Marketing Wizard Seth Godin on Success and Inspiration
Seth Godin has one of the most-loved marketing blogs on the internet, has penned more than a dozen bestselling books and launched a social site that attracts more than 50 million viewers per month. Yet he makes little effort to cultivate a following, preferring to be discovered virally. Those who do find him stick around for his uncomplicated entrepreneurial mantras, which boil down to this: Make something happen.
Now, he says, the time is ripe for impresarios and artists to take the lead in the business world. He sat down with us to reveal the philosophies that have brought him to this point, as explored in his new book, The Icarus Deception.
"Icarus. The original myth had two parts. Daedalus said to his son, 'I fashioned these wings for you. Two rules. Don't fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax. But, more important, son, don't fly too low. Because if you fly too low, the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.' We've left out the second part of the myth. We don't say to people anymore, 'Don't fly too low.' All we do from the time they are 4 years old is warn them against hubris. We have created this industrially led structure that says: How dare you."
Play Video In the late 1990s, when the internet was a toddler, Seth Godin grasped the personal nature of the digital economy and made a fortune teaching people how to build direct-marketing relationships through e-mail. His groundbreaking book, Permission Marketing, detailed his strategy and made him the go-to marketing guru for web pioneers.
During the next decade, Godin wrote a dozen zeitgeist-savvy business books, penned a popular column for magazine and started a daily routine of posting to , which has long been in the top 10, if not No. 1 or 2, on the Power150 ranking of marketing blogs. In
