Episode 27 of The James Altucher Show feature probably my favourite person to listen to, Seth Godin. Seth has written around 20 books, including Purple Cow, Tribes, Permission Marketing, The Dip, and so many more, and writes the most famous business blog on the planet where he writes a post every day. This was a shorter episode by Altucher’s standards but it feels like every sentence that comes out of Godin’s mouth is filled with a little nugget of gold. Some of my favourite points from this interview included:

• The New York Times Best Seller list is very “corrupt” in Seth’s opinion, and he doesn’t track how his books go on that list. Instead, he gets satisfaction when people tell him “I read your book and found something in it that changed me”
• Seth taught canoeing during his teenage years, but most tourists were more interested in sailing and windsurfing. This was where he first learnt that, 1) he had to put on enough of a show to attract ‘customers’, and 2) he had to help people grow because “people go where they grow”. It wasn’t just about teaching canoeing, it became much more than that.
• Don’t spend all of your time and energy trying to fight external forces that you can’t control. Instead, when issues arise, breath and think – you need to use the tools you already have to your advantage.
• A lot of Seth’s books talk about using story telling as an effective marketing tool (Permission Marketing, Ideavirus, etc). The most important thing to note though is that “the story is never about the teller, it’s always about the person who is hearing the story”. And this is where selfish marketers always fail.
• No big brands of the past 10 years were built off the back of TV or newspaper advertising. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
• Seth created the company Yo Yo Dine which was doing direct marketing for half the price and twice the effectiveness of basically everyone else out there. Yahoo figured it was cheaper to buy him than beat him, so he sold his company for somewhere in the vacunity of $30m. What he realised was that an entrepreneur’s identity is heavily tied to their company and the things they do every day, so it took him a long time to “recover” from that sale.
• He realised that he wanted to do something that mattered and something that would teach the people around him. He found that books were the perfect way to achieve both of those goals.

This is a definite must listen. I really need to ingest more of Seth Godin’s material.