtedly great developers into a room and asked them to design the contest, betcha they could talk for days and never agree on a set of criteria. Betcha before too long they’d come out and ask, “What kind of developer?”
Because what makes a great game coder won’t make the best coder of real-time satellite controls. And those two things are a lot closer together than other pairs I could name.
For every category of software on Tucows, there’s an opportunity to be best in the world. That’s a lot of categories. And there are subcategories galore inside those.
Seth’s many riffs on being remarkable set this up perfectly. Because when you set out to be remarkable, you’re creating a whole new category to be the best at. And there are nearly limitless possible ways of being remarkable and creating the category that won’t be categorized.
Why I Had a Problem
In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth makes a lot of us squirm by how he talks about lies and truth. But, on a close reading, it sure isn’t because Seth is lying. Quite the contrary.
He makes me squirm by saying, in essence, that one and the same story is a truth and is a lie, and doing this so many times in the book that my head spins and I get a little dizzy.
The awful thing is that he’s telling the truth.
If it gets confusing, it’s because, in reality, our human capacities for discerning truth are lousy. What we’re good at discerning are consistency and authenticity, which is why Seth winds up saying that we need to aim for those while telling good stories.
It’s that same truthfulness about the whole new world we’re living in that made me take a ten-foot pole to Godin’s latest riffs.
I think I’m a little more sensitive than most to just how confusing the post-internet world is. So I’m not always inclined to focus on its brighter facets. Seth is inclined to view both sides, and to speak strongly about both. His focus on permission marketing addresses head-on one of the dark sides of the loud new world. His focus on being remarkable, and his new focus on being the best, address one of the bright sides.
That bright facet is that today’s environment offers opportunity for self-expression like none before. It offers to millions the chance to say and live the truth, “The thing that I am matters, and the thing I choose to do matters, and I will be the best at it!”
Coda: You Can Move In With Seth
Three days into KS Week, I’m noticing that not many of the things I’m appreciating Kathy for are very direct applications of what she’s taught. Rather, they’re mostly wonderful things that happen inside my head while I’m reading CPU, that result from my mind wandering several steps away from what she’s saying. She’s my starting point.
Better, maybe, to say she’s a catalyst. I love what Kathy teaches, but I also like Kathy simply because I’m smarter, cleverer, more creative, when I’m in her virtual presence.
The same is true for Seth. One reason it took Kathy to get me to grapple with an aspect of Seth’s thought is that I don’t read him only for his ideas, but for his thinking process, which serves to start fires in my brain. I’ve only seen him in person once, but it happened then, too.
Having said that, have I interested anyone in this offer from Seth? Not tempting enough for me to leave the coast I love (the left), but a pretty wonderful idea. Move in with Seth Godin and watch the creative sparks fly.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The trackback URI is: http://blog.alphamind.biz/2007/04/18/kathy-sierra-day-3-getting-seth-godin/trackback/
April 20th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
I’ve been one of Seth’s “students” for some time. I think he’s truly brilliant; in terms of raw intellect, off the charts. I’ve heard him speak in person twice (including yesterday) and in addition to being brilliant he also possesses tremendous charm and grace. For me, it took a couple of readings of his books to understand his world view, but I didn’t truly “get it” until I read “Survival is Not Enough.” Then the lightbulb went off. When Seth connected the dots between evolutionary biology (Richard Dawkins being my favorite author in that regard) and the concepts he presents throughout his other books, I finally GOT IT! And for me, my world has not been the same since. The instant that light went on I felt as if I had been previously living as a somewhat benighted soul. In some ways I was. Seth’s works have transformed me in significant and startling ways and I have achieved more in the last 6 months than in the previous 6 years. No exaggeration. I think your re-phrasing of Seth’s concept is dead on.