Where We Have Been
So far, we talked about Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Purple Cow, The Big Moo, Free Prize Inside, and Small is the New Big. The most important part of Small is the New Big is the subtitle: And 193 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas.
Where We Are Going
In the last lesson, I stuck to Godin’s ideas about marketing and customer service. In the future we will cover many other subjects (e.g., in The Dip (about quitting), Tribes About leading the right people), Lynchpin (about becoming indispensable), Poke the Box (about taking action), We are All Weird (about the end of mass markets and the future of the many), the Icarus Deception (about the danger of low expectations), and V is for Vulnerable (a Children’s style ABC book for adults in business)).
A Free Prize Inside
This book was profoundly different than Godin’s other books. The table of contents read like an index (his rants were in alphabetical order).
A Free Prize for Seth
I can’t prove that all of the chapters are recycled posts, but my gut tells me that it was a collection of blog posts converted into a book (or perhaps ideas that never made it into Seth’s Blog at www.sethsblog.com in the first place). For example, the bit about the guy who couldn’t close his bank account because he had $4 and was charged a $5 service fee was posted in August of 2005 under the title Clueless.[i] Nonetheless, is pretty good to convert unrelated rants into a Best Seller. Free prize for Seth.
A Free Prize for You
But here is a free prize for you. Seth had a method to his madness. His writing is choppy like the staccato speech of a New Yorker, but that is because each sub-section reads like one of these posts. He doesn’t take the time to write full-blown exposés of a subject; he writes a few paragraphs each day.
It is clear that he used these paragraphs in his books. I would be willing to bet that if we tracked all of his books, you would find a lot of his books are revisions of his blog posts. What does this mean for you? It means that what you do daily can have a significant cumulative effect over time.
Benjamin Disraeli has said, “The secret of success is constancy to purpose”[ii] and Godin’s massive output is Exhibit A. Godin has had 18 Best Sellers over the last 20 years. He has worked on his craft regularly and his blog (which goes back to 2002) is a record of his effort. He wasn’t betting on becoming an overnight success.
I said that this is your free prize. Why? You can do the same thing in your line of work. You can practice and get better over time. If you write, write more. If you sell, see more customers every day. If you are learning Latin, practice your exercises daily, and before long, you will begin to see results.
What About You?
What free prize is waiting to be found from the effort you have already put in? If you can’t find one, can you start working in such a way that you develop one?
References
[i] Godin, S. (2005). Clueless. Seth’s Blog. Retrieved from https://seths.blog/2005/08/clueless/
[ii] Mintzberg, H. (2004). Managers, not MBAs. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (p. 63)
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Dr. Darin Gerdes is a tenured Professor of Management in the College of Business at Charleston Southern University. All ideas expressed on www.daringerdes.com are his own.
This post was originally created for Great Business Networking (GBN), a networking organization for business professionals where Dr. Gerdes is the Director of Education.
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